thread for Sean Baker since he allegedly doesn't belong in "ten greatest living American filmmakers" thread

Argue about The Florida Project here.

Well, violently down the middle on Florida Project.

For awhile, yes, Alfred is right that the movie takes for granted that "these horrifying children are charming little dears" and, left-field quips aside, not remotely convincing. Eventually, it settles into truly expert "everyone has their reasons" territory -- many moments of unforced efficiency. (Am thinking of the interlude with Willem Dafoe's son, I think, saying he doesn't want to "do this anymore," and also clearly understanding why Dafoe's character feels compelled to continue. And how the sudden pattern of bathtime play interludes gently invites the audience into a new and unpleasant plot point.)

And it has a knack for portraying squalor in a way that makes it clear how adults can see their environment one way and kids another way entirely. But one of the movie's most obvious but well-realized examples -- the birthday fireworks a half-mile away from the real show -- just underscored how the abrupt ending didn't fucking work. After Tangerine, which had one of my favorite endings in recent years, this was a damp squib. Even taking into consideration how it brings "reality" crashing into a 6-year-old girl's life so violently she has nowhere to turn to but desperate fantasy. But the movie's a lot stronger when it sticks to things like the tourists' helicopter endlessly taking off: exciting to kids, a slap in the face to the destitute adults.

Still, I'll refrain from calling any filmmaker willing to devote serious career energies into depicting the American underclass condescending until we actually have anything remotely like an appropriate proportion of filmmakers devoting serious career energies into depicting the American underclass.

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Monday, October 23, 2017

And my review.

He transcends the notion of an 'American filmmaker' since he is still so good. Starlet is a must-see as well, btw.

A review that I suspect will be more characteristic of the response to TFP the more mainstream it pushes: https://letterboxd.com/vjmorton/film/the-florida-project/

Frederik, I admire your opinions on ci-ne-mah more than I do on American politics, but I'm having a hard time accepting how anyone can transcend anything – and why this should be a quality to which artists should aspire! – or why we should look for Metaphors For America. Surely films that make such obvious statements should make one suspicious.

The transcendation thing is a joke, don't sweat it :) I meant 'metaphor' in the way that I look for imagery that communicates. That dares to use aesthetics to say something about the world. And that's the same for me whether we are dealing with the US, Denmark, France, etc. When you and Morbs say that I don't know shit about America, my counterpoint wouldn't be that I do. It would be that i don't know shit about Paris or Portugal either, but I still write about Nocturama and The Ornithologist. And so do you. I look to art for - amongst other things - brave, strong personal views of the world. And it has value through it's aesthetic power, not because it is accurate or 'gets it right'. And I do honestly feel like American cinema suffers under a regime of literalness, where people are suspicious of aestheticification.

On a macro level, Frederik is right.

I agree broadly w/ your take Eric.

And I do honestly feel like American cinema suffers under a regime of literalness, where people are suspicious of aestheticification.

i.e. the Sundance ethos. And you're right. But in TFP the aesthetics are put to work in a film as didactic and literal as any Sundance lab project.

I hasten to add the "do you know why I like this tree?" lapses are few and far between in the movie, but they're there. (Another: "I can always tell when adults are about to cry.")

I disagree with Alfred on the conclusion. There are big and obvious metaphors and music and ending, but there's a much more subtle aesthetic, off kilter, non-narrative, scenes going on a bit too long, always seeming just slightly weird, and it's the combination of the two that I love so much. I've been writing quite a bit about Baker, and have been searching for photos that could underline my aesthetic points, but I've repeatedly found that somehow, somewhere, they become edited so they look more 'normal'. Characters are moved to the center. Unimportant stuff - which is what I love about the shot - is cut out. Of course, that could just be bad promotion, but I do find it interesting. He is weirder than he gets credit for.

A wide channel through the middle of mainstream American film is incredibly similar in tone and mood, sure. I think mistaking it as literal is a problem with both producers and audiences; it's the same metaphor and story devices used every time, and we've grown accustomed to them and mistake their use for a reproduction of reality.

I'm all for alternatives but another prevalent mode has been "indie shit that freaks out the norms by showing people living fucked up lives" which can be good at times but isn't a "brave, strong personal view of the world"

Hey, at least it's better than Escape from Tomorrow amirite?!

good intentions now make for sterling cinema

I should really just catch up and watch all the Florida tourist films in one go

xp a heartening evolution for a frivolous medium

i still need to watch Tangerine! i don't know why it has taken me so long. also, i don't think i ever saw Greg The Bunny. also, he was born in summit, new jersey. my dad grew up there. so did Ice-T. Ice-T and my dad. rollin' hard through the suburbs.

his early stuff is all good

cool, he deserves his own thread. like i said elsewhere, Tangerine is one of my favorite movies of the decade so far, and I was letdown by the meandering Florida Project:

Saw it today. In between Fred & Alfred but erring on Alfred's side - my main issue with the movie is it lacks any forward momentum, and the ending feels tacked on and forced. I was intrigued by the helicopter that kept taking off and landing by the motel, and when the cops & CPS came, I got the idea that the girl was going to run and jump into the helicopter and fly away. A beautiful, absurd fantasy of an ending that was making me cry even as it didn't play out. I thought the idea of them seeking asylum in the Magic Kingdom was nice, but again, the movie was so poorly paced & kind of boring as a mood/atmosphere piece. Some things I loved: the colors obviously, Willem Dafoe's performance (yes Alfred, perhaps not the most common landlord, but I've known a few landlords that he reminded me of. he was my favorite part of the movie by far), Baker escalating situations beyond where most directors would stop or cut (the one parent beating the shit out of the other, the pedophile, the johns coming into the room when the kid was there).

As far as it representing Florida or America or being a "See? This is real America" - well, I trust the guy that actually lives in Florida. Fred, I think the fantasy of this movie does its subject(s) a disservice. I still liked it, and it confirms Baker's status as one of America's most interesting directors, but I was let down- mostly because I loved, loved, loved Tangerine so much.

i watched about half of Tangerine this morning. it's cool. it would make a good netflix t.v. show. is what i kept thinking. it's netflix t.v. show good. i don't know if i will watch the other half though. i have a lot to watch!

also, i have had to resist the impulse today to greet everyone with "how you doin', bitch".

Tangerine is like 70 minutes long!

really? seemed longer. okay, i'll finish it. i liked it. i just want to talk like that all day now though. and tell people to fuck off.

i was just at the part where they were smoking crack in the club bathroom.

i'll watch it with maria. she'll dig it.

When the woman in line shows off her sobriety coin and Sin-Dee cuts her off, "byeeee."

lol

yeah that bathroom scene iirc is towards the end

Seeing this again :D

Baker salutes his influences

http://www.movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2017/11/29/detail/the-florida-project-and-the-little-rascals

Tangerine was incredible. this looks like Beasts of The Southern Wild. i did not like Beasts of The Southern Wild. am i wrong in wanting to avoid this?

yea the preview gave me the same thought actually

this should've been called Birth Control is a Right

Jesus

what if... the Our Gang kids were charmless shits?

lol Morbs

Our Gang of Assholes

Not far from Victor Morton's take tbh: https://letterboxd.com/vjmorton/film/the-florida-project/

If I was forced to reduce my response down to what I thought about the characters as people, the only one I had no real sympathies for on the whole was whore mom.

LOL, I already linked Vic's review upthread, I see. It seemed to be the one review that said what evidently I thought needed to be said. At the same time as being comfortingly voiced by someone who is on the record as being a reactionary.

My one totally unfair hot take of the year: the little girl doesn't have the chops to pull off the extended pre-code crying jag at her friend's door.

i agree with that but not the over-the-top judgment making the rounds, lol

Baker owes his career to the leads in Tangerine

he should be barred from future filmmaking for the last sequence in this one

Watched this a week after Happy End and thought Haneke would get the mom to go on a killing spree at the nicer hotel - I suppose that would follow Morbs' they were just a bunch of shits hot take. Me and the friend I was with thought it would be a better ending.

Heh, when I was watching Happy End I realised that Haneke is a great writer and director of young people.

my "bunch of shits" comment had nothing to do with morality, those kids were just winners of irritation pageants.

the little girl doesn't have the chops to pull off the extended pre-code crying jag at her friend's door.

She's not an actress and should be taken away from the parents who let her do this film.

Lol, the ending is great!

would you have said so pre-lobotomy, tho

I kept thinking how Haneke, in Hidden, simply packed a young Majid off. Doesn't flinch.

There isn't any point pretending the girl's life is going to be any better.

That's not at all what the film does, though

That's like saying the final reunion between the girl and her father in Pans Labyrinth seemed phony

Of course the other arg is to say we all know it's going to be awful for her so why not pretend. The film never solved the story in any satisfying way.

Xp Fred it had some good things in it. the ending didn't work.

"Of course the other arg is to say we all know it's going to be awful for her so why not pretend."

Well, bingo. Sorry for the snark earlier, then :)

Fair enough, I saw the cut balloon to the right not the pavement so much - the problem, still, is he doesn't hold it for long enough. I really didn't see enough of these moments to build anything like a comment on what he was looking at.

Its not bad - just wouldn't go ape over it, in terms of its look.

Different strokes, but I very much go ape :) I love it, and I love that he just does it and then leaves it, if he held it too long it wouldn't work the same. It's not Ulrich Seidl, and I don't need it to be Ulrich Seidl. It's not about getting the character of the space, really letting it live, it's about creating a new space, a distorted, off kilter, unstable space. It's kinda ugly by design. Just like the final sequence wouldn't be so good if it wasn't done on ugly iPhone. One of the things I've noticed trying to write about Baker is that I can never find screenshots for my articles that are actually from the film, because the press office clearly 'cleans them up', so to speak.

Check this image, from his Starlet:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SGkPrwCtpCk/UKeBiqDk1wI/AAAAAAAAD24/4hszoZk9mUs/s1600/starlet+8.jpg
It's the person sitting on the chair in the background, the fact that the electricity towers in fact aren't symmetrical, the interplay between things that are clearly well composed - the bench is placed right in the middle of the frame - and things that don't fit. I love that shit. I just absolutely love the cinematography of Sean Baker ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't need it to be Ulrich Seidl, and yet for that shot to take more of an effect it could be slower. Except that could then fuck up with the rhythm in which the story is told. I never noticed the ugliness except as an aesthetic that is already in the place, but you could just capture it if you shot it straight.

i need to see Starlet

The visual aspect is where I actually do agree with Frederik, who is able to verbalize it better than I am.

Far more so here than in his last one, arguably.

yes and I do admire that composition he selected

lol yeah it looks great obv, maybe play it at 0.5 speed if you're not good at noticing stuff

i also like the exterior view of the motel's balconies and people on them... bcz it recalls Lewis's The Ladies Man.

unforch not as funny

frederik b mostly otm itt and mostly p chill when he gets attacked generally imo (caveat: I don't frequent the US politics threads)

Haters are just jealous at how much time Frederik B gets to dig deep into festival fodder.

lol I'm very unjealous of that myself

I grant some of the haters could just be miserable people.

Actually if I see it this again it will be on fast fwd.

Happy to be bitter.

Board description.

not sure i want to see the kids being MORE hyperactive tbh

i saw this last night. this movie has gone BIG in France; it's playing at pretty much every cinema in Bordeaux, including the big commercial chains. i had something similar to Dr C's response

for the first half hour I'm like huh, this is it? did not think the kids were especially great; who in the world spits like that in a spitting contest (you sniff and hock a loogie as every fule kno); the mother is aggressively stupid and unpleasant (though always loving with her daughter); dafoe too much of an angel; events occur, drift away, shapelessly. is this some kind of tone-poem? and then i guess about an hour or so into it somehow the accumulation starts taking on an awful inertial logic. it's a creeper. by the end i was a mess. halley's mouth filling the whole screen, yelling "fuck you" at the world. dafoe helpless, casting lamely about for some control or authority or ability to make things better ("i'll get those fixed by the end of the week" "...ok?") And you know this is probably not even that unusual for dafoe. it must have happened many times.

the ending maybe wasn't great but I'm not sure what would have constituted a "great" ending. one weird effect of it was that my chest was full of sadness and pain (i thought the crying jag was excellent by the way and totally believable) and suddenly the credits are there. i guess that's what happens when you skip the denouement. i can't stop thinking about it in any case.

by the way for you guys saying these kids have never displayed any interest in going to disneyworld, so the ending felt contrived? i feel like you're.. missing the conceit of the entire movie?? these kids grow up in the shadow of what is bought and sold as every child's ultimate wish. of COURSE they know about disneyworld. of COURSE the have asked to go there. but from the earliest age they have come to learn that they can't. because those wrist bands cost $1700 for four. disneyworld is a foundational aspect of their existence, always looming as something they can't have. so they block it out. pretend it's not there. they know exactly why those fireworks are happening. they know it's not for jancey's birthday. it's this massive unstated thing in the kids' lives that's intimately bound with money and inequality. so that last sequence for me was, yeah, maybe a fantasy sequence (it's the only time we hear non-diegetic music) but whatever it is, it's jancey (that just autocorrected to "hanley" lol) deciding she's had enough of this, she's had enough of not getting what she wants, enough of kids being told what they can't have. so i dunno.. maybe not a "great" ending (again not sure what that would have been) but not untrue to the movie's themes or its characters.

Good shout on the Fireworks scene.

I buy that reading, Tracer, thanks.

Nice post. As I said above, I loved the ending--more than anything else in the movie. I didn't even think for a second about the plausibility (which you make a good case for)--I was just caught up in the look of it, and for the breaking-free aspect of it, a kind of ending that I usually find moving. Too many examples to cite: the ending of The Perks of Being a Wallflower would be a recent favorite.

it's the place where all things are good, where no one is sad. where else to go when everything's closing in? what if the adults are wrong? what if we CAN go there?

i watched tangerine last night. it was only okay. felt like the plot was being stretched out way too long. Could have been about 20 minutes long really. Actors were good, well except for the guy who played the pimp boyfriend. nothing particularly illuminating about its treatment of trans sex work. also the soundtrack was really irritating.

not best review

lol

sorry to disappoint

😉

I love tangerine (and films that stretch 20 minutes of plot generally)

That's still too much plot. Unless we're talking a 3+ hour film.

50% of this film was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MziZpcVkOB8

Busy Drag Queen just replaced Twin Peaks S3E8 on my top 10 list.

dvdscr of The Florida Project has leaked, that's my night's entertainment sorted.

TFP is still playing in DC for at least one more week. The idea of this movie fills me with grim flashbacks to American Honey and other glass-bottom boat tours of the American underclass. Should I make the effort and go see this?

Just see it and then spread your personal gospel about it.

I loved American Honey and thought this much shorter film was a gruesome farrago, so.

Having seen this, I stand by "glass-bottom boat tour of the American (and other capitalist economies') underclass."

I find it so weird that this 'glass-bottom boat tour' accusation has in general been so much stronger this time than it was when he did Tangerine.

Poor, badly clothed kids that live in the constant stress of housing + food insecurity are having so much fun tho.

There is barely any substance or emotional gravitas to the mothers or the kids imo, just the put upon hero played by Dafoe, who tries to help these "irresponsible scratter" mothers as far as he can within his job remit, he's the lone responsible adult. The unrelenting Yellow Smartie OD exuberance of the kids becomes very wearing as well. I think the A White comment about the class condescension in this movie is bang on tbh.

Some of y'all just don't like kids... 😳

Hey, some of my all time fave movies heavily feature children, like Germany Year Zero and Killer of Sheep. But not this.

ya i know i'm mostly being facetious (tho there are people itt who straight up said they don't like kids), i didn't think the kids were engaging enough to carry a movie without direction

Lol, soz I should have noted the emoticon!

I found The Florida Project agonizing for the exact reasons Alfred did. The movie gravely mistakes histrionics for drama; I suspect Baker's approach to directing the kids (and some of the adults) amounted to "just scream a lot and occasionally throw a tantrum and it'll be great." I liked Defoe well enough, though I have to wonder if I just appreciated the break his character provided from all the noise (the scene where he handles the creep hanging around the kids was good, the only moment in the film where I felt any real tension). The ending was laughable.

I'd say I'm baffled by the praise this film has been getting, but I'm not really: Baker scores points for being one of the very few American filmmakers these days to pay attention to poverty (I don't think the movie is condescending, exactly, just shrill to the point that empathy becomes nearly impossible). But this movie was so annoying that I actually might think less of Tangerine in retrospect.

Man, Red Rocket is one of <the> Texas movies. So grimy and gross and perfectly of its place.

Fun Fact: that donut shop isn't in Texas City, but actually about 100 miles west in a refinery city called Groves that's a little south of Beaumont/Port Arthur. It looked kinda familiar to me, so I dug a little deeper and it's just two blocks down from this old Cajun Dancehall & Seafood joint my Dad liked to day trip to see Swamp Pop bands.

This was a good fucking thread

100 miles west East

tracer hand with by far the best posts itt. the film nails the sickly quality of living poor on the outskirts of other people's dream vacation, stuck where other people go to escape. it would be unbearably corny if the characters talked about disney, outside of using it to run a scam. it also captures the ambivalence of knowing and living with people whose troubles are both unfairly thrust upon them and self-inflicted. just because you sympathize with poor people doesn't mean they can't be completely obnoxious, i should know i've been one. absolutely wild to me that anyone could come to the conclusion that the movie would be less condescending if the mom were less shrill, less grating, if she didn't lash out. imagine how fucking treacly TFP would have been if she were an angel beaten down by a hard life, if the irritants of her circumstances hadn't seeped into her. or if the kids with nothing to do and no supervision weren't innane little delinquents pouring stream of consciousness nonsense--and spit, and ice cream--from their mouths. so many little details rang true.. even the look of the pervert was perfect (i live a few miles from a waffle house that's across the street from an RV park imfamous for its sex pests.) but its not a perfect movie, dafoe's character was enjoyable but too soft. the ending was good tho, totally believable depiction of the desire for social mobility in the minds of children who don't know what class is but know that something is wrong

my only issue with tracer's take is that little kids absolutely do spit like that, hawking loogies is an acquired skill

yeah I actually watched TFP recently for the first time and thought it was pretty good

thank you karl...arlk. sadly i never learned how to hock a loogie but i'm a soft middle-class kid, i feel like these kids would know. but point taken

Watched this a week after Happy End and thought Haneke would get the mom to go on a killing spree at the nicer hotel -