The Florida Project

[spenser1058]

Osceola County has come a long way in trying to restore areas like downtown Kissimmee, with great live-work-play options that almost anyone would be proud to call home. 

Arguably, central Florida has more New Urbanist projects per square mile than just about anyplace else in the US 

Nevertheless, our seamy underbelly of tourist/sprawl/poverty life is never far away. The Florida Project is a great new film with Willem Dafoe that takes an unflinching look at reality for thousands of local residents. It's definitely worth a look.

Here's a good review from former WDW cast member and journalist Robert Niles from his Theme Park Insider blog:

http://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/201710/5772/

[JFW657]

It's about time our seamy underbelly got the recognition it deserves, dammit!!!

[HankStrong]

I actually watched this.  I'm not ready to call it a good movie.  It was slightly interesting, but very, very, very awkward.  It was neat to actually know the locations and recognize places.  Dafoe did a great job.  His part was also the only professional actor role, so it made it a lot more glaring that the rest of the cast were not actual actors.  He made the film bearable to watch.

The story was basically every stinker indie film that comes out.  Stuff happens without much reason for it happening, minimal acting, disjointed dialog, no firm plot, vague open-to-interpretation ending.  Thankfully there wasn't a love story that ended randomly and ambiguously.   That indie trope was left out.

 

I know it won awards and almost won a ton of other awards, but it wasn't a good movie.  Points for being "real" (and I use those quotes to indicate someone's reality) but it just sort of happened instead of being a movie.  There are tons of places where the kids just jabber to each other for several minutes about absolutely nothing.  That's certainly realistic.  Kids jabber about nothing to each other all the time, however, it adds nothing to the film.  I sleep, shower, and take a dump everyday.  That's real too, but it doesn't make for an interesting movie scene.  Unless someone is stalking me while those things occur or something is going on that furthers the plot.

You certainly get to see how a sad segment of society lives.  I just don't need to see a mom do drugs with her kid in the room, teach them to steal, and lock the kid in the bathtub repeatedly while she does her hooking to know some folks have pretty sucky lives.

I will say this, if the rest of the acting in the film was on par with Defoe's acting, I'd probably think this was a much better film.  It was just painful to watch them stammer and stumble through scenes like an elementary school play.