Pretty Persuasion

Pretty Persuasion(480P)

Greetings again from the darkness. This one just defies all labels, categories and genres. Definitely not a teen comedy, but it is part Black Comedy, Social Commentary and is written like a spoof ... but it is not a spoof of anything in particular. The first feature film from director Marcos Siega is off beat as both a comedy and drama. The viewer finds himself in situations of uncomfortable, guilty laughter while at the same time mesmerized by the social topics and excellent acting. The cadence of the dialogue is beyond description and is perfectly displayed at the dinner table with Evan Rachel Woods, her dad played by an over the top James Woods and her new step mom. The family dog plays a big part in the "conversation". The heart of the story is the devilishly orchestrated false (or are they?) accusations of sexual harassment against drama teacher Ron Livingston (so great in "Office Space"). With so many different agendas at play, we can't help but be drawn into to this story on many levels. Jane Krakowski ("Ally McBeal") shows a real Priscilla Presley side as the lesbian, glory-hound reporter. Selma Blair (Reece Witherspoon's nemesis in "Legally Blonde") is terrific as Livingston's semi-supportive wife. Make no mistake, the real star of the film, and the reason it works is the extraordinary talents of Evan Rachel Wood (just plain brilliant in "Thirteen"). Wood takes teen ego and self-centeredness and revenge to a whole new level. As one of the male teacher's states, her character is the devil. Watching how she manipulates her friends, teachers, boys and adults is quite the guilty pleasure. Very few actresses her age could pull off the role of this complex character. The music of the film is very interesting. It is almost as if each character has their own theme song - you can really sense the focal point of the scene by the music. Not sure who to recommend this to as it is impossible to categorize. If you are up for a strange, outside the box story that is well acted, simply filmed and full of uncertain laughter, then this is the one for you!

source: Pretty Persuasion

This movie is great on so many levels. BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE by ERW. James Woods performance is like a train wreck - very disturbing...very cinematic...and you don't want to look away..but you know you should. So many movies that feature teenage actors are about the same things: being popular, makeovers, and finding "your own voice." This movie does so much more to expand the genre of high school satire. It's not a movie for teenagers...but teens will find that a lot of the duologue rings more true than what Miss Duff or Miss Lohan are usually forced to eek out in their PG cotton candy confections. This movie has it's own voice and pacing that takes a few minutes to get used to...but it's unlike any other movie opening this summer. Everyone has an opinion about this movie...which is rad. Some people give it a 10...some people give it a 1...not too many films divide audiences so strongly. The director decided to make a truly indie film that features scenes that would never be allowed in a "mainstream" drama. For that he should be applauded. Even more cool, is that the director has another movie opening the same time with Nick Cannon that goes in a completely different direction...it's the fluffy summer movie that those people who give Pretty Persuasion a 10 will likely not want to see. SPOILER: Not every movie in theaters should have a happy ending....that's the Hollywood way...not the world we live in. Here's a chance to see Evan in a performance that will make audiences take notice of many critic's claim to be the next Jodie Foster or Nicole Kidman...she's beautiful, kicks ass and has a brain to boot.

In Beverly Hills, the fifteen years old evil manipulative aspirant actress student Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood) convinces her friends Randa (Adi Schnall) and Brittany (Elisabeth Harnois) to falsely accuse their Literature and Arts teacher of sexual harassment. She manipulates also the lesbian journalist Emily Klein (Jane Krakowski), who is covering the case, to support their cause in the trial, which leads the group to a tragic and surprising conclusion. This dark "Pretty Persuasion" is a Machiavellian and mean tale of manipulation. With another impressive performance of the gifted Evan Rachel Wood and the stunning James Wood, this dramatic dark comedy may shock with the crude sex scenes, the deranged family of Kimberly or the outrageous perjuries of the girls; or make the viewer laugh with the permanent black humor or the scenes of the racist Hank Joyce; or feel sorry for the poor teacher Percy Anderson. But certainly this movie shows an important message, how people may be easily manipulated by an intelligent person. My vote is seven. Title (Brazil): "Garotas Malvadas" ("Bad Girls")

"Pretty Persuasion" crosses "Mean Girls" with an updated slant on Lillian Hellman's "The Children's Hour," but its social and political satire feels in too many scenes like an extended "Saturday Night Live" sketch. The film is heavy-handedly based on the sociological findings that instead of doing Columbine-like violence, teen age girls lash out with spiteful aggression in social situations. The film makes the extended case that teen girls are more like Machiavelli than "Carrie" or as in "Heathers." The male debut writer and director can't resist adding in dollops of male fantasy about girls and women. Even under the guise of examining how ambiguous male-driven media messages from Britney Spears to Lolita to TV shows, etc. create confusing role models of appropriate behavior for girls in their real lives, males are seen as clueless pawns of younger females. One effective touch is to replay scenes in flashbacks from different angles to show how miscommunications and misunderstandings can occur and be manipulated. Individual scenes and caricatures are very funny, particularly James Wood doing a comic take on his "Ghosts of Mississippi" role. Adi Schnall is touching as a naive Muslim student thrown in with the sharks of the American Dream. Jane Krakowski enjoys making fun of the ambitious bombshell roles she usually plays. Elisabeth Harnois is the most affecting as the best friend, but she is so natural she almost seems to be in a different movie. Selma Blair has a brief funny scene as a wife mocking her husband's fantasies, though a notable episode of TV's "Angel" did the exact same scene with more dark bite, as well as the general theme taken up more effectively by Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Ryan Murphy in "Popular." But most of the rest of the broad, scatter shot attacks on ethnic, racial and sexual PC clichés end up just wooden and go on repetitively for too long. Individual lines like "I can sympathize with the immigrant experience because I'm Canadian." are amusing, as are ongoing jokes about putting on the story of Anne Frank as the high school play, but pile up in dialog that even the commanding Evan Rachel Wood has trouble making seem real. The closing montage ties all the disparate themes together in a sudden shift of tone, but it was a long time getting there, in moving from the obvious to the touching to twists in using high school as the usual metaphor for the world at large. The cinematography is all appropriate bright pink. The set design is full of visual jokes, more than the can be picked up quickly. For a film set in the world of teenagers, there are few songs on the sound track, perhaps due to budget limitations, but more music might have helped the pacing.

I have two words for everyone: Evan and James! These two actors (one a legend, the other fast on her way!) deliver some of the sharpest, funniest performances you will see in a movie this year! Evan Rachel Wood is superb as the ultra-manipulative Kimberly Joyce, who's only real aim in life is to become famous by whatever means necessary. James Woods play's Evan Rachel's father, known simply as Mr. Joyce, a foul-mouthed, motor-mouthed lunatic of a dad who spends quality time spewing hostile racist "observations" over family dinner with daughter Rachel and newly- minted Trophy-wife Kathy (a brilliantly vacant Jamie King). Wood and Woods share some of the movie's most hilarious moments, like when Kimberly picks up the phone only to overhear her father's embarrassingly salacious phone-sex chat. (It has been noted by some that most of Woods' part was ad-libbed, but you'd never know, because his fellow co-stars are all on the same page, working together to bring the most out of the film's on-the-mark screenplay!) While Wood and Woods give unforgettable performances, Ron Livingston and Jane Krakowski also give stellar performances as two unsuspecting pawns in Kimberly's infamous rise to fame. If you thought MEAN GIRLS felt more like MEEK GALS, then PRETTY PERSUASION will surely be your cup of spiked tea!

(MINOR SPOILERS) Okay, full disclosure: the writer, Skander Halim, is a friend of mine. But even though his particular brand of humo(u)r was immediately recognizable to me (and I'd seen his short film Family Dinner, which was the calling card for Persuasion), some of the funniest moments turned out to be James Woods' ad-libbed non sequiturs. Truthfully, all the humor is of a piece, a caustic willingness to eviscerate any last remaining pieties about the innocence of American girlhood. Evan Rachel Wood turns in a small miracle of a performance as Kimberly, a rich girl who's more than precocious; she's got the fully formed subjectivity, sexual appetite, and ironic detachment of a grown woman. The piercing subtext of this character and her fate is that as a smart, mature young woman in the cruel, petty culture of American high school, she cannot survive intact. A bit like -- seriously, don't laugh -- the character of Sarah Jane in Sirk's Imitation of Life, Kimberly's clear-eyed picture of the way things work is a knowledge she can't fully capitalize upon. Instead, it effectively drives her insane. I know this sounds like pretty heady stuff for a "teen comedy," and Pretty Persuasion is aiming for balls-out genre subversion of the sort a film like Election only began to approach. The downside is that the film's ambition outstrips its ability, and the dark turns it finally takes feel less organic, more argumentative, than they probably should. Nevertheless, this film's got guts, and its first two- thirds are, for the most part, unrelentingly funny. Marcos Siega, moving over from TV and music videos, acquits himself quite well in his first feature outing. There's a flat, unfussy treatment of space and mise-en- scene throughout the film, along with fluid camera-work that slowly and subtly announces to the viewer that we're watching something teen-oriented but with higher aspirations. (Although the feeling is completely different, only Ghost World comes to mind as a fitting analogy.) Siega and Halim do not hit their every mark, and there are a few clunkers even in the comedy section (despite Adi Schnall's solid performance, the character of Randa is not hewn with the requisite care), but more often than not, Pretty Persuasion is tight, tough, and willing to smack you around a little bit. Admit you like it.

This movie about a manipulative teen female is meant to be ironic and nasty in the vein of such classics as "Heathers" or at least of such worthy, if lesser, follow-ups as "Mean Girls." An utter failure. To achieve true offense you must be either really crude and stupid or really bold and revolutionary. To achieve truly wicked wit you must be really smart -- and of course witty. "Pretty Persuasion" almost achieves the former qualities, but not quite. It's pretty stupid, and rather crude; it certainly isn't revolutionary (see below). The second goal -- truly wicked wit -- requires logic and intelligence in the script. And that is far, far away from what the makers of "Pretty Persuasion" have shown themselves capable of in this truly lamentable effort. The fault, indeed, is not in the acting, which is at best accomplished and confident and at worst able and serviceable. It is in the writing, directing, and editing, which are all astonishingly inept. Evan Rachel Wood as Kimberly Joyce is the alpha female, who does it all, wrecking lives left and right, for a boy. Hey, that's not hip; that's not cool! It's hard to see where this badly written story is meant to be going. It leads up to a jury trial in which Kimberly persuades two of her classmates (including Randa, a "Middle Eastern," i.e., Arab, girl in hijab, who is totally passive and commits suicide -- thus fulfilling several false stereotypes) to go along with her in accusing an English teacher of sexual harassment -- not a good idea for the alpha female, given that when she isn't listening to her obscene racist father (James Woods, who should be ashamed), is manipulating people by granting them oral and anal favors, or watching *. Kinberly is in no position to present herself as sexually innocent, and it is not ironic but simply illogical for her to bring forth such a case. The private Beverly Hills high school is mere wallpaper. There's no portrait of school life here, and no sense of real personalities or social groupings or up to date lifestyles. Thus one of the most essential elements of this kind of comedy -- a highlighting of current teenage social patterns -- is missing. How very unsophisticated and un-clever it was of Skander Halim, the screenwriter, to think this poorly organized series of mindlessly cruel and tasteless scenes, whose sole aim -- at which it fails -- is to cause outrage, would turn out to be somehow sophisticated and clever. Halim has almost no sense of the sophisticated schoolgirl sensibility or of current language. "Pretty Persuasion" is bad, bad, bad. And given the promising trailers full of seemingly outrageous moments, it was a huge disappointment for anyone lured into theaters to see it this fall. After this disaster, and with nothing else but a trail of minor TV behind him, it'll be very surprising if the director, Marcos Siega, ever does anything on film that is beyond mediocre. The high point of his career thus far may have been his role as a post production assistant for "Sleepless in Seattle." Good luck, Mr. Siega. Start out by finding another writer.

PRETTY PERSUASION is one bitchy, clever and very dark look at the world of teens in America. What Kimberly Joyce stirs up in this pot of juicy political "incorrectness" is at first a bit shocking, but then for the audience today in America, refreshing to see how she dissects on the screen equally the pretensions of cultural diversity, gay/lesbian life styles, Jews, the war in Iraq, and all varieties of sex, in a role that Evan Rachel Woods dominates on the screen in PRETTY PERSUASION. The cast, especially James Woods, is equally up to what Kimberly dishes out, and the dialog, crisp and sharp, keeps the film on a roll with always a surprising "bon mot" thrown in when unexpected. Woods is so true as a seedy, cynical Beverly Hills pervert with absolutely no care in the world for anything other than himself. The scenes with he and Evan Rachel Wood are nasty, priceless and so representative of the false world of celebrity hood in America today. Act Three is so powerful in revealing the deception in the court room and how it impacts the lives of others. But what is so amazing in the film is how Kimberly Joyce remains true to her determination to ensure that her best friend is brought down to her level in the eyes of her ex boyfriend and classmates no matter what the consequences. PRETTY PERSUASION is profane, shocking and thought provoking in delivering a film that shows exactly the evils of wanting to succeed no matter what the consequences. It is a powerful film.