The Poker House (2008)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Pretty Good

Good movie but grossly overrated

Absolutely the worst movie.

It's one day in 1976 Council Bluffs, Iowa. Agnes (Jennifer Lawrence) is a 14 year old living in a dysfunctional house. Her family escaped her abusive preacher father. Her sister Bee hopes to get into a foster home. Her youngest sister Cammie (Chloë Grace Moretz) sleeps at a friend's and spends her day at a bar with drunk Stymie (David Alan Grier). Her mother Sarah (Selma Blair) has fallen into prostitution and drug-abuse. She considers her mother's pimp Duval (Bokeem Woodbine) as her boyfriend. The house is a gathering place for criminals to play poker and known locally as the Poker House.Director Lori Petty brings her personal story to the screen. It's a harrowing story. It needs an expert to focus the story onto Agnes. It's a bit scattered. It's got some great young future stars and has great potential. JLaw does some big acting. She is always compelling. Petty really needs a professional writer to focus this material more.

Directed and written by actress Lori Petty based on her own life as a teenager with a drug-addicted prostitute as her mother.A young Jennifer Lawrence of Hunger Games fame play Agnus (which is supposed to be Lori as a teen, why the name change I'm not sure but I guess it doesn't matter) and she does so really well.Selma Blair plays her mother, although she's not really worthy the title of a mother in all honesty.Anyways overall the acting is very good and it has a lot of really good scenes but the narrative is a little off at times to the point it gets a little confusing, for instance a long while in the movie I thought Chloe Grace Moretz character was Agnus when she was younger but that was not the case, and the job scene just felt like another movie with Jennifer Lawrence playing another character.Anyway if you can look aside stuff like that this still is definitely worth watching.I give it a 6.5/10.

There is a place in the small Iowa community called the "poker house." People of all kinds, but mostly black, congregate in this smoky place for poker, alcohol, drugs, and prostitution. Not a very pretty place, visually or morally.Jennifer Lawrence was about 16 or 17 during filming, all in the Chicago areas, and she is the main character Agnes who is 14. She and her two younger sisters mostly have to fend for themselves, their mother (Selma Blair, almost unrecognizable) is never fully sober and even if she were does not seem to have any "mothering" skills. Agnes is actually the surrogate mother for the two younger ones. Agnes is also bright, makes straight A's, writes poetry about her gritty life, and is the star basketball player for the school team.So this is her story, about how she manages to stay above the grime and eventually carve out a better life. Jennifer Lawrence even at her young age is simply superb in her role as Agnes. It was also nice to see Chloë Grace Moretz in an early role as Agnes's little sister Cammie.SPOILERS: In a good role for him, Bokeem Woodbine is Duval , basically Agnes's mom's pimp. But he also takes a liking to Agnes, they spend long scenes kissing, and her voice-over tells how much she likes his lips. Agnes is young and not wise to the real world, and she thinks he loves her. Then one day of kissing leads to rape. She is shocked, she gets in the tub and washes herself frantically. All trust has been betrayed, but she pulls herself together to go late to the game but plays and scores to erase a large deficit and win the game. The rape was her wake-up call, it influenced her to care for herself and make a career for herself.

Unlike some people, I did NOT jump out of my seat when this movie ended. If anything, I had to work my jaw back into place, after observing how much implausible if not impossible (and certainly illegal, under U.S. federal law, for a MALE writer\director to depict with child actors, or even actors who could PASS for children) one woman could cram into her "based on a true story" film autobiography. Most Americans have no expertise as to whether THE KITE RUNNER novelist, who inspired the movie of the same name, is B.S.-ing us about conditions decades ago in Afghanistan. But some of us are in a better position to see if the events depicted here with admittedly powerful language and acting performances (tagged as more or less happening in Council Bluffs, IA, in 1976) pass the so-called "sniff test." (SPOILERS TO FOLLOW.) Jennifer Lawrence (nominated for Oscar for last year's WINTER'S BONE) is great bringing a combination of poetry, pathos, and the optimism of youth to writer\director Lori Petty's supposed childhood self, Agnes. The problem is, even for a fictional character, the woes and travails Agnes suffers are larded on to a ludicrous ledge of almost braggadocio. I mean, how likely is it that a girl a couple days past her 14th birthday could be 1) working TWO jobs (as a fast food clerk and professional journalist for the local daily), 2)be pulling down straight "A's" in classes including Calculus & Analytic Geometry and advanced poetry (the canon of which she is expanding with her own voice-over offerings, which she's shown scribbling into her notebooks between everything else), 3) serving as the primary care giver for her 10 and 12 year-old sisters, 4)doing the household shopping her coke-head prostitute mom is incapable of, while being threatened daily to start turning tricks on her own, 5)policing the sleep-over johns and regular pimps over-running her home through the sheer force of her personality, 6)refereeing mom's nightly booze-filled poker games, 7)driving her sisters all over town on errands in a full-sized Cadillac, 8)all the while smoking pot, cigarettes, and boozing herself, 9)while never getting caught out by her school authorities as 10)she becomes a local legend as apparently the best basketball player of EITHER sex in her fairly sizable town, while 11)living a totally color-blind life style, and 12)showing up midway through the second half of a PLAYOFF game with no explanation to anyone on the team (though this flick contends that despite being sexually abused years earlier by her long-gone preacher dad, Agnes' virginity somehow was preserved until a few minutes before game time, when one of mom's pimps forcibly rapes her in self-proclaimed business merger), and 13)scoring "27 points in 7 minutes" (NOT what the movie actually shows, to viewers paying attention, by the way) to eke out a two-point buzzer-beater victory for her visiting team? If you say, "C'mon, it's just a movie," I'd respond, so was HOOSIERS. But the latter film is believable in BOTH tone and events. Ms. Petty's version, on the other hand, sounds like one of Oprah's ill-advised book-of-the-month picks, which she has to retract a week later, when the facts come out.