Little Birds (2011)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Fantastic!

The acting in this movie is really good.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Little Birds (2011)A harrowing movie, a slice of very believable and scary life for two fifteen year olds looking to escape their awkward or dysfunctional families. What they get into, moving from the Salton Sea to L.A. in a stolen truck, is a nightmare for any parent. Yet for the girls there is a mixture of adventure and discomfort.All of this depends a lot on a great ensemble cast, which is pretty much here. The two girls are terrific--I had just seen Juno Temple in another excellent indie and sought this out. The boys they run into and hook up with are a little wild at first (and then more wild later) and weave into the story with surprising ease.This is a low budget movie but it makes the most of a series of scenes inside and out that keep it from feeling constrained. The Salton Sea parts are both beautiful an so impoverished they are sad. When the edge of L.A. comes in it's rougher and yet filled with energy. The girls are divided on how the city works on them. Temple's character is exudes confidence, and sometimes has it, too, and so she gets in deeper. The other girl, played by Kay Panabaker, is more morally solid and yet more scared, and she plays a perfect counterbalance to her friend.Writer and director Elgin James is just starting out here (that's part of what Indie films are all about) and the movie might not soar or show particular originality, but it does hold up pretty well in normal dramatic terms. The sets are very real--gritty and rough, for sure--and the acting matches. It's quite well shot, too, if nothing special is going on--give the editors some of the credit for keeping it fluid.You wonder by the end what the larger point might be, beyond a very distracting entertainment. There might be a little (a little) sense of "there's no place like home" at work. And there's a kind of buddy movie at work--the two girls being the pals on the road. Mostly it's about how tough some teens have it, and how they want to find ways to survive that surprise their parents (usually singular, parent). It's also a tale of how kids want a lot from everyone and everything--life seems so fertile and large--and how they know so little about how to get it.So, with vulnerability on their sleeves, these girls are a little bit of all of us. No, we aren't all so fully stupid or careless, but maybe in small ways we are all the same.

Movies like this force you to learn geography. We gather it is set near the Salton Sea, but what is "the Salton Sea?" Well it turns out the Salton Sea is a California State Recreation area, about a 3-hour drive southeast of Los Angeles. The lake's salinity, about 44 g/L, is greater than that of the waters of the Pacific Ocean. From the website: "One of the world's largest inland seas and lowest spots on earth at -227 below sea level, Salton Sea was created in 1905 when high spring flooding on the Colorado River crashed the canal gates leading into the developing Imperial Valley. For the next 18 months the entire volume of the Colorado River rushed downward into the Salton Trough. By the time engineers were finally able to stop the breaching water in 1907, the Salton Sea had been born at 45 miles long and 20 miles wide – equaling about 130 miles of shoreline. " So that's where two teenage friends live, Juno Temple (21 during filming) as Lily Hobart and Kay Panabaker (20 during filming) as Alison Hoffman. Both were playing girls of about 15 or 16, in this run-down, dry, ugly place. Plus they each had lost parents and lived without the trappings of normal teenagers.Lily and Alison couldn't be more different. Lily was sassy, rebellious, and always looking to the side for a different experience. Like standing on the tracks to see how close the approaching train could get before she jumped off. Alison was more serious, polite, and followed normal conventions.Their lives changed when one day they came upon several boys using an empty, abandoned swimming pool as a skateboard park, remarking "You could never find a place like this in Los Angeles." One of the boys, who seemed nice, gave Lily his phone number, just in case she ever made it to Los Angeles.They did make it there, Lily who couldn't drive talked Alison into "borrowing" a pickup truck of an adult friend, but they found that the boys didn't really have a home there, they were squatting in an abandoned motel. And, they were not so nice, dragging the two girls into their schemes.This isn't a pretty movie, but it shows what can happen when kids throw caution to the wind and get mixed up with the wrong people.SPOILERS: The boys cooked up a scheme, they would use Lily as "bait", advertising her online and then when she brought men into the secluded space mug and rob them. The first one worked, but the second one didn't, a fight broke out, the man angry decided to get what he came for and began to rape Lily. Then a shot rang out, as the camera slowly pans we see Alison, who had left but came back for her friend. As the movie ends they are back home, at the Salton Sea, their lives changed.

this movie was unique in several ways which was very refreshing. sure, it may have had the whole "small town teenage girl dying for an escape" plot cliché, but it was made into something very different and raw from what you would normally see. the plot (climax especially) was unlike what you would see in most movies. the characters were extremely genuine. the relationship between Lily (Juno Temple) and Alison (Kay Panabaker) was extremely touching and a little bit depressing how much Alison relied on Lily. the dynamic between the two was very authentic and usually what you would observe between any two close, young female friends. overall, the writer and director captured the essence of this movie perfectly, leaving you with wandering thoughts at the end. if you're open minded and looking for a movie with a different sort of perspective, i highly recommend Little Birds.

This movie is by first time filmmaker Elgin James who, developed it in a Sundance Workshop and it was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival which isn't a slam dunk for films that come up this way. James who wrote and directed movie comes from the streets of Boston and he chose to convey his gritty experiences through the characters of two teenage girls who come from the poverty stricken coastal town of Salton Sea in California and end up with some older boys on the streets of a grimy section of Los Angeles. The strength of the film is the insight and development of these two young girls Allison Huffman (Kay Panabaker) and Lily Hobart (Juno Temple) who are portrayed magnificently. Their attachment, dependency on each other and yet their differences unfold before us as they try to escape their environment. The storyline creates tension and anxiety. The three older boys with whom these girls connect David (Chris Coy), Louis (Carolos Pena) and John (Kyle Gallner) are as real as they can be and sadly operate just as you would expect them to. Compared to these five young people, the peripheral characters are somewhat an enigma to us as their back stories are thin and vague. They do seem authentic and there are excellent performances by Leslie Mann, Kate Bosworth, Neil McDonough and particularly by JR Bourne who does a captivating dramatic role at the conclusion of the movie. Although the little birds of this story had more reason to fly the coop than the daughters of many who are reading this now, we all know that when any teenager spreads her wings, anything can happen. This movie will be released in September and we will be rooting for it to fly. (2011)