She Knows You Only Know Her as Buttercup

Whenever anyone mentions Robin Wright, two images immediately pop into my head: the crowned, sparkly Princess Bride Buttercup and the efficient pantsuit-wearing Claire Underwood from House of Cards. The two are both great on-screen characters and it's easy to see how they're related: Buttercup's entitled pout easily transforms into Claire's thoughtful frown with experience. But nonetheless, I had forgotten about Robin Wright until she morphed from a princess to the queen of the Beltway. And now there's a movie that plays on that trope: The Congress' premise is that Robin (as herself, in some version of the present) has been forgotten post-Buttercup, and has fallen on hard times. She must then sell her entire likeness to support her son, who is slowly going blind.

What seems like a simple dramatic critique of Hollywood fame, quickly shifts to something much more fantastic. Somehow, the "scanning" of Robin's likeness has transformed her into a cartoon, alongside Tom Cruise (who is expertly but sadly voiced by Evan Ferrante) and they live in some sort of animated phantom world. As she fights to make her way back to her original world, the voice-over proclaims that "there is no such thing as the place that you came from." Although the trailer doesn't lay out the entire plot, this hybrid film could go one of two ways: either it successfully critiques Hollywood while creating a surreal dystopia, or it falls on a large pile of half-baked sci-fi plotlines. Luckily, The Futurological Congress, the 1971 book on which the movie is loosely based, is a well-known inversion of sci-fi tropes, so it's possible that the Americanized film version could be both dense and entertaining.