Wordiezett So much average

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

lasttimeisaw Todd Solondz's fifth feature, a divisive drama-comedy even among his acolytes, PALINDROMES makes great play of an outré gimmick, its protagonist, a 13-year-old girl Aviva is played by eight different actors in its chronicling chapters (8 chapters plus a coda rehashes the same procedure in Aviva's broody attempt), they are vary in appearance, age, race, even sex (including one familiar face, Jennifer Jason Leigh, superbly cooing to capture a child's mannerism), fairly predates I'M NOT THERE. (2007), from another Todd, incontrovertibly much more prestigious, Mr. Haynes. Yes, Aviva, her name is a palindrome, which is recently implemented in Denis Villeneuve's ARRIVAL (2016) to under-gird the ethereal mystery of predestination, yet in Solondz's methodology, palindromes are emblems of human nature, which is explicitly rounded out by the acrimonious speech of Mark Wiener (Faber) near the ending, a character stems from Solondz's breakthrough WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1995), here an alleged pedophile shunned by everyone else but Aviva - we perpetually run back to the same pattern in our individual trajectory and remain more- or-less the same person, that is palindrome, a sociological pathology nestled everywhere. The story unflinchingly tackles the thorny subjects of baby fever, teen sex, abortion-and-its-risk, child abuse, religious fanatics and pedophile, sometimes feels a tad over-stretching to skewer all these into one feature length, and how on earth could we endorse an opinionated pre-teen who is possessed with the idea of becoming a mother, with some part of the world is still endemic with harrowing child-bride horrors? Nor can we lay the complete blame on her helicopter mom Joyce Victor (Barkin), as self-serving and inconsiderate as she is, when a girl is at that delicate age, honestly, moms always know the best. Ingenious as the narrative device is, spoon-feeds us with the universality of the identity of Aviva, each chapter can be regarded as a vignette holds its own wholeness, interleaved with an idyll interlude when Aviva is played by a boy (Denton) roaming in the countryside. The meat of the story is the chapter where Aviva is portrayed by a plus-size adult black woman (Wilkins), an elephantine presence where a 13-year-old girl dwells inside, this agency of discrepancy imbues a perturbing vibe during Aviva's sojourn with the counter-intuitively insidious foster family headed by God- botherers Mama Sunshine (Monk) and Bo Sunshine (Bobbie). And in the ensuring sequences where Aviva hitchhiking with a stocky middle-aged lorry-driver-turns-hit-man Bob (Guirgis), the inappropriately one-sided tenderness is spiked with a pungent scent of reactive self- consciousness from another side, one might get bemused in Solondz's straddling stance about the semi-romantic-semi-perverse rapport (though we firmly grasp his take on pro-choice/pro-life option) until the violence bursts out, follows by a foregone conclusion and rounds off Aviva's daring adventure. Contentious in its self-inflicted archness, PALINDROMES is hard to decipher after its bold but sketchy presentation of a nexus of problems beset in America, like a nihilistic anecdote sums up to this: everything sucks, people are doomed and our world rotates in a rut, ad nauseam, especially under today's circumstances, we don't need to watch a movie to get a glimpse of this.

ultimt3 I rarely comment on movies on IMDb but there are a few that I remember for all the wrong reasons. When I see they have a really high star rating I feel compelled to weigh in. I usually agree with IMDb's assessment (with the exception of "bad" horror films which I enjoy). The movie starts out with an interesting premise but it is a bit gratuitous and I would say a bit exploitative of the 13 year old character in this movie. It almost struck me as a film that was written by a pedophile. This movie was depressing and depicted a heck of a lot of depravity and even pedophilia. I love film noir, love gritty grindhouse films and stuff like that. This is VERY different from that. I got itchy watching it and as a parent, I was revolted with the sexual depiction of the young girl in this. I understand reality in films but this was just going too far to be enjoyable in my opinion. I was not entertained.

random_avenger Aviva is a young girl whose long-time dream is to have a baby and she soon gets pregnant to a family friend Judah (Robert Agri). Her parents (Ellen Barkin and Richard Masur) love her but don't approve of her becoming a mother at such young age and pressure her to have an abortion. Afterwards she runs away from home and goes through various experiences, including meeting a pedophilic trucker (Stephen Adly Guirgis) and an overwhelmingly Christian family for disabled children led by Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk) whose husband has his own darker agenda. Throughout the story Aviva's dream of having a baby is what keeps her going, but can it really happen or is her journey just empty wading in seas of filth?The special thing about Palindromes is that the actress of Aviva keeps changing throughout the film: there are ten very different actors portraying her in different phases of the story. The unconventional approach to her character may be explained by a speech delivered by an accused child molester (Matthew Faber) near the end of the film: we will always stay the same no matter how our appearance changes during our life. Of the many actresses portraying Aviva the most memorable is surely Sharon Wilkins, an obese black woman who may initially strike the audience as a grotesque caricature of what Aviva has become, but soon wins the affections to her side with her fearful and insecure but low-key performance. Debra Monk and Matthew Faber also deserve praise for capturing the essence of their respective characters.As expected from a Solondz project, the film deals with heavy and depressing themes like murder, pedophilia and hypocrisy. Even so, I think Palindromes is less forlorn than, say, Storytelling (Solondz's previous movie from 2001). Although we know more than Aviva from early on, at least we don't have to witness her having her dreams thoroughly crushed, which softens the effect a bit. Palindromes may not be as wholesome an experience as Happiness (1998), but for those who enjoy Solondz's bleak, even disgusting style, it will deliver an enjoyable if pessimistic look into people's desire to have someone to love unconditionally.

tedg I admit, I liked the idea of this. The story is completely a waste for me, even though we all like to poke cheap fun at sanctimonious fundamentalists as the ironic representative of a flawed designer.What's at the core here is the device of portraying our 13 year old girl by a variety of beings. I liked it when I saw it elsewhere, especially the implicit merger of being in the work of Garcia. Is it worth it for this actorly circumlocution alone? Probably yes, because of the way it is handled. The character, like all real ones, is a blur, a manifold being. We never see people anyway, only our models of them. So to break the wall and see many models is a sort of intimacy. Its not a gimmick, but a device that works.And that's why we come. For something that goes deeper.I wish, though, that Solandz was a bit deeper as a person. Medem goes deeper on this ambiguous identity thing. Several Tilda Swinton projects like "Conceiving Ada" or "Female Perversions" go deeper into the knots of birth urge. Like so many other theatrical experiments, one wishes the technician would meet and marry the emotional explorer. Not work with, not have a relationship with, but marry and coabsorb. Embodiment of futures.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.