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Tuesday, January 11, 2022

Thoughts on The Florida Project

The Florida Project (2017), directed by Sean Baker. I finally watched this last week, and I liked it a lot. The basic plot takes place at this purple-painted motel just off of the strip in Orlando, on the outskirts of Disney World, and local businesses like diners and ticket booths and motels get by on tourism. The motel’s residents are a mix of single moms with their kids, where the moms are eking out a living to get by, be it waitressing or hustling, and their kids just run around the motel and across lanes to nearby businesses like it’s their giant playground.

It took me a while to get used to the kids, because I found them annoying, and I wavered between not liking Moonee’s (Brooklynn Prince) mom Halley (Bria Vinaite) for her volatile jerk attitude and having some sympathy for her as a lonely struggling mom, but I liked how it felt like this weird offbeat world just off the strip mall, and Willem Dafoe was great and fit right in as the motel manager, who was frustrated at Halley’s outbursts but couldn’t kick her out because she has nowhere else to go, and he clearly has a soft spot for the kids and their well-being. It’s always nice to see Willem Dafoe play a good guy. I loved this whole long take shot of him distracting and escorting a sexual predator away from the kids, culminating in a great moment with a soda can.
It’s mean of me, but I didn’t feel sorry for random guys who got scammed by Halley because they chose to hand over a lot of cash to just some random chick and her kid in a parking lot of a tourism center based on her claiming she can “get them a good deal” on passes at Disney World.
While the kids as a group could bug, I did like how it showed them being messy and loud and acting like real kids (mostly played by non-professional actors), like when they are trying to get a random woman to give them money for ice cream by making up some sob story, and she’s just like “Kids, here’s $5, I don’t need this whole story.” It was a cool and interesting movie to watch, and deserves its acclaim. It’s on Netflix.






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