‘OUT OF TOUCH’

Oscar Winner Melts Down at Critics After Box Office Disaster

Filmmaker Taika Waititi branded critics “sad lost souls” after his new movie got scathing reviews.

Filmmaker Taika Waititi has excoriated critics in a social media post after the box-office failure of his latest film, Klara and the Sun.

“This Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled and became critics,” Waititi posted on Instagram on Sunday.

Waititi won an Oscar for his 2019 movie Jojo Rabbit, and in the post said the “same people” had also trashed that picture.

“Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin,” Waititi said of critics.

Waititi also highlighted the difference between audience ratings of the new movie on Rotten Tomatoes, where it has a 76 percent approval score, and critic ratings, with only 26 percent of critics giving the movie a positive review.

Klara and the Sun is set in a future where androids are created as human companions, and it stars Jenna Ortega as an android Artificial Friend purchased for a girl who has fallen ill. It’s based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

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Released in October, the movie has so far flopped at the box office. It cost $20 million to make but made only $701,059 on its opening weekend and $145,000 in its second week, with global box office receipts of $1.74 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

Critics have been scathing in their reviews.

[Waititi] lacquers the film with a calculated gooeyness that’s stultifying before it becomes downright exasperating,” wrote the LA Times’ Tim Grierson.

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The New York Times’ Ben Kenigsberg labeled it a “saccharine, yet oddly humorless, film,” while The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as “soft-centered sci-fi-lite, simultaneously demanding we laugh at its (unfunny) humor and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy.”

And the Daily Beast’s Nick Schager called the film “insufferably cloying.”

According to reports, Sony scaled back the film’s initial release after the critical drubbing, and in Spain its planned release has been canceled.

By contrast, Jojo Rabbit currently has an 81 percent positive rating from critics and a 91 percent approval from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. Some critics, however, also took issue with the tone of the earlier movie after its release and its treatment of the Holocaust.

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Tom PorterBreaking News Reporter

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