Little Joe – A Last Video Store Clerks Review
Little Joe has the sort of trailer I look for in a weird streaming find. It’s colorful, ominous, and it has a couple of actors I really like but just haven’t seen in too many things. Plus, I had to know what the deal was with the lead’s haircut.
If you’re coming from the podcast, welcome to my very underused blog! I pay for this site so let’s use it.
It’s been exactly a year since Frank and I started The Last Video Store Clerks podcast. Like clockwork, history repeats itself. The very first episode of the podcast was lost to not knowing what the fuck I was doing. The episode was just about us rambling about being video store clerks, and learning to prepare an episode for release. But it was fun, and I mangled it.
(Later we made the other mistakes like not pressing record and talking for an hour.)
So, it seems appropriate that at exactly a year I destroy another episode trying to clean up the giant file space. RIP Little Joe. This review will have to do.
Little Joe
Little Joe is the story of Alice, a plant breeder working in a lab that creates new strains of flowers. Along with her lab partner Chris, Alice’s team has created a flower that requires a great deal more care than an ordinary house plant but has the effect of producing oxytocin in its caregiver. She calls the flower “Little Joe” in honor of her son, and she smuggles him home one of his very own.
Because the breeders made Little Joe sterile, they begin to aggressively pollinate. When their Co-worker Bella’s dog Bello goes missing, Chris goes looking for him, and both he and the dog inhale the pollen.
The following day, the troubles begin. Bella claims Bello has changed and has him put down.
Joe sneaks his girlfriend Selma into the lab to steal her a plant of her own. One by one the other breeders begin to ram production of the plant through safety procedures despite Alice’s growing feeling that something is not right.
Is Little Joe turning everyone into happy assholes, or is it all just paranoia and the stress of raising a teenage son alone?
Little Joe was directed by Jessica Hausner, who co-wrote the screenplay with Geraldine Bajard. The film is an internationally joint production including producers from Austria, the UK and Germany. It premiered at Cannes in 2019 where its lead won the award for best actress.
Little Joe Stars:
· Emily Beecham as Alice (Who plays the lead in 1899, which you may have heard Scott bitching and moaning about its cancellation at Netflix.)
· Ben Whishaw as Chris (Q from the later Daniel Craig Bond Movies)
· Kerry Fox as Bella
· Kit Connor as Joe
· Lindsay Duncan as Alice’s Psychotherapist
· Jessie Mae Alonzo as Selma
67% of critics on rotten tomatoes have given Little Joe a positive rating, mirroring its 6.4/10 on IMDb and 60 out of 100 on Metacritic. However, opening weekend it grossed $10,626 in North America, and overall, just over $200,000 worldwide.
Little Joe Review
What Little Joe offers is something we haven’t seen before in this type of movie. The themes of single motherhood to a changing teenage boy beautifully parallel Alice’s relationship to her work and coworkers. It all makes sense in a very Little Shop of Horrors way that hasn’t been referenced properly in recent memory.
If we were making a shelf for this sort of movie in the video store, we’d call the section “Clinical Trials.” The genre is inarguably hit or miss, but it’s always pretty fun.
What made this film stand out was the use of color to contrast our hero’s sense of dread, adding the color of the flower to the characters wardrobe as a way of indicating who was infected by the flower’s pollen. The pastel palette presses against suspicion and mistrust in a true daylight horror fashion.
Score Problems
The films score is a real sticking point for me. The use of wind instruments is original and effective, but contained within each buildup was a frequency that made me physically ill.
Frank was quick to point out that the same technique has been used to great effect hundreds of times in movies to drive tension and create discomfort in the viewer. In Little Joe’s case, it felt like the score was trying too hard to cause distress in the viewer. When the story reached a moment of tension, I wasn’t bracing for the safety of the characters I’d emotionally invested in. Instead, I found myself wondering if the story was worth suffering another assault from a high frequency woodwind instrument. It was distracting, and served only to make an otherwise good movie difficult to watch.
Dark Comedy
The movie was dark and funny, and it deserved the initial critical acclaim. Beecham’s performance was exceptional and fit nicely under that bowl cut. I’d like to see her in more things.
Maybe a mystery series! Oh, right. Goddamn you Netflix! #Save1899
As the characters surrounding Alice start to behave differently, her boss offers the greatest takeaway from the story. If the flower is changing people but they’re happy, does it matter? It’s the fear of everyone who’s ever thought about taking antidepressants. What if I’m not me anymore?
Aside from the score everything about this movie is great. Elements of We Need to Talk About Kevin and Invasion of the Body Snatcher make it a love child we haven’t seen before.
Maybe the filmmakers got over clinical about creating tension, or maybe, like a Christopher Nolan movie, it just wasn’t mixed for a home movie experience. Either way, it’s a damn shame because Little Joe offers a great deal of originality, storytelling substance, set design, and performance. We were left thinking about what just happened, and that’s good. We both wanted a little more from the end, but it was satisfying enough, and around here we don’t judge a film solely based on its ending.
Thanks for reading, and we apologize to anyone that watched the movie in advance of the episode. Producing an episode every week is an incredible amount of work, and no one is more disappointed than we are this one is lost. The mistakes we’ve made along the way have only made the show better. Remember, watching a movie is never a waste of time if you get to talk about it with your friends.
