With its copious nudity and zipless hedonism, Viva, though unduly long, is a crafty reminder of a time when the X rating was flaunted, not feared.
Comment
06/20/08
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Viva (2008)
53
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Reviews Counted:38
Fresh:20
Rotten:18
Average Rating:5.5/10
Consensus: Though it's lengthy and doesn't always walk the line between schlock and kitschy homage successfully, Viva's lovely visuals and knowing humor are undeniable.
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... [More]
Starring: Anna Biller, Jared Sanford, Bridget Brno, Chad England
Director: Anna Biller
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Reviews for Viva
It takes skill -- a certain sly, even perverse nimbleness of craft -- to make an homage to schlock movies that treats them as works of art. Viva, written and directed by its star, Anna Biller, could just about be the third featurette in Grindhouse.
05/19/08
Top CriticFor 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
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
Top CriticViva the film is as sly and knowing as Viva the character is endearingly oblivious.
05/08/08
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
Anna Biller set out to make a bad movie and succeeded.
05/02/08
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
A startlingly pitch-perfect reproduction of the kind of gauzy sex movies from the 1960s and early 1970s that preceded the hard-core revolution.
05/02/08
Completely devoid of cinematic wit, sensuality or even simple technique.
05/02/08
The nastiest transgression committed by this anything-goes romp is its length.
05/01/08
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
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
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
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
For fans of the work of Charles Busch and other like-minded spoofs only.
04/30/08
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
Its triumph is that of style -- gloriously and revoltingly tacky style -- over substance.
03/07/08
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