Angelus News | January 26, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 2
On the cover: High school student Atticus Maldonado smiles between classes at St. Pius X-St. Matthias Academy in Downey. On Page 10, Angelus contributor Steve Lowery has the incredible story of how Maldonado’s school community rallied behind him in prayer — and why his unlikely recovery from a rare cancer may not even be the story’s biggest miracle.
On the cover: High school student Atticus Maldonado smiles between classes at St. Pius X-St. Matthias Academy in Downey. On Page 10, Angelus contributor Steve Lowery has the incredible story of how Maldonado’s school community rallied behind him in prayer — and why his unlikely recovery from a rare cancer may not even be the story’s biggest miracle.
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NOW PLAYING POOR THINGS<br />
BELLA’S BIG ADVENTURE<br />
Awards season favorite ‘Poor Things’ turns a<br />
Frankenstein bride into a sorority girl<br />
Emma Stone and Mark<br />
Ruffalo in “Poor Things.”<br />
| IMBD<br />
BY JOSEPH JOYCE<br />
Often in the English language<br />
there are words mistaken for<br />
synonyms while nestling adjacent<br />
or even opposed to one another.<br />
For instance, anyone who has ever had<br />
their heart broken quickly learns the<br />
chasm between “affection” and “love.”<br />
Many more then have their heart’s<br />
shards snapped further by a waiter<br />
conflating the merits of Coca-Cola and<br />
Pepsi.<br />
But more notable and more relevant<br />
to this review is the difference between<br />
“provocative” and “interesting.” It’s<br />
easy to reach the former, and even easier<br />
to mistake it for an achievement.<br />
Thus is the quandary with Yorgos<br />
Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” fresh off its<br />
Golden Globes wins earlier this month<br />
for Best Comedy and Best Actress in a<br />
Comedy for Emma Stone.<br />
Stone plays Bella, a Victorian woman<br />
resurrected from the dead by mad<br />
scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter, played by<br />
Willem Dafoe. Though perhaps resurrection<br />
is again one of those adjacent<br />
but conflicting synonyms: When Godwin<br />
finds her floating under the bridge,<br />
he places the brain of her unborn child<br />
into her dead mother’s skull. I’m sure<br />
the more squeamish have tapped out at<br />
that alone. But that is what they want,<br />
and we cannot let them win. Who<br />
“they” and “we” are, and what indeed<br />
what “winning” entails, is irrelevant to<br />
the mission at hand.<br />
Bella is quite literally a child trapped<br />
inside an adult woman’s body. She<br />
staggers about like a marionette at the<br />
mercy of a drunk puppeteer, and in<br />
true toddler fashion makes up for her<br />
limited vocabulary in violence with<br />
the words she does possess. Unable<br />
to pronounce his full name, she calls<br />
her creator “God.” It’s the most blatant<br />
of the blunt symbolism throughout,<br />
which I’m sure Lanthimos would<br />
insist is tongue-in-cheek. But it’s ironic<br />
turtles all the way down, and at the<br />
bottom of the stack is still a character<br />
called God.<br />
28 • ANGELUS • <strong>January</strong> <strong>26</strong>, <strong>2024</strong>
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