Music (2021)
2021
PG-13
107 Minutes
Zu, a free spirit estranged from her family, suddenly finds herself the sole guardian of her half-sister, Music, a teenager on the autism spectrum whose whole world order has been beautifully craft...
User Review
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Normally, my ability to dance around the issue of whether or not a film portrays a disability or condition respectively or not is difficult.....mostly because I don’t know much about said condition and thus I’m not able to provide any relevant commentary. However....if there’s one thing I’m going to praise “Music” for, it’s for waking me up and making me realize I can’t dance around these issues anymore; I don’t care if I don’t know much about autism, I have to vent my frustrations about this because I FEEL FUCKING RAPED.
SIA’s direction towards and around the serious implications autism has and can cause is not only tone deaf, it once again brings to light another tried and true portrait of how some people only sought to benefit off the tragedy of the disability rather than actively convey it respectfully to help out. To be fair, if it stopped there, that would’ve been enough torture but already been maligned for its rather sickening depictions are only the tip of the iceberg as to what’s wrong here. Every single character doesn’t even qualify as a character: they’re toys, props, empty vessels that only exist to either spout lore or be a cheap tool for blatant emotional manipulation; it’s bad enough that Sia sprinkled in other blatant token Black/Asian racist stereotypes but it’s even worse that they turned the traumatic medical condition for Ziegler’s character into another in the long list of stereotypical caricatures. The meshing between uninspired addiction recovery drama and Sia’s exaggerated, over the top music video fever dreams further clouds the films haphazard structure, tone is stretched out constantly between being awkward and/or cartoonish, cinematography is either uninteresting or difficult to stomach depending on you seeing the ‘story’ or the songs play out, said songs are ultra forgettable (therefore betraying the fact that she never understood why she was writing them in the first place), it’s unreasonably proud of being ableist and insufferably ill-conceived in its messages since it knows it’s in deep denial over its own wrongdoings and the plot is a complete waste of time. It’s overly predictable, poorly written and it’s either frustrating and offensive as hell if you don’t ignore the controversy or boring as piss if you do (trust me, the two aren’t mutually exclusive).
I finally found a movie that was so tasteless on every conceivable fundamental level that I actually walked out on it; I have not finished this abomination and I have no plans to. It’s like the films purposely begging to be problematic for attention. You have any idea how dangerous this is? This shit is embarrassing enough to be viewed on the silver screen so what is it doing being nominated at the Golden Globes?! This isn’t just in the running for worst film of the year, this is probably going down as one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
If I could give this a zero, I would.1 member likes this review.
