Tart - Sesso, droga e... college

The box to this movie totally misrepresents itself. The cover shows a view of legs & panties in a short skirt. The title is `Tart.' The synopsis on the back of the box made it seem as though Cat, the main character, was an outcast who became one of the popular students, but that popularity lead to a bizarre lifestyle that she could not escape from. Everything that the box built this movie up to was a horrible lie. I expected a sort of crappy, direct-to-video version of `Heathers' targeted at the teenagers of today.

Let me tell you what `Tart' was really about. Yes, this really is the plot; so if you don't want to know what happens, stop reading. We have one unlikable, boring rich girl. This unlikable girl's best friend is a skank. The skank gets expelled from school, so the unlikable girl befriends some British girl. This leads to the unlikable girl dating this boring guy, who the box refers to as the `most popular boy in school.' If that guy was the most popular guy in their school, I wish I would have gone to that high school, because I could have kicked the crap out of him. Anyway, as any movie will tell you, the most popular guy in school is invariably a murderer or drug addict or thief, or in this case, all of the above. Anyway, everyone ends up disliking the unlikable main character because she is Jewish. Then the most popular guy in school beats her best friend, the skank, to death with a rock because the skank caught the most popular boy in a homosexual act. The unlikable girl's stoic mother and hypochondriac younger brother are there for her at the end. Oh, and the entire movie is about snotty rich kids and their horrible parents too. Gee, what is wrong with that? That sounds like a fantastic movie! Well, that's what I thought. But you see, there are NO likeable characters in this movie. The main character is boring. The filmmakers made her average, while during the film she keeps spouting off about what a freak she is. The skank is not skanky enough, and has little screen time. The popular guy is nothing to write home about. The popular girls are just your run-of-the-mill rich girls. There are no moral lessons. Cat, the boring main character, is not a freak, does not ever become one of the truly popular girls, and (worst of all) after all the crap she goes through, she thinks she is still too good to befriend the only nice girl, the dorky girl. To be honest, I have no idea why the movie is called Tart. I kept asking, who's the tart? Is she the tart? Are they all tarts? At 94 minutes, theoretically this is not a long movie. But after actually watching this awful waste of a VHS tape, and not knowing who the tart was, I was surprised that the movie was only an hour and a half. The movie felt like it was two hours and some change. After a while, I was hoping the movie would be about pop tarts. At least when you look at a box of pop tarts, you know what to expect.

Can someone tell me what is the song title we hear at 50min I have done some researches and couldn't find it even with the lyrics: If the little boy, likes the little girl, he should give her the world to that little girl. Tell her that he loves her, put his arms around her, chase the clouds away. If the little girl, likes the little boy, she shouldn't get upset, she shouldn't get annoyed, if that little boy, takes a little time waking up his heart, making up is mind. Note: it sounds like a song from Leonard Cohen

"Tart" is a good illustration of old the Yogi Berra saying: "If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up someplace else". Writer/Director Christina Waye (in her first feature) has managed to make a $3 Million movie that ends up someplace else. "Tart" is either a coming of age story devoid of characters that a rational person can connect with, a black comedy without any humor, or a sexploitation movie without anything that is particularly sexy.

Unlike the standard Swain film, "Tart" actually employed a competent and experienced production designer. Good enough to provide two extremely nice shots: the scene of Swain and Barton taking a bubble bath together and the scene of Swain in the park-featuring a nice montage of the "Alice in Wonderland" sculpture. The symbolism incorporated into these elements supports the possibility that Waye (despite the absence of a linear logic or unity of tone) actually has some visionary talent and aspirations for making a quality film.

It is even possible that Waye was trying for a fusion of the somewhat expressionistic "Metropolitan" and the camp classic "Cruel Intentions" which also deal with the Manhattan upper class. There are many camera shots framed by windows and doors yet few tight shots of faces and eyes. The former technique hinting at symbolism and the latter at intentional distancing from the characters and their motivations. "Tart" seemed on the verge of veering into camp territory at least twice and would have been well advised to keep going in that direction. First there was the scene where they try to dump the seemingly deceased Swain into the garbage chute. Then there is the whole bit about her father being Jewish (played to the same extreme as Joel Grey dancing with the Jewish guerrilla in "Cabaret").

In her other films Swain's acting technique is to overwhelm each scene in which she appears (insert scenery chewing here) but in "Tart" she actually shows an ability to restrain herself. This is the best performance of her career. It also provides some clues about her physical deterioration from willowy super cute in "Girl" to hulking lumpy-faced in "Pumpkin". This transformation was about half-complete by the time she made "Tart"; so go the ravages of time.

Mischa Barton ("Sixth Sense's" I feel better girl) and Lacey Chabet are excellent in supporting roles. The rest of the cast is simply horrible, although some of the blame for this should go to Waye's script and direction.

It's hard to find interesting new movies at video rental shops here, and by a quick review of the back cover text got me interested in this one. Popping the VHS in, I was expecting at least a decent film, but as some others have said, this just might be the worst movie I've ever seen, or at least in the last few years.

First of all, the plot goes nowhere - sure, the main character learns that special something, but the 'climax' of the film comes out of nowhere, making no sense at all. I mean, as far as I could see, the two characters that the climax takes place between had little or no interaction up until the end of the film.

Also, what character interaction took place, was utterly weird and illogical - can't give examples but believe me, you'll notice it when you follow peoples' expressions, tonal changes in the way they talk, strange little pauses between phrases... not only silly interaction, but plain bad acting, too.

Careless directing/shooting too - for example totally different facial expressions when changing the angle while the main character and her crush dance a bit. Bad recording/audio processing, the characters' voices sound totally out of place... Ugh.

The worst thing in this movie is that while it was total rubbish, you wouldn't get any camp thrills either, since you were actually expecting something...

Oh, and BTW, after seeing the film I checked the cover text again - it was plain horrible, too. Had the phrase "everything has it's price" (in Finnish, of course) three times. Also had some information about the plot that wasn't in the movie, or at least wasn't very visible.

For me this movie is about losing things and being lost. And it makes the observation that when you're lost you can end up losing things that you didn't know you had much less that you wanted to keep.

Cat (Dominique Swain) doesn't know who she is, which ironically doesn't keep her from not liking who she is. And in the people around her -- family and friends, adults and peers -- she finds varying amounts of belonging, rejection, hope, and disillusionment. In other words, Cat is just 17 in a way that should be familiar to us.

That's one of the strengths of Christina Wayne's quiet, mature film is the feeling of verite. I've never been young and rich in NYC (or near-rich, or formerly-rich, or trying-to-keep-up- with-the-rich) but Wayne's portrait seems so detailed it makes me really curious to know if she has been. Far from being "Just another spoiled rich kids film - _Kids_ meets _Metropolitan_!" Wayne shows us Cat trying to "fit in" and a diverse number of reasons -- from financial to social to emotional to behavioral -- why you can cast out of this insular, cannibalistic sub-culture.

Another strength is Wayne's direction and writing. The film is well-constructed with strong characters, with images and (Yeah, I'll say it ...) motifs that appear once and then quietly reappear in different contexts. And all throughout Wayne shows a really nice eye for pictures.

Plus she's got really good people doing good work. I mean, everyone is in this movie: Swain, Renfro, Phillips, Zehetner, Chabert and Barton (before they had to try to be smoking hot), Scott Thompson of _Kids in the Hall_ fame. She even gets Melanie Griffith to do a walk-on.

One thing the film has going against it is the marketing. Looking at the trailer and the film poster, it's clear that Lions Gate or whoever didn't know how to pitch this film. It seems like they wanted it to be naughtier or rowdier or ... brighter than it is. But it's not a melodrama. There are no simple heroes and villains, no moralizing on right and wrong, no suspense- ridden plot. It's the type of character-based, even, sad, dramatic storytelling that seems to go down better in Canada that here in the States.

I like it, though. If you've got a quiet morning and some time, it deserves a try.