Synopsis
Being outlaws was rougher than they thought
Cozy, a dissatisfied housewife, meets Lee at a bar. A drink turns into a home break-in, and a gunshot sends them on the run together, thinking they've committed murder.
River of Grass
1994 Directed by Kelly Reichardt
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🎵 It feeeels like a fiiiirst film!
It feeeels like a very first film!!!(Still good though!)
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I liked that it is set in Florida. I am from Florida. So, fun to watch and think, “that’s where I’m from.”
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“too much daydreaming left me blue”
feels a little like kelly reichardt‘s pulp fiction moment for better or worse, but i’m glad her films only grew softer and more thoughtful later on. she truly is a quintessential american director
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the scene where the anti-heroes are passing a joint back and forth with their dirty feet is a good capsule of the funny/sad/grimy/romantic/weird balancing act this is doing, and i don't know how else to put it in words
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River of Grass is presented as a quasi-first person tale, narrated by an unreliable voiceover. detailing an adventure not always duplicated on the screen. Though we don't know it at first, the disconnect begins immediately, when Cozy (Lisa Donaldson) tells us that the man with whom she will run away (Larry Fessenden as Lee Ray Harold) is just as lonely as she, spinning connective tissue between the two and their experiences before we've even met Lee.
Over the course of the film, however, we see almost no connection between Cozy and Lee. They get along, share space and, when necessary, beds, but they're fully clothed when they do and, when they're sober, there isn't a thing that draws them together,…
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"if we weren't killers we weren't anything."
florida dirtbag Badlands. love stories about people constantly messing up and seeking meaning and worth despite their material circumstances that try to deny them those things but kinda felt more like i was observing these characters rather than really feeling their experiences which kinda mutes the ending. but good location work and sense of ennui that develops through the images. also always no matter what enjoy watching criminals who are very bad at being criminals; loved the scene where the dude hesitates to pull his gun out and rob the convenience store and while he hesitates another dude runs in and robs it first lol. solid debut.
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Whoa, where did this Kelly Reichardt come from? Before we've hit the three-minute mark we've seen zippy Truffaut-style still photo montages, campy, splattery murder scenes recalling John Waters, a bit of nudity and what On the Hour referred to as the corrupting influence of bebop jazz. I imagine at the time this was referred to as Tarantino-esque - it was released in the same year as Pulp Fiction - though I'm increasingly coming to think early Tarantino was just the most complete expression of a set of proudly trashy, transgressive aesthetic and narrative concerns that so many of his generation were into. If he hadn't existed, maybe his position in popular culture would have been taken by Gregg Araki, or…
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You don't even have to read anything about this film to immediately recognize it as a directorial debut. Kelly Reichardt, now an established filmmaker and a widely recognized voice of American indie cinema, debuted her career with a small film about a pair of runaways on their journey through Florida.
She undoubtedly drew inspiration from Terrence Malick's Badlands, which comes as no surprise considering that Malick seems to have had some major influences on the calmly poetic, visually oriented imagery of Reichardt's films. River of Grass is a rebellious, minimalist work from an already promising filmmaker that often gets buried beneath the more firmly determined works of her later career.
Following her feature debut, Reichardt struggled to finance another full-length…
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“She's no kid.”
Today, we had a River of Grass watch party. I'm hosting one each Monday at 4 PM PST if you're interested to join us in the future.
I loved the docu-style and the jazz soundtrack. Reading director Kelly Reichardt's bio on IMDb, I could see how much of herself she put into this movie. Her father was a police officer and she grew up in South Florida; the rest is made up from her dreams and imagination.
In terms of plot, it isn't as intricate as other criminals on the run movies, but I feel it doesn't need to be. It is its own thing. There were still several shocking moments throughout the film, even despite its…
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if you don't love kelly reichardt at her river of grass then you don't deserve her at her first cow
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River of Grass deserves to be mentioned alongside those unique and remarkably auspicious debut features that sprung onto the American independent scene in the early to mid-nineties. A list that includes, but is not limited to, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket, Kevin Smith's Clerks, Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven and Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight.
Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt (b. 1964), the film is an astutely rendered neo-noir that partakes in the genre's conventions in order to cunningly subvert them. However, unlike a number of other such films, it feels like the genuine, thoughtfully fleshed out article rather than another tired, self-conscious exercise. Reichardt, who was born and raised in Miami, has suitably set her effort…
