Memorable, crazy movie

Crappy film

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The first time I watched this movie a couple of years ago, I wasn't too impressed with it. I've seen it several more times since and it's not a bad movie; its more than watchable, but left more questions than answers in the end.I'll leave the cinematography reviews to others who know more about that subject.**** SPOILER ALERT **** In the end, my feelings at the end of this movie were mixed. Now I love a movie with an ending that leaves the viewer to ponder the whats and whys of a character or their actions.However, this movie isn't a suspense so these questions, I feel, are pretty crucial to the plot.The first and biggest questions to me is: WHY oh why do the girls signal for the boys across the street to come over, say they are going for a car ride and end up all killing themselves either before or while the boys are waiting for them to get ready. What is the point in that??? It's not like the boys found their bodies and alerted anyone. They ran away.Another question is the fact that Lux is having sex with multiple men and boys on the roof of her house. Why the roof? Wouldn't her parents hear something on the roof and possibly inspect what it could be? Why not in the guy's car down the street or in the basement or, well, anywhere but the roof?I realize this is taken from the novel (that I haven't read), but surely I can't be the only one with these questions. There are others but I'll leave it at that.

Sofia Coppolas debut is my absolute favorite of all of her movies. Virgin Suicides has a unique look and is totally visual poetry with charming and hauntingly beautiful and melancholic scenes. The stunning photography, the slow paced style of telling the story accompanied with the wonderful soundtrack makes this movie an absolute winner. If you are new to Coppola watch her debut and enter the world of sadness, happiness, emptiness and love. Ed Lachman captured that wonderful light and Coppola really did something wonderful with the book which the movie is based on. This is a highly recommended movie everyone should see at least once and if you catch it screening in a theater near you on 35mm go and watch it, I was lucky to do it and it was wonderful!

I expected "The Virgin Suicides" to be a heart-wrenching study of five repressed and abused girls who commit suicide. Instead, I got a movie that was... empty, more than anything.Right off the bat it is established that the five sisters of the Lisbon family, aged 13-17 have killed themselves. We hear this from the narrator, a boy who lives across the street from the sisters. His voice-over is retrospective, and it implies that many years have passed since the events of the movie. The movie covers roughly a year leading up to the suicides, and all of the events that transpire in that time (spoiler alert: not much happens)."Romeo and Juliet" is a tragedy. If you read or watch the play, you see the two main characters live their lives and you understand how they are led to suicide. In the play, all the characters are fleshed out and have clear motivations behind their actions. "The Virgin Suicides" is like Romeo and Juliet told from the perspective of Balthasar, Romeo's servant. We don't get the whole picture. In fact, we don't really get any picture at all. All of the sudden, the teenage kids are dead, and we don't know why.Why did the girls do it? The parents don't seem to be abusive. A little strict, sure, but no reason to kill oneself. We get quick glimpses into the mother's supposed cruelty, but she's really not that bad- as far as the viewer can see. The most memorable line in the movie comes from the youngest sister, when she goes to therapy. The doctor asks her why she has attempted suicide, saying he sees no great struggle in her life. The girl responds by saying "clearly doctor, you've never been a teenage girl." This is the closest thing we get to a reason that these girls kill themselves, and it's pretty flimsy and uncompelling.There's nothing wrong with this movie technically. The acting is fine, the writing is good, and the sets look like they are from the 1970s. The soundtrack is pretty good, and I'd say that Coppola has a nice directing style in the movie.There isn't enough substance in this movie for me to recommend it. The credits rolled and I felt like I had missed the whole thing.

Set in 1974, the story centres around a group of teenage boys and their fascination with five mysterious sisters known as the Lisbon girls in their final days.The story begins with the attempted, and then successful, suicide of the youngest Lisbon, Cecilia who impales herself on a metal fence during a party that was intended to cheer her up after her first suicide attempt. The family are left devastated and while the four remaining sisters, Therese, Mary, Bonnie and Lux (played perfectly by Kirsten Dunst) don't outwardly display the same self-destructive tendencies Cecilia showed, it is clear that their strict upbringing by their passive father and overly religious mother is a source of discontentment for them; most notably Lux, the youngest and easily least content of the remaining girls.A glimmer of hope appears when Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the cocky high-school heartthrob falls in love with Lux, who ignores him at first, which makes him want her more. He asks her to the homecoming dance and her parents reluctantly agree but only if he can find dates for all of the sisters so that they can all go. There are, of course, no shortage of potential dates.The evening goes well until Lux misses curfew because she is having sex with Trip on the football field. He loses interest in Lux immediately afterwards and abandons her, leaving her to make her way home the next morning by herself, causing the girls' parents to put them all on total lock down. They are taken out of school and withdrawn from the world almost entirely.Feeling dreadful for the girls, the neighbourhood boys do what they can to help them feel connected to the world, such as playing song lyrics down the phone to each other and using flashing lights to communicate Morse code across the street.The lock down seems to send Lux over the edge as she starts having sex with random boys on the roof of the house, much to the boy's amusement.One evening the boys think their luck is in when the sisters invite them over after Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon are asleep, seemingly to go for a joyride or road trip. But when they arrive Lux appears to be in a melancholy mood. In reality, the sisters have each taken their life in a different way in a different room of the house and they just wanted the boys to witness it.I must admit that I went into this movie biased towards liking it as years before viewing I had the ear candy that is the soundtrack composed by French duo, 'Air' that compliments the movie's dreamy, surreal tone perfectly.No real reason or catalyst is ever given as to why the sisters feel that suicide is the only escape from their present reality and some feel that the movie glamourizes suicide (the movie is very beautiful), but I would argue that as the story is told through the eyes of a boy who idealises the girls, many years after the events of the movie took place, he is telling the story as he remembers it, not how things actually were.