For a tongue-in-cheek and slyly insightful look at the conflict between innocence and desire, curiosity and taboo, bad taste and kitsch genius, I’d recommend Anna Biller’s Viva.
05/08/08 03:04 PM
Viva (2008)
63 %
Reviews Counted: 16 Fresh: 10 Rotten:6 Average Rating: 5.9/10
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 2 hrs
Runtime: 2 hrs
Theatrical Release: May 2, 2008 Limited
Synopsis:
VIVA is about a bored housewife in 1972 who gets sucked into the sexual revolution. Abandoned by her husband, Barbi is dragged into trouble by her girlfriend, who spouts women's lib as she gets Barbi to discard her bra and go out on the town. Barbi becomes a Red Riding Hood in a sea of wolves, and... [More]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Anna Biller, Jared Sanford, Bridget Brno, Chad England, Marcus DeAnda
Reviews
1 - 16 (sorted by date)
The movie pops with parodic joy--in the hoary double-entendres and presentational acting styles--and hotly lighted 35-millimeter cinematography that evokes lounge music album covers and Playboy ads.
05/08/08 01:51 PM
Top Critic Viva the film is as sly and knowing as Viva the character is endearingly oblivious.
05/08/08 01:25 PM
This film is such an outrageously colourful homage to 1970s sexploitation cinema that it's impossible not to enjoy, even with the over-the-top performances and rambling narrative.
05/03/08 02:06 AM
The campy early '70s is the goofy gift that keeps on giving in Viva, a mock soft-core sexploitation film that gets a lot right but forgets that less is often more, especially in plaid.
05/02/08 12:07 PM
Top Critic A startlingly pitch-perfect reproduction of the kind of gauzy sex movies from the 1960s and early 1970s that preceded the hard-core revolution.
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Comment
05/02/08 10:36 AM
Top Critic Completely devoid of cinematic wit, sensuality or even simple technique.
05/02/08 07:10 AM
The nastiest transgression committed by this anything-goes romp is its length.
05/01/08 11:35 PM
Biller's film is to the films of Radley Metzger and Russ Meyer what Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven was to Douglas Sirk, only perhaps a little bit cannier and a lot less dryly academic about its postmodern tweaks.
05/01/08 09:42 PM
Anna Biller's debut feature Viva consciously combines elements of all of the above, offering a painstaking recreation of the look and feel of campy retro sexploitation.
05/01/08 02:15 PM
Anna Biller’s pseudofeminist send-up of the sexploitation movies of the late ’60s and early ’70s remains as limp as the flaccid dongs at her film’s nudist sing-along.
04/30/08 01:12 PM
What's best about the production is how it faithfully conforms to the sensibilities of the Sixties' skin flick genre, except perhaps for adding an anachronistic dash of refreshing female empowerment to the mix.
04/30/08 09:25 AM
For fans of the work of Charles Busch and other like-minded spoofs only.
04/30/08 03:15 AM
Top Critic Faithful to those cult-adored obscurities in nearly every detail, including their soporific pace. Here, however, sly in-jokes come often enough to make said pacing funny in itself.
03/07/08 03:33 PM
Top Critic Its triumph is that of style -- gloriously and revoltingly tacky style -- over substance.
03/07/08 02:58 PM
Top Critic1 - 16 (sorted by date)
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