good evening and welcome to a thrilling episode a fistful of popcorn the movie discussion show out of princeton new jersey and i'm tonight's moderator by default i hadn't really planned this i had mine is bob brown by the way  and we have to hurry hiller pat was with us long time panelists to my left and your right is janet stern and to my right in your left is marilyn campbell and i we've got show focused on problem children or children with problems depending on how you look at it and so we'll have a summary from each of our panelists janet would you like to start with the first of these two movies which is called the florida project yes the florida project takes place just south of orlando actually was the name of disney world while disney world was in development but now it's kind of ironic because there are housing projects around and our characters in this live in one of those kind of like the hidden homeless they live in a welfare motel and the welfare motels in that area have the names of some of the disney like disney world like they live in magic kingdom there's another little girl who lives in future land future something anyway these little kids are totally not totally but very often unsupervised and they're six and it's summer vacation and they run everywhere and they're they have to leave in their discovery and they're exuberant but there's just an undercurrent of dread because you can't believe that these kids are going to escape unharmed it's a very  transience place to risk come and find that they're in the wrong place and then leave it's a very it's a very threatening and menacing atmosphere it can be the kids make the best of it their parents not so much parents are trying very hard their parents have no safety net no support and they're trying everything they can to keep kids keep their kids clothed and fed so i think i'll stop there again without a summary of your other film well and and the directory's todd haynes who's done many interesting films in the past and this the the original book was done as half graphic novel and  anything twenty seven hoboken and then manhattan who is deaf and in the book she her story is told only in pictures and in the movie her story is in plaque and white and the second story takes place in one thousand nine hundred seventy seven about a little boy from minnesota who is struck deaf actually literally by lightning coming through a phone line when he's on the during a thunderstorm and he loses his hearing and he also goes to manhattan to search for his missing father and his story is told or filmed in color  hundred seventy seven new york very very colorful in fact photos graffiti and people in interesting clothes and so both of these children have to deal with the fact that they seem to be or they're trying to get away from parents or they're or they're not don't have a good relationship with their parents or their parents are dead and they are trying to make their way in manhattan by themselves and they're also kind of in peril but eventually these these stories and this movie converge and happily now i have a question that these two films are dealing with child parent relationships or lack thereof those are the two similarities but in some ways they're very different bit surrealistic oh it certainly turned surrealistic interestingly the director i think i neglected to say that the director sean baker whose most recent film got a lot of the claim because he it was called you went along through it to florida project yeah a dread because i felt something felt sure something was going to happen his kids some review a reviewer said that the service road was their mississippi river you you also get this just sense of these of their parents just living hand to mouth really trying to survive and you can start to see if you want to not just the kids are exuberant and resourceful which they are crafty devious imagine why imagine it but full of life but then you say to yourself how are they going to escape the rut that their parents are in how are they going to get out of this and you see the little i guess i felt dread i felt it at the end of the movie someone another couple behind me said one of them said to the other so that's what free range childhood was and and it gave me to think that we this point a lot of us of the baby boomer generation look at our kids and our grandchildren we say our childhoods were so much less supervised and we we went out in big packs of kids because it was the baby boom there were always big packs of kids wherever who have and you went out and you did devious things like these kids did you did you had adventures you fell into the creek and you climb trees you did things that prohibit you from set fires he was there were bags on yeah yeah yeah you did things that were a little risky and and that today's children are so supervised that they never have that of that opportunity to make their own fun to i'm supervised child as you say has that sort of darker side where they could really get into trouble they had really be injured you raise an interesting point because i question whether when these kids grow up and look back with this yes and i'm not so sure they would be if they didn't like how they turned out i mean another thing that you said that reminded me that the filmmaker loved the little rascals and there's a lot of that in here but he said that the little rascals were also impoverished you know yes and yet it didn't weigh them down you know i'm not a sense of that being because that was still there was america was still a land of promise impoverishment of their families was not a subject was not a character in the film in their film he's a little bit wrong there because there was a rich girl and a rich boy who of course all lived in the same neighborhood which he wouldn't and and there was a little bit of saying well you know darla has dancing lessons or whatever and we we improvise and do our own  the you could tell that the filmmaker was absolutely adored this child especially the main child mooney whose real name is brooklyn and very trendy name and because there's one point where she they just set the camera down she's at it at her mother has sneak them into the breakfast buffet any more upscale motel and they're enjoying the large s of the pre characteristics and i have and i have a responsibility not too far from her real life very much like and he couldn't find anyone so he went to hire he said he called her and she thought this is a prank you know she's just parading in front of a camera but she actually was ten she gets to do that film my sense of these kids is kids don't know what they don't know and as actors they're naturals you get adults and they become self mainstream what's right he has he's managing this motel that's full of people who are on welfare or just above it and whose lives are very chaotic and he wants them to follow the rules and he wants them he wants their lives to be better and have a certain he's sort of a guy who who yearns to make these kids lives better and their parents lives better to the extent he can with his very very limited resources so he's sort of the voice of  the filmmaker in a way well he is and he's also the adult in the room yeah yeah and it's interesting to me that disney world really thrives on the idea of never growing up and yet the he's angry at this show and then again so i go on he has a great deal of empathy when it comes to the kids getting in trouble you know one mom gets into trouble he somehow his heart melts and he's able to get he's even really concerned for the kids at that point although he's been angry at them from their having ice cream and all that stuff way right but it's more when he when he yells at them it's more like it's in a sort of affectionate you know only way apparent way y you know i know that you're you're not even you're done something nobody right and i expect you to do think you know anything and i don't really hold it against you it's not like he's not a person who doesn't like him he likes kids yeah  he has a troubled relationship with his own son who's grown up and moved out and doesn't really need him anymore but he really hearings to be the same it's actually a bit stronger the dibble he's divorced from his kids mother and is a bitterness because a kid said happy birthday to his mother from him and he was furious don't don't ever do that again so there's papper there's possibly some empathy  the end where all of this stuff comes to this unbelievable climax in a way but well totally believable climax actually well totally believable i don't know i would argue against that  but in any case i wondered if if that was the point of the film is that if there is that's kind of chaos and so just ride with it somehow i think there was an act and another layer besides the layer of the children's world being without stability is that it's very much sort of the underside of disney world full of these places that are a little shabby a little bit maybe c d s maybe a little bit sketchy and that but it's also tremendously commercialized  outside the system but they're a little bit out of the system because we still improvising they're still going on adventures and they're still you know waiting in the creek and discovering cows and saying isn't this is good is the safari has didn't last i have brought you one adventure we have now  let's let's turn to wonderstruck at this point and talk about that it's a very bookish it's a it's a kids book but did it feel like a kid's film to you know and i have to how would work with them is actually on at the in princeton it's on the reading list for the middle grade it's a recommended outside reading so i'm not sure how you would teach it i think one of the reasons that it might be assigned is that it deals with children with disabilities it deals with children who are who are deaf and how they cope and how the world is not kind to them in till they find their community but there's a second also in this film the sort of second story which is the birth of the museum which is really completely charming and you know his his other book the invention of you you go  made into the film hugo which is about the invention of the motion picture and this is about the invention of the wonder cabinet that or the evolution from the wonder cabinet to the museum and the museum of natural history has a central rol the museum and there were no lines because it was free and i remember thinking wow that was those were the good old days when you there were no lines you could just walk into the museum of natural history can't do that anymore now and and everybody really you know the people who worked in the museum however were very ill used to the kids very stern not very welcoming it was everybody to the young girl looked angry everybody was angry with her nobody was nice and that part i i think was very much trying to reflect perhaps a silent films that she leaned on up on where it's your bill it's black and white and they were nicer than you think because we don't get an sound and her black brother no and that's well they could have been clearer maybe not george my husband didn't know that either he said i was worried what you meant only meant so i was funny now that's odd they should between silent films and yeah sound films and in fact she has seen the silent film feature as a refuge because in somewhere she can go and read the subtitles and she knows what's going on a significant part of the population became out of segmented yet could not any longer enjoy films again and again even a lot of foreign language writers after after silent films went to sound where we could not you have a having their own deaf deaf community as they have now so in her from her particular point of view which is well told from her point of view where do i belong i don't belong anywhere someone helped me she was sent a little boat right so i am trying to figure out how the museum and the story are supposed to mash and a little bit is the way that she eventually i don't want to spoil anything for becomes a what we're looking at are buildings that are since thirty nine on them yes yeah ok well you've touched on something marilyn i had a hard time figuring out where anything matched there seemed to me to be i can just quickly run through discombobulated yes because i think there were two there were two too many to two plotlines now or to be this one was the theme of children in peril and how they managed to find communities or find people that they can be friends with and community and communicate and the other is this whole thing about that todd haynes is probably fascinated with which is the making of the museum  same way about hugo that hugo had the tanit times and the movies and also the little boy in peril and he there were connections but it didn't feel like the connections were all was another problem i really wanted to see her on the screen and is captivated by the boys and i really was loved watching her by the way the boy looks as though he could be the older brother of the girl in the first film they have the same set of  yeah yeah the ending to that film was it really would crack me up how that worked out if i you know we eliminated but i just wanted to raise the big issue about this film the big controversy is whether the mother was a good mother or a bad mother