The Virgin Suicides (2000)

Don't Believe the Hype

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I was initially drawn to this movie by James Woods. He's been my favorite actor for many years. Then the story drew me in further.The five beautiful Lisbon sisters are living in a virtual prison run by their fanatically religious parents (Woods, Kathleen Turner). Things go from bad to worse when one of the girls commits suicide.Josh Hartnett was pretty fresh off his very solid performance in The Faculty. Here he plays Trip Fontaine, a school football player. Kirsten Dunst plays Lux Lisbon, the object of his affection. When Trip and three friends manage to get permission to take the sisters to the homecoming dance, this is when things take a little turn for the bizarre. Lux arrives home way after curfew and their parents, particularly their mother, lock them down even tighter.The scene I found the most touching was the girls and the boys communicating by phone using records to say what they wanted to say. The story was set in 1974 so yes, records.On the whole, the movie was a real downer. No happy ending for anyone. As I write this, I've not read the book, so I have no basis for comparison there. I will say that the time I spent watching this movie was time well spent. The actors turned in top flight performances and Sofia Coppola's career as a movie director flew out of the gate with this movie.

This film is such a tearjerker and gives you a whole amount of fear for these girls because their parents were such religious control freaks. It was really awful to see the sisters die one by one especially Kirsten Dunst's character Lux Lisbon.Now at the beginning, I thought the parents were just ordinary folk wanting for the daughters to do well in school. However as the movie goes on, you would really be more scared for the girls sake. I say the father and mother beat them up too as well as burning some of their stuff.Lets just say, I'm glad this is a fiction movie!

The movie brought high school movie sub-genre to a weird spot as it places the high school life backgrounds and all the complexities surrounding it facing the contrast element of death and loss and coping with them. The movie goes curiously with it's opening and builds its story casually after-wards. The time frame background permits the story to exhibit cultural practices that may be deemed strange by people nowadays. Yet these weird practices gives a great way for the story to development into it's unpredictable ending. The acting overall is surprisingly good. James Woods and Kathleen Turner did their parts well in acting out as the parents. This movie sure was a showcase to display then young talents such as Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, Hayden Christensen and even Leslie Hayman. Cameos and smaller parts by Michael Pare and Danny DeVito nicely add some flavor to the movie as a whole.

A beautifully depressing and sad movie about 5 sisters, who ended their lives at a very young age. The movie has an interesting way of telling a story, the story is told by the boys who loved the girls, but unfortunately the movie feels kind of cold. It is very hard to emotionally engage in the movie, since you never really get any real and emotional character interaction, it never really showed any of the girls communicating with one another.Just 2 of the sisters had their time under the spotlight, for most of the movie, and that, in my opinion, destroyed the real lust and emotions the movie could have had. I wanted to see more character engagement in the film, i get that the idea was to make you feel sad and emotional via the lenghty sad fragments of the girls dieing of boredom, being oppressed by their religious parents, but at least they could have made them talk with each other.When you look at the movie as a whole, it was a really good movie, but then, when you start thinking about some of the details, which i mentioned above, the movie kind of loses its charm and just seems blatant and plain, so it is better to just enjoy it, without trying to figure out the details and flaws of the film.