Deidra & Laney Rob a Train (2017)

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1. 

   gobberpooper

   A refreshing breath of comedy and very well done visual style.
   
   The other comment in here seems to be missing the point, and missing the entire modern wave of film and TV. It's supposed to be "cartoony". It's the new wave, one that I welcome a lot, called Magic Realism. Think Louie, or Atlanta, or SMILF, or Birdman, or Kingsman, or the newer seasons of Always Sunny. The idea is to take stream of consciousness as it exists in dreams, and meld it into real life. The point is to truly hone in not on how events exist in reality, but how we perceive and process them, and visualize that. It's the difference between a phone-camera picture of a night sky, and Monet's Starry Night.
   
   Think about when it's 6am, and suddenly there's construction outside your window. In traditional film, they'd show the person sleeping, show the construction happening outside, and then show the person waking up. Like in My Cousin Vinny when they get woken up by the late night train. In "Magic Realism", it shows the person sleeping, and then construction workers and bulldozers literally come crashing into the bedroom, and the person puts their pillow over their head and try to block it out, like in an episode of Louie. Is that what's actually happening? No. But anybody who's had to deal with jackhammers directly outside their room every morning for a stretch of time knows that that's exactly what it feels like.
   
   Deidra and Laney isn't quite that stark but it does follow that sort of visual movement, where it caricaturizes and exaggerates. Probably because it's a comedy. It's a really funny and easygoing movie. Also, TV has been better than film for the last 7-10 years (the fucking Breaking Bad prequel is orders of magnitude better than 95% of what Hollywood's putting out). This movie does have an element of high quality Youtube to it, but I think it's most certainly for the better. It somehow uses exaggeration to make a story that would be boring for 90 minutes into one that captivates you. 6 years 3 months ago
2. 

   Siskoid

   The Netflix original, Deidra & Laney Rob a Train, has some interesting directorial flourishes, but they are at odds with how remedially "TV" it all feels. It's the story of two teenage sisters who decide to rob the trains passing behind their house in order to pay for their mother's lawyer after she has a violent meltdown at work. What follows is what you might expect from a straight-to-video release aimed squarely at pre-teens (the one twist on that formula being that it condones theft). And like a lot of TV/video movies with that target audience, it doesn't know how the real world works. That's the real frustration here. The actors are fairly likable, the capes are well thought-out, the visuals occasionally inspired. But its take on school, and on the law, are strictly out of a cartoon. It's too bad. 6 years 4 months ago

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