Page Six vs. “Girl”

This Paula Froelich or Bill Hoffman-authored item in the N.Y. Post‘s “Page Six” about George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl is warm urine in a bucket. First, it’s not a “troubled biopic” — it’s an 8 on a scale of 10 (or was when I saw it) and is shooting extra scenes right now so it can elevate up to the level of a 9 or better — big deal. Movies that don’t quite nail it 100% during principal do this all the time; it doesn’t mean squat.

I saw an early cut several weeks ago (have Froelich or Hoffman had the pleasure?) and can say with more than a little authority that Factory Girl has a deliberately imposed downtown-raggedy feeling that a person not hip to the mid ’60s Andy Warhol-early ’70s Paul Morrissey aesthetic might mistake for sloppiness.
Factory Girl “has a grungy Manhattan, Collective-for-Living-Cinema, 16mm street quality,” I wrote, “like it was shot two or three years before Flesh and Lonesome Cowboys and maybe a year or two after Empire State and Blow Job. Hickenlooper gives it discipline and tension, working from a tight script by Captain Mauzner but styling in the realm of the Warhol-Morrissey aesthetic, which could be summed up as ‘don’t recreate anything, just behave and let it happen.’”
I’ve been told that the finished Factory Girl will definitely start to be screened in very early December, and maybe a bit sooner. (You have to get it seen that early so the critics groups can weigh in.) The Weinstein Co. should have just made sure that Factory Girl was on its website instead of someone allowing it to slip off (or not be there at all) due to an “oversight”, which was what got “Page Six” all hot and bothered in the first place.

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