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

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 :)

Pan's Labyrinth was in a much more fantastical vein. Only saw it when it came out and I can't say I liked it.

I still haven'tavrnt recovered from what this film has done to my already tenuous liking of children.

Even ppl who are better disposed to this film than some of the ILX film snob krew (ie myself) think the ending is a major mis-step (and doesn't really make sense in the context of the proceeding narrative, where even the children are only really interested in Disneyland as a omnipresent source of income and opportunity).

People being wrong about a film trying something different. Shocking!

I mean, come on! 'Doesn't really make sense'? It comes out of knowhere, the camera changes to an iphone, there's a string cover of Celebrate. It's supposed to be incongruous.

an alt interp of the ending i've seen -- from Victor Morton, above -- is IT'S DISNEY/SOCIETY'S FAULT

"it's a supposed to be incongrous" is cover for how Baker didn't know how to end it.

xpost

Yeah, can't really get behind a review which ends with the author wanting to physically assault the main female character.

Fred you're being a dick, but just for argument's sake - what purpose does the incongruity of the ending serve? What does it add to the film?

People being wrong about a film trying something different. Shocking!

I have yet to see anyone who has issues with this one’s ending frame it in an argument defending doing things the same old way.

When people talk about the ending here do they mean the whole section from social services coming to take her away, or just the bit in Disneyland?

I love this film and I think the ending is """audacious""" and completely unsuccessful. Don't really give a fuck tho, it's 15 seconds of the film

People being wrong about a film trying something different. Shocking!

I have yet to see anyone who has issues with this one’s ending frame it in an argument defending doing things the same old way.

― Fred Klinkenberg (Eric H.), 7. december 2017 14:13 (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, because every reactionary film critic always writes 'This should be done the same old way.'

Fred you're being a dick, but just for argument's sake - what purpose does the incongruity of the ending serve? What does it add to the film?

― Akdov Telmig (Ward Fowler), 7. december 2017 14:03 (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That it's jarring is the point. You have to make an active choice whether or not you believe in it, instead of being carried along. And that's a real tightrope to walk, because it's so easy to succumb to sub-Brechtian bullshit. But it walks the line perfectly!

it's at least 45-60 seconds btw

The movie undeniably feeds into at least a portion of the audience's desire to see something/anything change the girl's living situation. And then it denies us of that closure by first making the arrival of protective services a sad little bureaucratic clown show, and then jettisoning the denouement into a wildly speculative fantasy. I'm not saying that it's not audacious. If anything, it's the moment the movie morphs into its both middle fingers up mother-daughter team.

The Bird Flipping Project

Or, if I'm being particularly charitable, it's the movie arguing there actually is no solution.

(I'd rather enter a debate on this movie any day over Three Billboards.)

There is no children!

The alternative of fantasy to the 'same old way' wasn't new either. It was a poor choice.

Alba - it's the Disneyland bit.

I don't see it as a middle finger to the mother-daughter team at all. Social services allowed the daughter to escape..

Perhaps if protective services arrived and exited via helicopter?

Now that would be audacious!

Maybe if Donald Trump had nuked Kissimmee?

I'm going to see this later. I bet I will love it.

My ending was a man a few rows away shouting "what utter rubbish" as the credits started rolling.

good. i should've broken into "Kids!" Paul Lynde-style

Hated most of Tangerine. This was better, but you get the point in the first, what, three minutes, and after that, it just didn't have the strangeness that made American Honey so memorable to me. There were lines people laughed at that I couldn't quite hear.

I loved the ending, though. At first I thought "I've never seen anything quite like this," then quickly realized it's very much in the tradition of The 400 Blows and The Squid and the Whale.

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 -