Pearl

I appreciate this movie on several levels. I have never thought that stories about loss and grief needed to be "big Hollywood", but experiential. & substantive. I personally relate to the story, because over the last year, I lost both of my parents - which was what actually drew me to this movie. It was great to see Anthony LaPaglia in this role, portraying someone in the thick of their own personal crisis, then shifting gears to something completely unexpected. His chemistry with Thompson was good, though some of the story & conversation was inorganic in a few places. For example, there is a scene where Thompson overreacts for seemingly no reason, and she lashes out and pushes LaPaglia like she wants to start a fight with him. I actually went back and watched the scene again trying to figure out what was the catalyst for that overreaction, and I still feel it's unexplained. Another unexplained part of the story is the sudden end of Thompson's & Macedo's friendship - an inorganic, and unfortunate end to that storyline. There are a few things left unexplained in the plot, but it seems like at the end of the movie that it's OK that those things were unexplained. I suspect that this film had a very limited budget and a short window to film it - a little more time and money could have rounded out this film in a way that it really deserved. That's part of the beauty of independent films. Even so, I feel this film deserves nine stars, as it does address grief and loss in a meaningful way, as people with different struggles try to find a way forward. If you are reading the reviews about this film before deciding to watch it, just go ahead and watch it and pay no attention to the naysayers.

Anthony LaPaglia was solid throughout, that's the only real positive I have here. Otherwise, this movie, with so much potential for emotion in its subject matter, seriously lacked a punch. I love indies and finding hidden gems but this was very amateurish in execution and dialogue, and failed to move me emotionally. Skip this one.

Characters were underdeveloped, the climactic point wasn't developed enough either. It just left me hanging at the end. If the movie had been given more time, it could have been truly excellent, but there were too many characters who had conflicts/things to settle with the main character, Pearl. These never got resolved at the end. At the end I was thinking, "What about the struggle with this person? The issue this person has?" Well, you don't get to know what happens to them. So although the movie could have been great, there was about a half hour or more that seems to have been cut off at the end. The movie does draw an important point: Americans are greatly spoiled, and Pearl was a great example of this. Maybe the writer was thinking in that same spoiled mind frame, not taking to account what happens to the other characters. Hence, I give it five stars for some good parts, but really that made it all the more disappointing when a couple of main characters/issues were, for lack of better wording, just thrown out the window.

Wow. The acting in this is so bad it is cringeworthy throughout. Hint to filmmakers: Let models be models, but do not cast people with zero talent at acting for acting jobs. BTW, the positive reviews here are from single use accounts. That is shilly.

The acting was dreadful. Pearl could have learned responsibility at the end of the film, but she didn't. Instead, she is glorified for what she did. Life isn't that simple. The film ends too abruptly.

Larsen Thimpson and Anthony LaPaglia srar in this interesting drama. Thompson's mother is shot by her step father. Her mother gave a letter to her lawyer friend, and he gave it to LaPaglia. The letter states that LaPaglia is Thompson's father. She moves in with him. She goes to public school and meets Melissa Macedo who is a smart tough girl. As the story develops Macedo realizes she cannot befriend Thompson, because their worlds are too different. Thompson has a one night stand and gets pregnant. LaPaglia and Thompson bond at the grave of her mother and his unforgotton love. Is she his biological daughter? It ends with not knowing what happened with the pregnancy and the dna test. This makes the entire plot filled with no answers. Why did the step father kill her mother? Why didn't her friends stick with her? Why is LaPaglia a pariah? Why would Macedo dump her? This is very unsatisfying and frustrating, because the storyline had great potential which wasn't developed.