Smooth Talk

For about 70 minutes of this nothing much happens, a teenage girl does stuff at the mall with her friends and has squabbles with parents she thinks she understands. One fleeting moment during one of her days out with a friend will fuel a NIGHTMARE later. I cant even comprehend how scary it is to be a woman sometimes ... except for those times in my youth changing for swimming lessons while old naked men stare and loiter.

I don't think I've seen a film with such an obvious female perspective in a long time. It's 90 minutes of Dern being an aimlesss teenager and coming of age during a listless summer, and it does really well at keeping everything small while still evoking that feeling of importance that such things have when you're a teenager. That balance and Dern's performance make the film. The ending is a bit strange and I'm not sure what to make of it, but I think it works.

Glad to have the female perspective, but the whole final act really feels like a fundamentalist's karma fantasy against the sexual awakening of a 15-year-old, whose only real crime was wearing the same outfit twice. Clueless dad. I thought Treat Williams was an allegory or imaginary at first, since he was so villainous. Fav scene: the final act was so tense and you remember that Dern's a child.

I am glad films like this can be released by Criterion. Laura Dern is wonderful, as this film shows the inner-life of a young girl navigating her burgeoning sexuality. It is structured so oddly, which is not a criticism, and the scene with her and A. Friend, is one of the most tense ~20 minutes I have had watching a film in ages.

Patriarchy: the movie

Starts off as a down-to-earth look at burgeoning teenage sexuality that becomes something far more powerful and unnerving. Dern’s performance is absolutely phenomenal.

que estrutura peculiar

Viewed April 11, 2021.

Beautiful cinematography and storytelling. Great performances by Dern, Carlin, and Williams. Charming, angsty, and scary.

Great early performance from Laura Dern and its shot very well.

strange, interesting movie. love the look of it. dern and williams are great. really liked it.

Because it doesn't contextualize the ending in any way other than as a rite of passage, all it says is that she had it coming, and that's a pretty disgusting moral.

pretty bad in most ways. Acting is the only thing that's decent. Music is hokey, storyline is trudged in supposed realism and gets tiresome and boring quick, and the highlight of the short story (Arnold Friend) seems really hacked into the script and serves little purpose. Ending is also terrible. It completely rapes the material, also, which makes me dislike it all the more.

Laughably bad, especially the part when Treat Williams just sort of stands there and rocks out for no reason, but he looks like he's having a seizure.