Manny and Lo -- this is a slight indy film from 1996, most noted for a very young Scarlett Johansson at age 11 playing one of the title characters. It's not a bad chick flick by any means. But there really isn't much "there" there.
The two title characters are orphans whose mother, an alcoholic, apparently died of a drug overdose, and they've run away from their foster homes and are roaming the countryside in their mother's old station wagon, living by stealing food and gasoline and avoiding the cops for fear that they might get sent back to their respective foster homes. That wouldn't bother Manny, played by Scarlett Johansson as a put-upon little sister who bears her older sister's jabs and occasional idiocies with a quiet dignity that doesn't affect her obvious adoration of her older sister. She is an odd girl who examines ants with a magnifying glass, uses a stopwatch to measure everything, and hypnotizes lizards, but her performance never goes over the top into unbelievability. The best performance here is by a fourteen-year-old Aleksa Palladino playing sixteen-year-old "Lo", a not-so-bright youngster whose capacity for self deception and false bravado hiding fear and desperation rings true of other young women I've encountered who've been in desperate situations. Mary Kay Place's performance as Elaine is excellent character work too, accurately capturing a brittle older woman whose hold on sanity is precarious. The problem is that these excellent character actors are placed into a slight and somewhat ludicrous plot that comes to a ridiculous denouement.
This penguin's rating: Three herrings out of five. Watch if you want to see three excellent character actors doing an excellent job of breathing life into some unique characters, or maybe if you're a random pedophile curious to see what the babe-a-licious Scarlett Johansson looked like when she was a little kid (she looked like a little kid, duh -- couldn't tell at that time that she'd turn out to be such a babe). Otherwise, pretty forgettable.
-- Badtux the Movie Penguin
A lot of people think we named our cats after this movie, seeing that they are Manni and Lola.
ReplyDeleteWe actually named them after the two main characters in the German classic Run Lola Run.