Palo Alto (2013) Reviews

• Teddy and April need more screen time together

  SnoopyStyle2015-03-29

  April (Emma Roberts) is a sweet girl with a crush on her soccer coach Mr. B (James Franco). He's a single dad and she babysits his kid sometimes. She also likes Teddy. They flirt at a party but end up with different people. He's drunk and high, gets a blow job from Emily, hit-and-runs another car, gets caught and is sentenced to 12 months probation community service. Teddy's friend Fred is a talkative jerk. Fred hooks up with Emily and enables Teddy's destructive behavior. April starts a relationship with Mr. B which isolates her from her friends Chrissy and Shauna. It's a rambling teenage high school romance. Emma Roberts is so tiny that she can still pass for a teenager. She's quite good in this role. Franco is flirting with super creepy. Jack Kilmer is a slacker teen. He should have the acting gene considering who his parents are. There is an immaturity in his acting especially compared to Emma Roberts. April and Teddy are kept apart for almost the entire movie. They need screen time together to develop more chemistry. The style gives a dreamy suggestive feel. However it's disjointed with April and Teddy basically in their own separate movie.

• A film without a plot

  Gordon-112014-09-04

  This film is about several suburban teenagers who live hedonistic lifestyles, and slowly their lives spirals out of control. "Palo Alto" shows the teenagers getting up to all kinds of trouble, but there is not really a focused plot. We get shown various events that happen to various individuals, but it is all superficial and we don't get to see any real meanings behind their actions. The plot meanders but never seems to get anywhere, with no central message to get across. I thought it was as if I watched a bunch of events happening, and that was it. It did not leave me feeling satisfied, touched or entertained. In fact, I felt a little bored by it.

• A film of essences and details rather than long term significance

  StevePulaski2014-11-07

  Gia Coppola's Palo Alto feels like a film of Larry Clark's set in a wealthier neighborhood that wants to show that the kind of crime and moral vacuousness that exist in certain impoverished, but the issue at hand is that the film doesn't seem to want to fully commit. While by no means mediocre or not worth seeing, Palo Alto finds itself in the quandary of not always finding a clear balance between its subjects, cycling back and forth, optimistically trying to devote equal time to each characters, but sort of getting lost in a sea of transitions. Even the ending, when it should be finding a way to tie these stories together, it only seems to try to rush and wrap them up in a clean manner without giving us much in the way of connective tissue. Yet, with that being Palo Alto's biggest issue, I think I can go on happily. The film finds a new concept to explore other than teenage nihilism and debauchery, but the idea that just because teenagers or youths reside in a wealthy community doesn't mean they have lives as vividly-planned out as some may assume. Wealth doesn't equal direction, or even morality, is what I took from the film, and just because the idea of money at ones disposal is instilled at a young age, a clear pathway to success isn't. To build off of the famous saying "the grass isn't always greener on the other side," the grass explored in Palo Alto is the kind hyped to be beautiful because of new lawn-care application but winds up showing a few dry patches and weeds. The film follows a gaggle of characters living in the wealthy, upper class community of Palo Alto, California, and centers on the day-to- day lives of listless and directionless high school kids. One of the characters we find is April (Emma Roberts), a shy virgin, who finds herself torn between her flirtatious soccer coach Mr. B (James Franco) and a deceptively deep stoner named Teddy (Jack Kilmer). Another soul is Emily (Zoe Levin), a sexually promiscuous girl of the same age, who has sex with both Teddy and his close friend Fred (Nat Wolff), an unpredictable time-bomb of a teenager. The film follows April's relationship with the two key men in her life along with Fred's descent into complete chaos and madness, as well as following numerous high school parties around the neighborhood. The directress at hand, Gia Coppola, another member of the Coppola dynasty headlined by patriarch Francis Ford, actually shares a lot of the thematic similarities as her filmmaker aunt, Sofia Coppola. Sofia, for years, has made films with the overarching theme of wealth, fame, and alienation, focusing on characters, predominately female, growing up in extremely well-off parts of the world but having unfulfilled tendencies that money cannot buy. This is arguably related to her father being one of the most famous and renowned directors of his time, and a family that found ways to make news in Hollywood, one of the most known cities in the world. This kind of ubiquity and outside hunger for the next big thing from the family like prompted Sofia to frequently feel alone, which lead to films like Somewhere, Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring, and Lost in Translation, all of which about an outsider's (or outsiders) desire to fit into society. Gia feels like she's elaborating on this idea by focusing on several teenagers, already tumultuous characters, bombarded by hormones and stimuli they have no idea how to respond to or control, and looking for the basic routes of human gratification through alcohol, sex, or meaningless shindigs. But what occurs when the buzz wears off, the clothes are put back on, and the parties die or are raided? In Palo Alto, many conversations between teenagers and their peers occur as, at the end of the day, a teen's companions are those that can resonate with them the most because of circumstantial similarities. Such is explored to considerable effect in the film, as characters ramble and converse quite frequently, discussing everything from trivial sexual tendencies of people to the random stupidity teenagers often debate over. While Palo Alto may be messy and often scattershot in its ideas and pacing, it definitely portrays its characters effectively, often devoting time to the inane questions teenagers ask each other and their basic desires for reassurances and empathy. Because these kids come from wealthy areas but have no direction by their parents, one can perhaps call this an outlaw story in suburbia, as these kids are not gridlocked, or even partly- committed, to any particular future, leaving them about as wayward as the cowboy on the trail. Palo Alto is a film of essences and details rather than long term significance, but such is the teenage way. One will likely remember certain features and events of the film, but find difficultly in defining a theme or an overarching idea grandiose enough to justify itself in a larger sense of time. I applaud it for its portrayal of a demographic I never tire of seeing on screen, and for not only including but emphasizing the random questions teenagers find themselves asking each other ("what would you do if you got in a drunk driving accident?") and their own moronic tendencies, like mixing tequila and vodka because it felt good in the moment. Starring: Emma Roberts, James Franco, Jack Kilmer, Nat Wolff, and Zoe Levin. Directed by: Gia Coppola.

• "Palo Alto"--Typically "Shallow Alto"?

  diana-y-paul2014-06-06

  I really, really wanted to like this movie, filmed on the street where we lived for almost twenty years. I gave it every hall pass I could, especially since I think James Franco is a gifted actor, writer and artist. Still, this is not a movie worth seeing. The narrative focuses on shy, bored April (Emma Roberts), who comes from a family in which her stepfather (Val Kilmer), appears to be a stoner although there is no backstory whatsoever on her connection to her stepfather nor her feelings towards him. She gets involved in a sexual relationship with her soccer coach Mr. B (a smarmy and predatory character played by James Franco) when she babysits for his son. Her classmate Teddy (Jack Kilmer, in a charming performance) has a strong attraction to April but has no ability to express his feelings for her and struggles to get her attention, but mostly fails miserably. The city of Palo Alto is presented as one high school party of drugs, sex, and alcohol after another. But the story goes nowhere. No inciting incident to pull the viewer in. Just one party after another, and one teenage tantrum after another. "Palo Alto" bounces from character to character, in a "coming of age" story that is an epic failure. What doesn't fit is the friendship between Teddy and his seriously disturbed friend, Fred, someone he hangs out with just because he needs a friend and Fred is just there. So far, believable and sympathetic to a point: two teenagers hanging out together because they have few other options. High school is often painful and disappointing. So is this movie. Without Coppola and Franco, I wonder if this film would have been financed, let alone filmed! ["Palo Alto" is currently in theaters under limited distribution. Another, lesser known film with the same title was produced in 2007.]

• Vanity, money and marketing

  FrostyChud2014-07-01

  Is this a music video? A sneaker commercial? No, it's a poignant drama about the pain, angst, and heartbreaking beauty of the teenage years! The writer/director is Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter. The male lead is Val Kilmer's son. The female lead is Julia Roberts' niece. Keep it in the family, guys! As you might expect given the cast, PALO ALTO is an exercise in vanity, more fashion propaganda than narrative. Rather than using the camera to go beyond the narcissism of her characters, Coppola uses it to shore it up. On the level of explicit content the film is a perfectly honorable drama about teenage life, but on the level of diegetic form the film is a refusal of the depth constitutive of drama in favor of surfaces. Now, I've read my Hegel. I know that form and content determine each other mutually. These young punks are just too cool. Their clothes, poses, attitudes, and thoughts have no substance beyond this contentless coolness and as such they constitute an active refusal of subjectivity proper. Not only does Coppola leave their posturing untouched, she validates it. These boring and unfree adolescents wander around under the gaze of a director who is so seduced by the spectacle of raw teenage authenticity that she cannot bring herself to help them by offering them access to a NO that might liberate them a little. In this she is a perfect dupe for our corrupt consumerist culture which substitutes objects and postures for the emancipatory potential of Logos and subjectivity. Some concrete examples: April sitting in her locker is a detail worthy of the castrated twee peddler Wes Anderson. The scene in the skate park towards the end..."if you thought 17-year-olds were cool, wait until you see how raw and real and cool 14-year-olds are!" Every character is desperately in need of some intervention from without, some access to something beyond the stifling, repressive world of appearances and "fun", and Coppola refuses to give it to them, because to do so would extract them from the authentic-y angst that makes these teens so raw and cool. Of course, the film was made when Coppola was only twenty-five years old. This is far too young to be given this kind of creative control. Like her aunt, Coppola has nothing to say. All she knows how to do is project her own life onto the screen. There is no authentic artistic vision here, just vanity turbo-charged by the absurd sums of money these people have access to. At the end of the credits, there is a "The director would like to thank..." section in which she shouts out every cool brand, band, actor and director that inspired her. What kind of monster is inspired by a brand? The list is super long and betrays the nature of the universe in which Gia Coppola lives. It is the world of money and marketing...nothing more.