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

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 -