May December

The beautiful Black-backed oriole, a symbol of overwhelming and (at times) toxic optimism, is one of the few natural predators to the Monarch butterfly, a prey oft-ignored due to its appearance providing a neon sign to most of the animal kingdom that it should never be indulged. But not to this oriole, it has a habit of waiting until the monarch is in its most vulnerable state before striking the abdomen and slurping the poison like it's a luxury. A predatory presence that waits until its snack is at its most feeble and unprotected before leaving it behind as nothing more than a soulless husk of its former self. It's funny, before this year I don't think I had ever watched a Todd Haynes movie except for Safe which I can't really remember enjoying at all and I kind of strayed away from his filmography. But after watching three this year (Dark Waters, Far From Heaven, and this one). I can't help but really feel what this man is putting down. A brutal deconstruction and dark satirization of the slog of Lifetime films that flooded the airwaves and the thoughts of most white maternal figures in my youth. A thief of the aesthetic feeling and over-the-top ideology behind "trashy TV" creativity and forcing it, sometimes at what feels like gunpoint, to have something striking and interesting to actually say. All found in a monster with a disarming lisp, the stolen childhood of a man whose tail is now perpetually between his legs, and an actress who yearns to be more than the mediocrity that she's enveloped in (to a thoroughly unpleasant degree.)