-Archives-

July 21, 2000

Quick Takes: "Getting to Know You"

By OWEN GLEIBERMAN
Entertainment Weekly -- #550

Joyce Carol Oates, with her florid gothis feel for casual psychodramatic horror, should probaly be adapted for the movies more often. In "Getting to Know You," director Lisanne Skyler interpolates three Oates short stories to form a tapestry of middle-class violence and flight. Despite a few seams, the movie holds you in its steadily intensifying grip.

Heather Matarazzo, whose puffy-lipped quizzicality has grown more sensual and commanding since "Welcome to the Dollhouse," has the pivotal role of Judith, a thoughtful, passice teenager who is waiting, along with her brother (Zach Branff), in an upstate New York bus station. We get vivid flashed of the domestic snake pit that these two siblings have left behind: life with theis parents, a pair of alcoholic ballroom dancers (played, with charismatic force, by Bebe Neuwirth and Mark Blum) who have dropped off the bottom rung of showbiz. Meanwhile, Jimmy (Michael Weston), another kid at the station, spins further tales of everyday destruction, which lend the film an elegant, brooding symmetry.

Grade: B+