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Little Boxes

Little Boxes (2017)

April. 14,2017
|
5.9
| Drama Comedy

It's the summer before 6th grade, and Clark is the new-in-town biracial kid in a sea of white. Discovering that to be cool he needs to act 'more black,' he fumbles to meet expectations, while his urban intellectual parents Mack and Gina also strive to adjust to small-town living. Equipped for the many inherent challenges of New York, the tight-knit family are ill prepared for the drastically different set of obstacles that their new community presents, and soon find themselves struggling to understand themselves and each other in this new suburban context.

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BlazeLime
2017/04/14

Strong and Moving!

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Greenes
2017/04/15

Please don't spend money on this.

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Salubfoto
2017/04/16

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

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FirstWitch
2017/04/17

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

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Ersbel Oraph
2017/04/18

This is a refreshing new variation in script theme. It is nice. And heart felt. It is quite real. Yet, by the end it falls short.There are too many main characters. And somehow, in contrast, too few supporting characters. And for me this mix of three points of view disconnected me from the story.There are many interesting details. And real. The unpleasant mover. The pleasant and rather fake neighbors. The lack of Internet. Yet they seemingly come out of nowhere and they do not develop. And for a passing thing they take way too much time.Which brings to probably the biggest problem: the story is slow. Very slow. Yet, at the end, when they seemingly went out of film, things can be pretty fast and the details are well pruned. Why can't the movie be like the epilogue? Well, probably because there would be enough story for say 25 to 30 minutes. But the quick ending made the entry so much frustrating.And there are wasteful scenes. In one the husband walks on the New York sidewalk. No information. Quite peaceful. Later he will do the same in Rome. Besides the extra trees and fewer people, there is no change. There isn't any mood, even if the producers probably badly wanted to mimic the waste of film done in European artsy movies paid by the state.In the end, with the given happy ending, this movie goes against everything written in plots and by critics. I did not see the white suburban community. Just a white and unpleasantly polite community that radiates fake. Which is true for any community that involves status. There are racial tensions. But the conflicts are well white washed. And the people have conflicts based on the tensions. Nothing about racism. Peaceful? But their life in New York is shown as peaceful. And the two men are not disturbed by the people around, but by the change to an environment they did not ask for.It might have been good.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

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Ch_Kings
2017/04/19

When I first decided to watch this movie I had to question myself if I wanted to take a chance on yet another film that is build around racial issues. I'm quite frankly a bit tired of the "black family moves to a white racist town" or the "white teacher saves a class in the projects" type of films. Those films is so overdone, and also tend to portray people as if it's still the mid 80's or something.In this film they kinda fall in the trap with writing the town people as socially awkward, and borderline racist. Which i guess in some cases might fit, but I don't personally find it believable that everyone is like that. On top of that I felt unsatisfied when the movie ended because I just sat there and wondered what I was supposed to get from it. It barely made me laugh, it didn't move me or make me cry, it didn't make me sad or happy, and worst of all it didn't really give me the good-feel either. So i don't know what they actually tried to do with this film, because it can best be described as "meh". To wrap it up I would like to go back to my topic. It could be so much more. With that I mean it is definitively a good story hiding in this film, and they probably should have made it more about the kid, and write it so that the audience at least get that good-feel or the nostalgic love memories. But as it is right now, I can't really give my recommendations.

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jdesando
2017/04/20

"You are so interesting." (White townie to new black resident)Little Boxes is a little film that wants to be more than it is. While it would like to be a quirky tale of an interracial family moving from NYC to white Washington State, it's a slow moving story of a few dysfunctions on the part of the rural town faced with the black and white presence and awkwardly responding to it.The white mother, Gina, played underwhelming by Melanie Lynskey, accepts a tenure-track job at Rome College with perks her black writer husband, Mack (Nelsan Ellis), appreciates if only because his second book is taking a great deal of time. Eleven-year- old son, Clark (Armani Jackson), is experiencing a new life with a couple of 11-year-old girls, nothing grand, just the kind of pre-teen exploration that seems awfully tame from my jaded point of view.The meaty issues that hover over the biracial motif are meekly treated by a few pedestrian lines such as a young girl exclaiming the town needs a black: "We like totally needed a black kid. This town is SO white!" Or about husband a neighbor says, "If you close your eyes you can't even tell he's black." The mold hiding in the family's house is hardly a hidden metaphor. Embarrassing stuffThe only excitement in this turgid melodrama is when Clark gets in trouble for boyish misdeeds, odd actually for such a nice kid. I'm trying not to mention the four female professors at bad karaoke while over drinking on their regular lunch break. Even worse Gina is criticized for getting "sloppy" in a small town--a definite no no and a signal of intolerance almost unheard of in Brooklyn.Clearly Little Boxes (hmm, people trapped? town?) is not in the suburban satirical league of Ice Storm and American Beauty. Even in the final act, a resolution occurs so quickly as to be unbelievable. But I'm not going to spoil one of the only spirited parts of the film.

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tsimshotsui
2017/04/21

Little Boxes attempts to explore and unearth these certain racial frictions and casual racism that something like the film Get Out has done amazingly. The efforts are appreciated, and there are certainly good scenes (Mack's interactions with that 'writer') but the film never quite knows what to do with the things it brings up. It just lets them hang there uncomfortably, something that an ignorant audience can just brush past quickly.

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