Appropriate title

Who needs professional acting? Here's a test of why professional acting isn't always good. How many great child performances have you seen where the kid actually acts in a natural, spontaneous way that a real kid does? Usually in a professionally acted movie, the child acts like a miniature adult, even while ensconced in the supposed trappings and cliches of childhood.

People are interesting enough in themselves without all those contrivances. I feel like in Trash and Heat, where the characters are basically playing themselves, that the actors' primal states emerge. It gives me a sense of tactile realism beyond 99% of what other movies provide. It has all the naturalism, even in its greatest sordidness, of watching real children at play.

"And a Happy New Year to you, George Bailey.... in jail!"

And who needs a story line?

The whole point is that these characters' lives have no story line. They live from pathetic moment to pathetic moment. Like most people, they are pitifully clueless in their grotesquely inept schemes. As the Joe Dallesandro character says after they fail to get into welfare because Holly will not bribe the welfare visitor with the absurd pair of shoes she has found in the garbage, "We'll do what we've always done". THAT could be on our money more truthfully than E pluribus unum or, certainly, In God We Trust.

This is both moving and very amusing.






If the Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard, It can also be like a chicken-pox mark.

I didn't like this film, either. I had heard about it for years and wanted to see it, and when I did it was a huge disappointment (in my opinion). Watch Kevin DiNovis' SURRENDER DOROTHY, instead.