JOHN PODHORETZ COMPARES AND CONTRASTS ANORA AND EMILIA PEREZ: The best and worst movies of 2024.
Emilia Perez is dreadful—both conceptually and in execution. See, according to writer-director Jacques Audiard, the problem with the psychotic mass-murdering Mexican drug lords who are destroying Western civilization is that they have been brainwashed by toxic masculinity. And what is the perfect cure? Transsexuality. The title character is El Chapo with his male machinery removed—and once El Chapo becomes a she, they become social justice warriors for the poor and oppressed.
No, I am not kidding. No, this is not a comedy. But it is a musical (again, no I’m not kidding), mostly in Spanish but a little in English, featuring an immortal exchange in recitative between El Chapo’s lawyer and a doctor in a clinic in Thailand:
Lawyer: Hello, very nice to meet you, I’d like to know about a sex change operation.
Doctor: Man to woman or woman to man?
Lawyer: Man to woman.
Doctor: Penis to vagina!
You would know this yourself. You could. You almost certainly have a Netflix subscription and Emilia Perez has been available on Netflix for months. You might even have watched some of it. Many people have. The thing is, I haven’t met a single person who has made it past the 60-minute mark of this two-hour movie because (with the exception of Zoe Saldana, the blockbuster franchise actress who does a wonderful job playing the lawyer) its awfulness doesn’t even rise to the level of “this is a camp classic, I just gotta see how bad this is going to get the longer it goes on.” Rather, everybody shuts Emilia Perez off and then goes and takes a shower.
Or puts on a real estate flipping show.
Why did it get 13 Oscar nominations? Guess why. You know why. It’s the same reason the movie nobody has seen about Donald Trump got Oscar nominations for the guy playing Trump and the guy playing Roy Cohn. Hollywood is trying to tell us things again. Emilia Perez got the same number of nominations as All About Eve because it’s about the wonders of sex change operations and how they will solve all the problems of our planet. The person playing Emilia Chapo, Karla Sofia Gascón, is nominated for Best Actress. If she wins, in part by defeating Mikey Madison, it will be a scandal—but hey, if actresses in Hollywood don’t have the courage to complain about their awards being taken away by biological males, then those awards should be taken away by biological males. It’ll serve them right.
The above scene from Emilia Perez is included in this clip featuring Sky News Australia’s Rita Panahi (and on the right of the screencap, the overly-caffeinated Saldana), who notes that Hollywood lefties are getting a taste of their own medicine:
As Matt Walsh tweeted last week:
