Pictureland

Motel life.  Bria Vinaite in The Florida Project  Fuuuck you!  Lest we miss these final, flagrant word from Halley (Bria Vinaite) in Sean Baker's The Florida Project , the director practically inserts his camera into roaring mouth of the young woman.   This close close up is both typical of Sean Baker the director and Sean Baker the humanist.  There's arguably not much admirable to be found in Halley, but Baker lets her speak, or shout her piece.  This before The Florida Project at its climax spins off into high and sad irony like a firework into the night sky.  One of our best and most valuable filmmakers, Mr. Baker continues to present us with the travails of those scrapping at the edges of the American economy and society, or at least those generally beyond the interest of politicians, demographers and the like.  Read many reviews of the The Florida Project and you will regularly be served variations on the word margin. ...

Often pulsing with a score of ominous, insistent electronica, Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes  seems an echo from the fictional side of the story telling divide opposite documentaries of tragic economic chicanery like Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room , Client 9 and Inside Job.  All are films, whether apparent truth or fiction, concerning themselves with the deregulation of the financial industry that found its most devastating expression in the Global Financial Crisis (the swath of destruction vast enough that we can now grant it capital letters, like a world war) of 2008 and beyond. We're not given a specific date when we're dropped into the midst of the action, the great reversal, taking place in the U.S economy, but the setting is Orlando Florida (with unrecognizable suburbs of New Orleans standing in).  What's clear is that the economic crisis, initiated largely by a multitude of doomed mortgages, is quickly fanning and settling like a gangrenous rot.  ...