Bridgerton and I’m Your Woman

The first quarter of almost any normal year yields very little from the movie watching perspective, at least theatrically. The sprint to screen awards contenders in New York and Los Angeles having ended with the ringing in of the new year, the ensuing months become a sort of protracted sloughing-off of the dead weight of the previous 12 months (or longer). The miscalculated prestige pictures, the reboots without an audience, the movies of potential interest gone sour with excessive tinkering; the low, gray months are when projects too expensive to be thrown away are thrust into the marketplace to gather as much revenue as possible before they die the death of a thousand tweets. Needless to say, there is no normal, not anymore. Or perhaps more accurately, the new normal just isn’t. But the constancy of limited cinematic choices, now heightened by so many theaters having been shuttered, remains; there is not a whole lot going on. Wonder Woman 1984 remains at the top of the domestic box office, despite drastically mixed reviews. It contends with a handful of other studio releases simultaneously available on streaming services, whether premium rental or subscription-based but, frustratingly, theaters are currently the only available venue to see director Paul Greengrass’ (United 93, 2006; Captain Phillips, 2013) Tom Hanks-starring adaptation of Paulette Giles’ News of the World or Carey Mulligan in Emerald Fennell’s up-to-the-minute sexual justice revenge thriller Promising Young Woman. It is yet another indicator of the inflexibility of some of the minds of prominence within the movie industry, or maybe just of the intractability of outmoded habits cemented by formerly easy profits. Anyway, pickings (and audiences) are unsurprisingly slim out there in the world of would-be insurrection and super-spreader events. But even at home, the streamers seem to have reverted to the industry’s accepted early-year modeling — not a whole lot going on. To be fair, this may be due at least in part to the embarrassment of riches with which Netflix was presented at the advent of the plague, having famously prepared a full year’s slate of content before the virus started roaming the streets. And it is likely due to the death-spasms of the facist regime so reluctant to leave office, and the repugnant actions of its unthinking white-supremacist base, that I didn’t feel like grappling with the likes of Netflix’s Pieces of a Woman, which we are told opens with…



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