Word: loing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Manny (Scarlett Johansson) is a wise and watchful child of 11. Lo (Aleksa Palladino) is a scared and angry young woman of 16. Orphaned sisters escaping foster care, they have hit the road in their mom's old car, subsisting on junk food but sheltering luxuriously, first in the model homes of newly built subdivisions, then in a vacant ski chalet...
There's a good reason for Lo's emotional volatility; she's profoundly pregnant. There's also a bad reason for it; she's doing her best to deny--or at least minimize--her highly inconvenient condition. It is more than Manny, patient and practical as she is, can cope with. What these kids need is a surrogate mom. So they decide to kidnap...
Manny and Lo carries a huge potential for sentiment. These are, after all, three lost and lonely souls, and the possibility of blubbering breakdowns and bondings hovers constantly over the movie. But its young writer-director, Lisa Krueger, making her first feature, will have none of that. Her compassion is as unforced as the comedy that is also implicit in the creation of this curious menage. She has a capacity that far more experienced--or should one say more wearily knowing?--filmmakers lack: she trusts her tale, whatever its improbabilities; she also trusts her characters to find their...
Separate from the story, Krueger's film technique movingly captures the tenuous string of moments that Manny and Lo enjoy on the run: hands under running water, ants scurrying like the two children...
...enjoy the snapshot we get of the itinerant young women's lives, precisely because it's so expressive in and of itself. But when Krueger draws out the story, it's everything Johansson and Palladino can do to continue carrying their thorough portrayals without becoming grating. "Manny and Lo" belongs to the ranks of movies that offer more pleasure in the moment's fantasy, in the little package of an idea, than in its fully realized execution...