lasttimeisaw Todd Solondz's fifth feature, a divisive drama-comedy even among his acolytes, PALINDROMES makes great play of an outré gimmick, its protagonist, a 13-year-old girl Aviva is played by eight different actors in its chronicling chapters (8 chapters plus a coda rehashes the same procedure in Aviva's broody attempt), they are vary in appearance, age, race, even sex (including one familiar face, Jennifer Jason Leigh, superbly cooing to capture a child's mannerism), fairly predates I'M NOT THERE. (2007), from another Todd, incontrovertibly much more prestigious, Mr. Haynes. Yes, Aviva, her name is a palindrome, which is recently implemented in Denis Villeneuve's ARRIVAL (2016) to under-gird the ethereal mystery of predestination, yet in Solondz's methodology, palindromes are emblems of human nature, which is explicitly rounded out by the acrimonious speech of Mark Wiener (Faber) near the ending, a character stems from Solondz's breakthrough WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1995), here an alleged pedophile shunned by everyone else but Aviva - we perpetually run back to the same pattern in our individual trajectory and remain more- or-less the same person, that is palindrome, a sociological pathology nestled everywhere. The story unflinchingly tackles the thorny subjects of baby fever, teen sex, abortion-and-its-risk, child abuse, religious fanatics and pedophile, sometimes feels a tad over-stretching to skewer all these into one feature length, and how on earth could we endorse an opinionated pre-teen who is possessed with the idea of becoming a mother, with some part of the world is still endemic with harrowing child-bride horrors? Nor can we lay the complete blame on her helicopter mom Joyce Victor (Barkin), as self-serving and inconsiderate as she is, when a girl is at that delicate age, honestly, moms always know the best. Ingenious as the narrative device is, spoon-feeds us with the universality of the identity of Aviva, each chapter can be regarded as a vignette holds its own wholeness, interleaved with an idyll interlude when Aviva is played by a boy (Denton) roaming in the countryside. The meat of the story is the chapter where Aviva is portrayed by a plus-size adult black woman (Wilkins), an elephantine presence where a 13-year-old girl dwells inside, this agency of discrepancy imbues a perturbing vibe during Aviva's sojourn with the counter-intuitively insidious foster family headed by God- botherers Mama Sunshine (Monk) and Bo Sunshine (Bobbie). And in the ensuring sequences where Aviva hitchhiking with a stocky middle-aged lorry-driver-turns-hit-man Bob (Guirgis), the inappropriately one-sided tenderness is spiked with a pungent scent of reactive self- consciousness from another side, one might get bemused in Solondz's straddling stance about the semi-romantic-semi-perverse rapport (though we firmly grasp his take on pro-choice/pro-life option) until the violence bursts out, follows by a foregone conclusion and rounds off Aviva's daring adventure. Contentious in its self-inflicted archness, PALINDROMES is hard to decipher after its bold but sketchy presentation of a nexus of problems beset in America, like a nihilistic anecdote sums up to this: everything sucks, people are doomed and our world rotates in a rut, ad nauseam, especially under today's circumstances, we don't need to watch a movie to get a glimpse of this.

ultimt3 I rarely comment on movies on IMDb but there are a few that I remember for all the wrong reasons. When I see they have a really high star rating I feel compelled to weigh in. I usually agree with IMDb's assessment (with the exception of "bad" horror films which I enjoy). The movie starts out with an interesting premise but it is a bit gratuitous and I would say a bit exploitative of the 13 year old character in this movie. It almost struck me as a film that was written by a pedophile. This movie was depressing and depicted a heck of a lot of depravity and even pedophilia. I love film noir, love gritty grindhouse films and stuff like that. This is VERY different from that. I got itchy watching it and as a parent, I was revolted with the sexual depiction of the young girl in this. I understand reality in films but this was just going too far to be enjoyable in my opinion. I was not entertained.

Ami Kapilevich There are hints of classical allegory (see: Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain) to this intriguing, disturbing, difficult but ultimately triumphant film. I think that the use of several characters to play Aviva (meaning "Springtime" in Hebrew) implies that the young lady is mildly schizophrenic - something that was either triggered by exposure to sex at such a young age, or by the trauma of the aberrant abortion.The film jumps around a bit in time. Chronologically, it starts with the first sexual encounter when Aviva visits the younger Otto (palindrome), and ends with Bob (palindrome) getting shot by the police. The film itself splices a few scenes in between, beginning and ending with the young black girl 'character' who is perhaps the youngest and most innocent of the Aviva characters. I was blown away by the portrayal of the foster family. Had no idea where to place them. I think that ultimately Solondz is sympathetic to them, which gives the film an impressively mature and equivocal view of religious fundamentalists (but a deep, dark part of me had a good chuckle, too).More please, Mr Solondz!

downstairs_roro Let's get one thing perfectly straight before continuing in what is about to be a well-balanced and thorough beating-about-the-brow of this movie: There is literally *no* reason for anyone to watch this mess. It has been mentioned that the director, Todd Solondz, spent his *entire life's savings* to create this film, because no studio would back it. And why wouldn't those awful, money grubbing, corrupt SOBs back it?Why, because "Palindromes" is utter, festering drivel. Quite truly, its one redeeming quality is that it ends.Let us forget the fact that the main character is bewilderingly played by eight different actresses, that the cinematography is a step below what you'd expect to find on Youtube, and that the entire plot basically takes the audience on a snore-inducing non-adventure. What truly drives me to hate this movie is that not one single cast member can muster up the ability to actually act. I felt like I was watching cardboard cutouts with dumbstruck little faces scrawled on them.If there was ever supposed to be a deeper meaning to this rubbish, it was lost somewhere between Solondz's inner thoughts and what he actually ended up producing. There are people moving, talking, partaking in awkward sex scenes, and being shot to death, but when it's all said and done, there is truly nothing to be gleaned from this movie save for the ice-cold assurance that you just wasted an hour and forty minutes of your life.