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Foxfire Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 29 Reviews)

In your face and gripping
Just a great movie. A breath of fresh air, because unlike most of the films about girls, boys or men are the center of everything and this film focused on the relationships and love between the girls, and it accurately portrays the feelings of lost, uncontented teens who know that there has to be something more.

The funny sequences in this movie are almost too funny- A couple of the people who were watching it with me turned blue, and it has some great one-liners.

Fun to watch, it picks you up and won't put you down.

Like fire...
This film burns the screen with power, sensitivity, unbreakable bonds and emotional connections that will blow your mind. Jolie and Burress shine in Foxfire in a way that you'll never forget. Every woman has been a girl, and, even if they store their feelings deep inside, they have to wish they had spent a few months like these girls. I know I do. But even guys have to relate to the realistic rebellious and connected spirit these girls reflect on-screen. Every character is well-developed. I wish I could change the ending of the movie, but that ending is what keeps things real. This movie is definitely a treasure.

Decent movie with an awful, awful ending.
Foxfire (Angela Haywood-Carter, 1996)

Foxfire is a great idea for a movie that, somewhere, went wrong. Not horribly wrong, really, just wrong.

It starts off well enough. Honestly, "well enough" describes Haywood-Carter's first (and, to date, only) full-length feature for most of its length. Rita Faldes (Pleasantville's Jenny Lewis) is a mousy high school student who nearly has a breakdown in biology class when frog dissection day rolls around. That day, a stranger shows up and drops in on class-- Legs (Angelina Jolie). Everyone assumes she's a new student, so she passes without remark, at least until she stands up for Rita, then escapes through a window (with the frog). In detention after school, the teacher, Mr. Buttinger (Point Pleasant's John Diehl), puts the moves on Rita, and is stopped by a Legs-led cabal that also contains Maddy Wurtz (Boston Common beauty Hedy Burress), Violet Kuhn (Slaughter Party's Sarah Rosenberg)-- whom said teacher had also accosted-- and, as a latecomer, Goldie Goldman (The New Women's Jenny Shimizu). The five of them, flush with success, end up suspended for three weeks, during which time they bond at an abandoned house on the woods where Maddy often goes to indulge in her photography habit. As they grow more self-sufficient, however, they find themselves increasingly unable to fit into the conventional society beyond the woods.

What is fundamentally wrong with the film is not, actually, the film itself-- most of it, anyway. The parallel between the growing power and self-assurance of the girls and their increasing outcast status is exceptionally well-handled, and that power and self-assurance is depicted with just the right amount of discomfort on both the parts of the girls and the parts of the viewers. As should be expected in any movie based on a novel by the redoubtable Joyce Carol Oates, there is a great deal of subtext to be had, and it all works quite nicely. For ninety-seven of the film's hundred two minutes, this is some good stuff, here.

Then come the last five minutes, and everything goes down the tubes. Storylines simply disappear. Things which had been depicted subtly and effectively earlier in the film come back, and their symbolism is rammed down the viewer's throat. Characters disappear. It's as if a different, and incompetent, director took over for the film's final scenes.

Final score: ** ?. Would have been four had the ending been at all worthwhile.

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