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List Price: $9.98 | | Label: 20th Century Fox
Salesrank: 616
Released: March 18, 2003 |
| Our Price: $4.63 |
| Used Price: $4.99 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Get ready for laughs the size of Texas when Olivia Newton-John, Beau Bridges, Bonnie Bedelia and Delta Burke lead an all-star cast in this twisted, white-trash tale "that puts the 'fun' in 'dysfunctional'" (Toronto Sun). The hilariously sordid details about a southern family surface with a vengeance when relatives converge for the funeral of "Grandma Peggy," who died after tripping over her lover's wooden legs! Toss in a couple of feuding, big-haired daughters, a jumpy aunt who just quit smoking, the scorned neighbor from hell, and crazy, cross-dressing "Brother Boy" - and you've got an outrageous "train wreck you can't help but watch!" (Chicago Tribune)
Description of Sordid Lives:
If you've got a taste for big hair, broad Texas accents, and gay rights, this mixture of white-trash comedy and coming-out melodrama is for you. Sordid Lives starts out as chicken-fried farce, as a funeral is prepared for a woman who died when she tripped over her adulterous lover's wooden legs; about midway the emphasis shifts to a drag queen unfairly held in a mental institution and the dead woman's grandson, an actor in Los Angeles who hasn't come out to his mother. The tone shifts wildly, and the humor depends on your fondness for the white-trash genre--if you like it, this will tickle your ribs; if you don't, it'll fall flat as the panhandle landscape. But it must be said that the cast (including Bonnie Bedelia, Beau Bridges, Delta Burke, and Olivia Newton-John) dives right in, no matter how over-the-top their characters get. --Bret Fetzer
Sordid Lives Reviews:
Sordid Lives 
2008-10-07 - Great easy purchase, very fast delivery - awesome product, just as described. THANKS AMAZON!! Awesome funny movie!
Cute but flawed 
2008-10-04 - Sordid Lives is like many films that have attained "cult" status in that it's an awkward, ungainly production whose devotees embrace it for the very elements that mainstream audiences might consider flaws.
The story is simple and straightforward, and the characters are potentially interesting, but they most seem two-dimensional. Beau Bridges is wasted on a drunk buffoon who's never really funny or given much to do. Bonnie Bedelia fares better as the prissy mom of the narrating character, because she chooses to play the part straight instead of broad. Even when she's being ridiculous, she's far more real than most of the cast, who, while energetic, are often not likable and frequently cartoonish. I suspect this is more about the script and the direction than the actors.
The gay subplot of the film is handled with a surprisingly heavy hand, and while Leslie Jordan's character Brother Boy is played with a certain level of dignity, the part as written is more stereotypical and broad that you'd think. Cooped up in an insane asylum for 23 years, Brother Boy lives vicariously as Loretta Lynn, but it's never clear if he's adopted his country music queen persona as a mechanism for distancing himself from the horrible world he inhabits, if he has gone slightly nuts from his years locked up, or both. The story takes a cheap way out by having him confronted by a psychologist who's clearly the biggest but in the booby hatch. The character of Ty, who narrates the story from his therapist's office, is bland, and for every story he tells that feels real and touches a nerve, there's something else that feels worn and retreaded. Ty never seems to be connected to the world he describes.
There's fun and funny stuff here, but the morals are heavy handed, and the story tries too hard to be outrageous, often resulting in forced comedy.
That this film is adapted from a play is readily apparent and all too obvious. I've not seen the play, but its fingerprint are all over the film: the staging and the dialogue and the fact that the whole story plays out in essentially four locations (house, mental hospital, bar and church) all point out this origin in really obvious ways. The thing takes place in essentially four scenes, and while intercut, it's still obviously four scenes. Those scenes would have been better off subdivided into smaller scenes and played in different locations.
Worst of all the technical execution is terrible. Apparently being one of the first indies shot on high def video, the film has a weird flat quality that isn't helped by amateurish lighting schemes where actors actually step into key lights of their fellow performers, casting them in shadows. The camera work itself is shaky and the setup and angles are often clumsy. The deleted scenes on the DVD demonstrate how bad this work can be, as some of the deleted material is so poorly photographed that one suspects it was dropped for its lack of visual quality as opposed to its narrative effectiveness.
In a way, the TV series spawned from it is better than the film itself, because it's written in bite-size scenes suited to television and film.
sordid lives
2008-10-02 - The dvd arrived in excellent condition. I would continue to do business with this company. The product arrived sooner than expected. I was extremely satisfied.
Sordid Lives the Movie
2008-09-30 - Loved it. Laughed and laughed and laughed! I love the series which is a prequel to the movie. I'm a dis-functional person from the southwest and can relate. This movie is for adults (adult children). I laughed, I cried I happily kissed 10 bucks goodbye.
Sordid Review 
2008-09-26 - I have been watching the Sordid Lives new series on Logo and it is hysterically funny! The series gives events prior to those in the movie.
If you like the series you will like the movie (although the movie is not quite as funny as the series). If you like irreverent white trash humor
you will like this movie. Great cast! Enjoy!
