Let's get this here little fact out of the way before I start yacking on with regards the Charlize Theron Shaves Her Eyebrows film.
I didn't want to like this.
No, I wanted to hate it.
Monster seemed to The Duke to be the epitome of everything Aileen Wuornos was afraid of. A big-budget Hollywood biopic that made her accusers rich and would set her corpse on a stall with a plaque round its neck reading "America's First Female Serial Killer".
Aileen was alive when Overkill - The Aileen Wuornos Story was produced, and indeed three police officers were forced to resign following tales that they had been paid for the story whilst the trial was ongoing.
The last thing anyone needed was Overkill 2 - The Return Of Bloody Aileen.
Nick Broomfield had already made two stunning films regarding the case, namely The Selling Of A Serial Killer and Life And Death Of A Serial Killer, both of which, you may recall, invoked glowing reviews from The Duke.
Monster, however, directed by first-timer Patty Jenkins, seemed to me to be nothing more than a vehicle for a star to get all worthy on our collective field of vision, and exploit the life and death of a woman who ended up as a mentally ill paranoid delusional killed by state-endorsed lethal injection.
Let The Duke be the first to admit he was all the wrong in Kansas.
My mind is cast back, via some soft-focus nostalgic plot-device, to my first viewing of Lost In Translation, another film by a female director which had a known-star getting all "proper" and also had at its core a doomed romance of sorts.
Also, I didn't especially want to like Lost In Translation, either.
But there you go, ten minutes in I loved the fucking thing, regardless.
Same applies to Monster, except it took a little less than ten minutes.
Anyone who saw those aforementioned Broomfield films will know instantly why all this praise has been dished out on Charlize Theron. She is uncanny. The mannerisms, the half-embarrassed, half-trying to impress laugh, the wide eyes, the flicking of the hair. It would be borderline caricature, if it wasn't so, y'know, heartbreaking and stuff.
But where's the praise for Christina Ricci, that's what The Duke was asking. This is easily her best performance to date, her most human, and I feel she may have got a few more nods in the whole awards-carry-ons if she hadn't been burdened with a surname no one can pronounce.
So yes, the two lead performances were amazing, but that doesn't always make a masterpiece, I'm afraid. To be honest, George Clooney wasn't that bad a Batman, really. Still, the film was arse.
But this here is so far from arse as to have made a round trip and ended up at the knees. Or something similarly profound.
This is a love story right here, between Ricci's Selby and Theron's Aileen. Selby has been cast out of her parent's home for a time, on account of her gettin' all arousified regarding members of her gender. She meets Aileen when the latter is five dollars away from killing herself. Wouldn't you know it, the two hook up and love blossoms.
Except when they arrange a date, Aileen, who was a prostitute, is attacked in an unbelievably brutal manner. The real Wuornos related this incident in graphic detail at her hearing, but still, seeing it presented here, onscreen, well it's just about unbearable. So Aileen kills the fella.
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