Floria Sigismondi
8 connections found
Filmography
View:
Connections, in both directions
The sidewalk is on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, the blood is menstrual – perhaps a nod to Brian De Palma’s crypto-feminist horror movie Carrie.
Not since Brian De Palma's "Carrie" do I recall a movie about teenage girls starting with such an overt depiction of the outset of puberty.
Almost Famous (2000)
Directed by Cameron Crowe
influenced The Runaways (2010)
Characters Plot Themes
Cherie serves as your guide into this raucous other-world, the distaff version of Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous—surprised, sullied, and eventually educated.
Based on Currie's book and told from her point of view, "The Runaways" is "Almost Famous" from the band's perspective, and with Fanning's Currie walking in the platform shoes of that film's groupie, Penny Lane.
Still, more than any movie since "Almost Famous," "The Runaways" captures the intoxicating power of rock-and-roll music to transform young lives — to lift teenage nobodies up into the clouds of stardom (and then, more often than not, dump them back down into the real world they had dreamed of escaping).
Such films as The Doors, Ray, Sid and Nancy, Walk the Line, and What's Love Got to Do With It share the hazy spotlight with films existing on the perimeter, like Almost Famous and last year's Taking Woodstock.
Fanning, whose wide-eyed, sun-kissed innocence recalls Kate Hudson's breakout performance in "Almost Famous," teeters as if on Currie's own vertiginous platform heels between little girl and grown-up, in a role that often demands seeing Currie as both simultaneously.
While Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical love song to the period, Almost Famous, waxes poetic on the music and the muse from a journalist/fan’s perspective, The Runaways plays as fast and loose with the band’s biography as it does the camera.
The film gets better as it goes along; in terms of pure giggle-inducing brio, it recalls Amy Heckerling’s Valley Girl comedy Clueless, an update of a classic (Jane Austen’s Emma) that is now a classic in its own right.
The sensibility toward teenage interests and idiosyncrasies matches Richard Linklater’s ode, Dazed and Confused, but as the band careens toward fame, Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine (vaguely biographing David Bowie) becomes the inspiration—an enraged Jett smashing a bottle and pounding the window of the studio control room.
The film gets better as it goes along; in terms of pure giggle-inducing brio, it recalls Amy Heckerling’s Valley Girl comedy Clueless, an update of a classic (Jane Austen’s Emma) that is now a classic in its own right.
Think Kristen Stewart (as Joan Jett!) and Dakota Fanning (as Cherie Currie!) slithering their way through 2010’s sleazy and ludicrous The Runaways, a very specific kind of wonderful.
Take Floria Sigismondi’s excellent, underrated The Runaways (2010), which folded together several historical details but got right to the emotional essence of its characters, or F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton (2015), where the parade of rock biopic clichés felt triumphant, even subversive, when applied to subjects once considered dangerous to the cultural status quo.
Taking her visual cues from Oliver Stone’s The Doors as well as Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, Sigismondi gives the movie a nervous energy that fits both the time period and the characters’ state of mind.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)
Directed by Marielle Heller
influenced by The Runaways (2010)
Themes
(Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways attempted this edgy, period-blood-spotted, ’70s girl-power movie but didn’t pull it off.)