The Florida Project (2017)

This enjoyable slice of low-life about the denizens of a shabby motel in Orlando, especially a six year old girl, her friends, her remarkably clueless mom, and the kind hotel manager, is languidly paced and getting Oscar buzz for Willem Dafoe as Bobby, the manager.

Dafoe (last blogged for A Most Wanted Man, he was born William but his high school friends in Wisconsin called him Willem), who usually plays scary roles, fully inhabits the guy who watches out for the unsupervised urchins on their summer break, as well as many living hand-to-mouth at his workplace. This LA Times article has all six critics predicting his Oscar nomination. The only other recognizable face is Caleb Landry Jones (he's been in X-Men: First Class, Get Out, and American Made, to name a few) in one scene as Bobby's son. Newcomers Brooklynn Prince as little Moonee, and Christopher Rivera and Valeria Cotto as her friends Scooty and Jancey keep it going with childlike ebullience that owes a lot, says director/co-writer Sean Baker, to the Little Rascals of 1930s America. Here are some videos if you have no idea who they were. Bria Vinaite, who plays the tattooed mom Halley, also has no acting experience. Baker literally picked her from her instagram page which has 52.8k followers. Yes, those are her own tattoos and piercings. Sandy Kane, AKA the Naked Cowgirl of Times Square, has a cameo as a sunbather in a funny scene.

Baker co-wrote the script with Chris Bergoch (they performed the same duties on Tangerine), drawing inspiration from people Bergoch saw en route to his mother's Orlando home. The Florida Project was an early name for Disney World.

The cinematography by Alexis Zabe (new to me) is a strong inducer of MPMS (motion-picture-motion-sickness). I pre-medicated and sat in the back row, but still had to look away from time to time. It's not as bad as Tangerine, which was shot entirely on iPhones, but in that ballpark. Here's the complete MPMS list. The last scene is shot on an iPhone, for reasons which will be obvious when you see it.

The movie opens with the song Celebration by Kool & the Gang and closes with an orchestral version of it by Lorne Balfe (most recently in these pages for scoring Dough). In between, there are dozens of songs, listed here.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are rhapsodic, averaging 95% and its audiences are a bit cooler at 77. You should probably see it.