Reno Rangan A fine opening for a first time director. I saw it specially for Juno Temple and her performance was the major plus point but her co-star attracted to my eyes. I liked Juno Temple very much in 'Dirty Girl' but afterwords she was good, also exposed her body consistently and I disliked it. Sometime we hate someone we admired do like that. She could have been a good actor liked by everybody including family audience if she does not expose much of her skin.Anyway this movie was good, delivers a fine message and kinda a lesson to youngsters to learn. This was the story of two teenage girls Lily and Alison from a small town. Fifteen, the age of self discovering and curious about everything in the world, to find out what is future and where it will be. These girls are unhappy with their poverty and pollution town, so wanted to runaway. One day they meet the boys from Los Angeles and follows them. What comes to them is not as they expected and theirs response to the circumstance brings the curtain to the movie.Good story and the movie looked realistic to me. The element about blackmail through social media was one of the highlights of the movie. It was based on actual happenings in everywhere like the movie 'Trust'. I am happy they used it very well for this movie. This independent drama about youngsters mistakes is totally worth seeing.8/10

secondtake Little Birds (2011)A harrowing movie, a slice of very believable and scary life for two fifteen year olds looking to escape their awkward or dysfunctional families. What they get into, moving from the Salton Sea to L.A. in a stolen truck, is a nightmare for any parent. Yet for the girls there is a mixture of adventure and discomfort.All of this depends a lot on a great ensemble cast, which is pretty much here. The two girls are terrific--I had just seen Juno Temple in another excellent indie and sought this out. The boys they run into and hook up with are a little wild at first (and then more wild later) and weave into the story with surprising ease.This is a low budget movie but it makes the most of a series of scenes inside and out that keep it from feeling constrained. The Salton Sea parts are both beautiful an so impoverished they are sad. When the edge of L.A. comes in it's rougher and yet filled with energy. The girls are divided on how the city works on them. Temple's character is exudes confidence, and sometimes has it, too, and so she gets in deeper. The other girl, played by Kay Panabaker, is more morally solid and yet more scared, and she plays a perfect counterbalance to her friend.Writer and director Elgin James is just starting out here (that's part of what Indie films are all about) and the movie might not soar or show particular originality, but it does hold up pretty well in normal dramatic terms. The sets are very real--gritty and rough, for sure--and the acting matches. It's quite well shot, too, if nothing special is going on--give the editors some of the credit for keeping it fluid.You wonder by the end what the larger point might be, beyond a very distracting entertainment. There might be a little (a little) sense of "there's no place like home" at work. And there's a kind of buddy movie at work--the two girls being the pals on the road. Mostly it's about how tough some teens have it, and how they want to find ways to survive that surprise their parents (usually singular, parent). It's also a tale of how kids want a lot from everyone and everything--life seems so fertile and large--and how they know so little about how to get it.So, with vulnerability on their sleeves, these girls are a little bit of all of us. No, we aren't all so fully stupid or careless, but maybe in small ways we are all the same.

usernumber655321 I was tricked into giving this film a look after seeing a well edited preview. With all due respect to all the people who worked on this thing, it is absolutely horrible. To be fair, there are approximately three to four well framed pieces of cinematography. Other than that, this is utter garbage. The filmmaker 'gazes' mercilessly at his fifteen year old protagonist from beginning (the film literally opens with her naked in a bath tub) to end. The metaphors are obvious and clunky. The story the same 'got to get out of this boring town' cliché that we've all seen ninety six times already. It is essentially straight forward, artless, misanthropy. Pretty much every thing about this film is absolutely embarrassing. Whoever at Sundance decided to insure the making of this film should be promptly fired.

FilmRap This movie is by first time filmmaker Elgin James who, developed it in a Sundance Workshop and it was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival which isn't a slam dunk for films that come up this way. James who wrote and directed movie comes from the streets of Boston and he chose to convey his gritty experiences through the characters of two teenage girls who come from the poverty stricken coastal town of Salton Sea in California and end up with some older boys on the streets of a grimy section of Los Angeles. The strength of the film is the insight and development of these two young girls Allison Huffman (Kay Panabaker) and Lily Hobart (Juno Temple) who are portrayed magnificently. Their attachment, dependency on each other and yet their differences unfold before us as they try to escape their environment. The storyline creates tension and anxiety. The three older boys with whom these girls connect David (Chris Coy), Louis (Carolos Pena) and John (Kyle Gallner) are as real as they can be and sadly operate just as you would expect them to. Compared to these five young people, the peripheral characters are somewhat an enigma to us as their back stories are thin and vague. They do seem authentic and there are excellent performances by Leslie Mann, Kate Bosworth, Neil McDonough and particularly by JR Bourne who does a captivating dramatic role at the conclusion of the movie. Although the little birds of this story had more reason to fly the coop than the daughters of many who are reading this now, we all know that when any teenager spreads her wings, anything can happen. This movie will be released in September and we will be rooting for it to fly. (2011)