Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Palo Alto (2013)


IMDb plot summary: Shy, sensitive April is the class virgin, torn between an illicit flirtation with her soccer coach Mr. B and an unrequited crush on sweet stoner Teddy. Emily, meanwhile, offers sexual favors to every boy to cross her path - including both Teddy and his best friend Fred, a live wire without filters or boundaries. As one high school party bleeds into the next - and April and Teddy struggle to admit their mutual affection - Fred's escalating recklessness starts to spiral into chaos.
Directed by Gia Coppola. Starring Jack Kilmer, Nat Wolff, Emma Roberts, and James Franco.

I have no idea how to respond to this movie, but once I saw it was directed by a Coppola, that made sense. While I generally understand Sofia Coppola's work, Francis Ford Coppola's movies have never made any sense to me at all, feeling like odd rambling narratives that *should* have meaning but just leave me feeling befuddled. That's very much how I feel about this. Consider, for example, that it took me almost a third of the movie to confirm that these kids were in high school. The lack of supervision plus 2/3 of the main characters being hit on/propositioned by authority figure adults with nobody thinking this was particularly abnormal... felt confusing at best. The kids themselves are kind of interesting to watch, but since I couldn't make any sense of the world they're in, I felt a disconnect through the entire movie. It's a strange, depressing, somewhat disturbing story, and I just don't get it.

2 stars.

Flickchart: #1446 out of 2227, below State of the Union and above A Time to Kill.

2 comments:

Brittani Burnham said...

lol. I had a weird reaction to this one too. Like part was interesting, but then it just became "meh."

Hannah K said...

Yeah, it started off interesting but then just got weirder and weirder and eventually I just wasn't getting it at all.