Reviewed by Byron Potau.\u00a0 Viewed at the Los Angeles International Film Festival<\/p>\n
Joshua Safdie\u2019s film, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, begins with a promising, well executed thievery of a woman\u2019s purse by our so called heroine, Eleanore (Eleanore Hendricks), a kind of air headed kleptomaniac.\u00a0 The act is perpetrated on an unsuspecting female who we immediately feel sympathy for.\u00a0 We expect that we will soon feel a similar sympathy for Eleanore, but that sympathy never comes.<\/p>\n
The film follows Eleanore as she robs unsuspecting people of anything she can get, kittens included, but shows no hint of remorse.\u00a0 She simply steals without a conscience, even stealing right in front of her victims with no fear of being caught as if the victims would not mind.\u00a0 The film goes nowhere, with a\u00a0 large chunk of the running time taken up by an extended learning to drive sequence wherein Eleanore has stolen a car and her friend Josh (Joshua Safdie) teaches her how to drive it, eventually taking him to Boston from New York.<\/p>\n
The camera work is excessively shaky, making the film looks as though it were shot entirely from across the street, with the exception of the learning to drive scene which is shot in backseat cam.\u00a0 This effectively displaces Eleanore from her surroundings, but can also be disorienting to the audience.\u00a0 The real fault of the film, however, is Eleanore.\u00a0 The character simply robs without feeling or remorse and characters this selfish and despicable at least need some charm which Eleanore is completely lacking rendering her a thoroughly unlikable character from start to finish.\u00a0 Reminiscent of Jerry Schatzberg films like Scarecrow and Panic in Needle Park, the film could have succeeded on the same level as these films if director Safdie had made Eleanore just a little bit likable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reviewed by Byron Potau.\u00a0 Viewed at the Los Angeles International Film Festival Joshua Safdie\u2019s film, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, begins with a promising, well executed thievery of a woman\u2019s purse by our so called heroine, Eleanore (Eleanore Hendricks), a kind of air headed kleptomaniac.\u00a0 The act is perpetrated on an unsuspecting female who we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-los-angeles-international-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}