The Florida Project
theres a point in which this stops feeling like a movie im watching and it starts feeling like im actually watching real people live real lives. ive spent so much of my life near this place: my family would go to disney/universal like all the time, i have cousins who live here, i went to college here. even tho ive lived a completely different privileged life from these characters, this movie like, captures this specific feeling about the kissimmee/orlando area so fucking well that it hurts. the heat, the long roads, those random fucking sandhill cranes walking around, the gift shops, the loud machine gun america billboard, the old broken looking motels and the people walking on the street that you dont have to pay much attention to because hey, we're going to a big, packed hotel in a few minutes. we dont have to worry about how shit really is outside the marriott hotel.
paying much attention is a big thing in this movie: these are just kids having a fun summertime, not paying attention to their world, or the people around them, or their family's struggles. they really are only kids, no matter what. i love how you're given sortof an objective view the whole time, watching everything from afar and seeing everything unfold either in the background or offscreen, but always having you focus on the kid's perspective as they just dilly dally through it without knowing any of it. the adults in this movie walk a fine line between being supportive characters and being the exact main characters, struggling to hide their pain and suffering so they can still love their loved ones, or do whatever they can to show their love. This is a really consistent thing with Sean baker’s stuff but everyone acts so insanely genuine it’s like they’re real people. (repeating myself there, sorry) it’s so melancholic but so honest. peak, peak bittersweet. there're so many inspiring shots that happen here that i'm gonna remember forever.
PS: Willem Dafoe is so incredible because you're used to seeing him be an unhinged freak in most of his stuff and this one i want him to be my dad