Brilliant! I fell asleep almost twice, I wanted to gouge my eyeballs out ONLY once, and the acting was so amazing that I even ended up quitting the movie just 20 minutes in, stretching it across 4 days! Isn't it wonderful to be alive

If the films of the 70s — well, let's say the excesses of Russ Meyer and the drug and biker movies that I love so much — prove to me that there's no way I would have survived the excesses of the decade. There's another truism — the movies of that era have people and imagery that look like no one and nothing else. Yet Anna Biller — who created this and The Love Witch — is the rare filmmaker that is able to recapture that past without merely creating a pastiche that has no heart and soul of its own. VIVA may take its look and feel from the classic exploitation cinema and vintage Playboy magazines of the early 70s, with the gaudiest apartments outside of a Sergio Martino movie and colors that practically bathe your eyes in a soft and lush bath of joy. Yet on the inside of this taffeta-wrapped box lies hints that 1972 wasn't always what was seen on drive-in screens. There aren't many films that are inspired by both the works of Hugh Hefner and Luis Buñuel — I would say that this is the only one — and for that, the world is a much worse place. Biller wrote, directed, edited, designed the costume and stars in this film, which is the most self-aware movie I've seen that features unself-aware characters, which is some kind of meta backflip trickery when you get right down to it. Barbi (Biller) starts the film happily married to the workaholic Rick, all while dealing with harassment at every turn, from her boss to her friends Mark and Sheila. Yet when her husband continually chooses work over her, she decides that she's a single woman. And with Sheila also now single, the two ladies decide to go into the oldest of all professions, like something out of a Barry Mahon film. Can a movie based on films and magazines that pretty much defined the male gaze break through and become a strong piece of feminist art? When it's as well made as this film, the answer is yes. That said, this is a film that definitely feels like it will work better for an audience who understands camp and has a beyond working knowledge of the material that inspired it. As I watched a scene where Barbi got ready for her man to come home, I was struck by one of the first women I ever dated that cared about make up. I felt horrible that she was spending so much time putting on a frustrating pair of false eyelashes and said, "You don't have to do that. I think you look just fine without them." And she replied, "Maybe I'm not wearing them for you." I'm glad that I learned that lesson. And glad that I watched this film.

Satire? Homage? Recreation? VIVA does a remarkable job recreating the look and much of the style of 70s sexploitation movies. At an hour it might have been a fun little homage to the genre. Going on and on for two hours, it creates a rather dystopian story of free love.

This movie was a major disappointment. Anna Biller tries very hard to live in the world of the 70s. She succeeds tremendously at creating and crafting (literally, I mean most of the sets she made herself) every little detail that is 70s. She does a great job and should be commended for that alone. However, the stilted dialogue, the overlong running time and the tremendously crappy way it's captured makes me want to ACTUALLY pull out a REAL movie from the 70s. This was dull to it's core.

The production design is unparalleled, but it's the two-hour film that feels longer, and one whose tangential scenes you can identify immediately. Worst of all, the feelings Biller wishes us to have for her characters are nonentities, particularly after her dismissal of a rape scene.

This has a great look, sound and feel of the era it is depicting, and the sets and styles hits it just right. It was fun, very visual, but too long.

While this attempt to recreate 60s/70s exploitation films does capture the look and feel of those films, it unfortunately captures the attitudes of the misogynist leisure-suit crowd a little too well. Rape in this narrative is not addressed as a serious problem, but instead as a freaky dramatic thing to happen, from which characters seem to bounce back from with no psychological recrimination. And once you find out that the woman who stars in it also WROTE it, the fact that every character who graces the screen (even gay men) makes declarations of her beauty and sexiness makes it little more than annoying, narcissistic wish-fullfillment. It's on a par with a 15 year old girl writing fanfiction in which her "Mary Sue" character wins the love of all her favorite movie actors. I'm so sorry I saw this turkey!

This movie is fucking brilliant. It was the most perfect homage to late sixties/early seventies sexploitation flicks I've ever seen. Had I not known that it was made two years ago I would never in a million years have thought that it wasn't the real thing. Everything, right down to the film stock, looked authentic. You can't really be sure whether the characters are played by extremely bad actors or extremely good actors pretending to be bad actors. Either way it's great. Not only that, but none of the actors looked like they belonged in this century. They look more like the casting agent set the way back machine for the early seventies and just cast people from the era. The sets were dead on, the dialogue is completely ridiculous and laced with blatant sexual innuendos, and the nudity? I don't think word abundant does it justice. Anna Biller may be one of my new heroes (and unlike most of my heroes I can think naughty thoughts about this one). Viva is a funny, stylistic, and extremely fucking hot achievement. Oh, and did I mention that there's a hippie nudist jam session?

A great throwback to 70's sexploitation movies about a bored housewife who decides to explore her sexuality by becoming a call girl. She quickly becomes a sort of Red Riding Hood moving through the sexual revolution. Writer/Director Anna Biller (who also produced/starred and did the costume and set designs) did an amazing job of re-creating the look and feel of a film from that period, complete with over the top acting, campy dialogue, sex and nudity galore and even a few musical numbers, one of which takes place at a nudist camp. Anna Biller herself even disrobes several times throughout and treats us to a lesbian scene. I had a boner through half the film. Well done, and bravo!

Aesthetically gorgeous, ideologically muddled. As an act of replication, it's tops, but I'm less sure of it as an alleged satire. Of course, if the film had been more overtly parodic or didactic it wouldn't really have worked either, so I'm not sure what I'd add, necessarily. It runs long, and watching the main character get assaulted over and over gets exhausting.

An homage to the "frustrated housewife" genre that featured so prominently in sexploitation cinema, replicating in extravagantly pointless detail the disjointed narrative lines, stilted performances, laughable haircuts, and dreadful, dreadful dialogue that might be witnessed upon ducking into an off-Broadway fleapit at the turn of the 70s... No attempt is made to subvert the dodgy sexual politics or stereotypes: the genre is merely recreated as was, right down to the "comedy" scene in which Barbi gets screwed by a butch passer-by, having been drugged by her gay hairdresser neighbour. If "Viva" *was* intended as a deconstruction of the values of exploitation cinema - and the evidence as presented suggests that's a big if - wouldn't it have been better made in 1970 rather than 2009, and wouldn't Biller's crusading energies be better expended on making something with more relevance to the world, and its hang-ups, today? As it is, "Viva" can be filed away safely as ironic sexploitation: a nonsense, in other words, because there's no such thing as ironic sex. You either go at it full-throttle, or not at all; it doesn't pay to put your genitals in quotation marks, however glossy and appealing the latter might be.

[font=Calibri][size=3]Viva is an intelligent, self-aware and beautifully satirical film - a film that can be classified as indie in style. [/size][/font] [font=Calibri][size=3][/size][/font] [font=Calibri][size=3]On a general level in the filmic medium, representation pertains to the construction and composition of aspects of ‘reality’. [i]Viva [/i]existing as a period piece realises, recreates and situates an authentic, effectual vision of exploitation movies from the 1970s. This is significant for several reasons. Firstly, filmic representation inherently involves a process of selection. Moreover, representation here stands in for and takes the place of what it represents. Biller, speaking of [i]Viva [/i]continuously notes the significance of her own experiences as a woman and relates these to the complexities of a “gender problem that’s universal and will always exist.”[/size][/font][url="http://uk.chrc4work.com/vine/journal_entry.php?action=addentry&journalid=703406&type=movie&id=1195796#_ftn1"][font=Calibri][u][color=#800080][1][/color][/u][/font][/url][size=3][font=Calibri] While purposely recreating the pseudo-psychedelic vogue of the seventies, Biller makes visible the episodic and excessive nature of the sexploitation film. That is to say that Biller represents the purposeful deformation of naturalness as a desired filmic style and highlights the deformation of the traditional gender divide in relation to new desires (particularly female desire) for freedom; for something authentic; something more than domesticity. The authenticity of the text then is attained through psychological realism. Barbi is represented as confused, bored, alienated and a little absurd noting at the hippie nudist commune: “I don’t want to be a man’s play-thing.” Barbi thus appears to search for an authentic experience associated with sex and perhaps, this is indeed, the greatest success of [i]Viva[/i]. Notably, Barbi fails (of course) to find [i]jouissance. [/i]In lieu the Thing, she realises her own existential authenticity. As Tanya Krzywinska, author of [i]Sex and the Cinema [/i](2006:42) notes, sex and the representation of sex on screen is often far from idealistic. Instead, sex and the complexities of sexual relations upon the individual are represented in order to highlight the thorny, unsettling effects of the social order: “A key motive behind the use of psychological realism, is to show that sex is a physical and problematic business. Realism is often used in films that focus on sex in the light of problems originating within the social order, and, in some cases, facilitate the demonstration of the effects of a hierarchical differentiation in the exercise of power.”[/font][/size][url="http://uk.chrc4work.com/vine/journal_entry.php?action=addentry&journalid=703406&type=movie&id=1195796#_ftn2"][font=Calibri][u][color=#800080][2][/color][/u][/font][/url][font=Calibri][size=3] Biller's creation is more than sexy - it is sexually aware and recreates the zing of the 70s in order to highlight the dissatisfaction of desire for women in "a man's world". [/size][/font] [font=Calibri][size=3][/size][/font][url="http://uk.chrc4work.com/vine/journal_entry.php?action=addentry&journalid=703406&type=movie&id=1195796#_ftnref1"][font=Calibri][u][color=#800080][1][/color][/u][/font][/url][font=Calibri] Keith Waterfield (2008) [i]Viva: Q&A with Anna Biller [/i]http://www.altfg.com/blog/hollywood/viva-qa-with-anna-biller/[Accessed 03.03.09][/font] [url="http://uk.chrc4work.com/vine/journal_entry.php?action=addentry&journalid=703406&type=movie&id=1195796#_ftnref2"][font=Calibri][u][color=#800080][2][/color][/u][/font][/url][font=Calibri] Tanya Krzywinska [i]Sex and the Cinema [/i](London & New York: Wallflower, 2006:42)[i] [/i][/font]

Purposely bad and effective at that. The acting is awkward and artificial. The whole look is more than retro - it is exaggeratedly weird and trippy within the style bracket of the 70s. Quite disorientating like a sort of screen hallucinogen.

I love that they made a satire of the old 70's softcore movie. The actors was great at playing bad or maybe they were just bad for real, anyway that's the way you want it. Bad plot as in the old movies. A atractive young girl gets abused by everyone but in the end she learns a lesson. Watch it for the boobs or just for the fun of it.

I know everything in this movie was intentionally created in order to parody the soft porn movies of the 70's, but as I can't seat right now and enjoy a 70's soft porn movie, I definitely could not seat and enjoy its 2007 satire.

I know everything in this movie was intentionally created in order to parody the soft porn movies of the 70's, but as I can't seat right now and enjoy a 70's soft porn movie, I definitely could not seat and enjoy its 2007 satire.

This ode to trashy soft core porn from the early 70s has great sets, a great soundtrack; everything is just right. Even the shaky acting ability of the cast works to the point where I can't decide if it's intended or not. The problem is that all the stylized details still can't support a 2 hour film. There's a reason these movies were crap that nobody watched the first time around.

visually, the 70s sexploitation vibe is captured superbly well, along with some deliberately bad acting and a curious feminist subtext, but the stylised humour got a little too Austin Powers for me at times; that all said, there's a cornucopia of male/female flesh and sexy retro clothing on display

Beautiful sets, great colours, but an extreeeeeemely slow film.

One ups Todd Haynes by being both smart AND fun.