Tuesday, March 14, 2023

TUBI CONTINUED… DARLING NIKKI (2019) *

Nikki (Nicole D’Angelo) is a beautiful woman stuck in a boring marriage to her musician husband (James Duval).  Or is she the co-hostess of a cooking show?  Or is she a high-priced call girl?  Whatever she is, she gets bored of all that shit, and begins taking drugs until she occasionally starts to slip into a half-assed DTV version of Alice in Wonderland, further infuriating/confusing/confounding the viewer.  There’s a guy dressed like the White Rabbit, a Cheshire Cat wannabe, a hookah-smoking pimp, and Lisa London is the Mad Hatter.  

This movie is like the White Rabbit as it hops from place to place so much that you can never get your bearings.  Tubi describes the flick as such:  “A busy bachelorette with her hands full of romantic prospects plunges into a fantasy world that becomes indistinguishable from her secret life.”  It’s one thing for a character in a movie not to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality.  It’s another thing when the audience can’t either.  

The big problem is that director Gregory Hatanaka (who also made the equally awful The Awakening of Emanuelle with D’Angelo) makes the early scenes so chaotic that it’s hard to tell if Nikki has already gone off her rocker or not.  He should’ve at least grounded the early scenes in some semblance of mundane everyday reality to better disassociate it from the Alice in Wonderland shit.  Is the cooking show scenes part of the Lewis Carroll-inspired nonsense?  Is the hooking scenes (she never has sex, so I don’t know why they made it a big deal that she was a prostitute) part of the Wonderland sequences?  It’s almost impossible to tell.  Since nothing makes a lick of sense, it’s hard to care one way or the other about Nikki’s fantasies, or her reality for that matter.  Oh, and naming the movie after a Prince song does nothing to clarify any of the resounding plot questions posted above.  

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