Sleaze Pizza
One of the film festival hits of 2017, described as an “intensely felt palimpsest of joy and despair” conveying the “infectious joy” of summer [1] and finding “magic in the mundane” [2], was Sean Baker’s The Florida Project . I watched it with the intention of posting a review, but found it so depressing and upsetting that I abandoned my plan for a write-up. As with Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), one of The Florida Project ’s selling points is its shocking depiction of unchaperoned children in inappropriate situations. Six-year-old actress Brooklynn Prince stars as Moonee, a foulmouthed, mischievous girl who stays at a sleazy Kissimmee motel with her semi-homeless stripper/hooker mother. Moonee’s imitation of the adults in her life finds her, for instance, calling another little girl a “stupid thot” or twerking for her mother’s amusement: “Oh, wow, you got some twerk skills, girl.” “Now watch me shake my booty,” Moonee sings, directing her posterior toward the camera. Writer-directo...