Factory Girl (2006)

Genres : Drama and Biopic
Tagline : When Andy met Edie, life imitated art.
Release Date : December 29th, 2006 (limited)
MPAA Rating : R for pervasive drug use, strong sexual content, nudity and language.
Runtime : USA:90 min
Country : USA
Language : Polish / English
Color : Color / Black and White
Trivia : his movie is Mary-Kate Olsen’s first project without her sister
Sienna Miller was cast twice as Edie Sedgwick. She was actually dropped by the producers of this movie, because they felt they needed a “bigger name”. Miller was eventually re-cast, after she received a lot of publicity due to her public break-up from fiancée Jude Law.
Description :The year is 1965, and Edie Sedgwick is living every young girl’s dream. Rich, ambitious and breathtakingly beautiful, Edie’s life changes forever when she meets Andy Warhol, New York’s most famous artist, and the man who will transform this trust fund baby into the Big Apple’s most dazzling Superstar.
At the center of this exciting and decadent new world is The Factory, Warhol’s downtown loft, a place where musicians, artists, actors and all types of misfits gather to create art and movies during the day, and to throw fabulous parties at night. It is here that Edie takes her place at Andy’ss side as the Factory’s most alluring and irresistible Superstar. Edie has the world at her feet. Every woman wants to be her. Every man wants to be with her. But unable to find the love she craves from Andy and The Factory Edie turns to the “voice of a generation” singer-songwriter Danny Quinn, a captivating and talented musician who represents everything that Andy is not - where Andy is all cool surfaces, Danny burns with the fire of his convictions. Danny pushes Edie to free herself from Andy, who has been using her in his movies but never paying her. Edie quickly falls for Danny, but every affair has its price.
DVD Cover : Download from here
Exclusive Download :Trailer 1
Review : At the outset, Factory Girl looks like thin material for a biopic: It covers the life of Edie Sedgwick, a college dropout propelled to “it” girl status by Andy Warhol in the sixties, only to lose herself, as “it” people often do, to drugs and fresher faces. The movie starts with her leaving college, ends well before her death at age 28, and (intentionally or not) presents a convincing case that she didn’t do much with the years in between.
But so many filmed biographies cram from childhood to old age, resulting in filmed Cliff Notes, or a mini-series at twice the speed and half the scenes. That Factory Girl doesn’t have to cover an Edie Sedgwick comeback — that she dies young and off-camera — is a perverse relief. George Hickenlooper’s brief, sometimes impressionistic film is most illuminating when showing both the allure and the casualties of Warhol’s free but detached Factory scene.
Speaking with an upper-crust movie-star accent that sounds sort of like a cigarette-damaged Audrey Hepburn (Sedgwick’s idol), Sienna Miller plays Edie Sedgwick not as a larger-than-life force of nature but as a girl who wants to be famous, have fun, and escape her wretched (but monied) family life. In Warhol’s purposefully artificial and unscripted DIY movies, she could be herself, not do much of anything, and still win art-circle praise. She needs Warhol (Guy Pearce) more than he needs her, but he’s the one who feels slighted and hurt if she, say, spends time with an unnamed musician who looks and sounds an awful lot like Bob Dylan (Hayden Christensen). Pearce is terrific as Warhol, welcoming Edie into his world and then shutting her — or anyone else — out with cold ease, shielding himself with his sunglasses and peppering his speech with oh yeahs that manage to sound both inviting and dismissive.
Christensen may have an even tougher part, essentially playing Dylan without getting to admit it, but he’s helped by an uncanny resemblance to the folk poet as a young man, as well as an ability to capture the truth and bluster behind a young Dylan. The various scenes between Sedgwick, Warhol, and/or semi-Dylan all have an odd, alluring art-project charge.
But Pearce and Christensen aren’t onscreen all the time — they can’t stick around for Sedgwick’s druggy fade-out — and the movie suffers without them. Hickenlooper has assembled an eclectic supporting cast, but underuses familiar faces like Jimmy Fallon, Mena Suvari, and Illeana Douglas, all doing what they can with brief, two-dimensional roles that beg for a standout scene or two. The closest any of the support has to a moment is a protective outburst from Edie’s college friend (apparent Weinstein contract player Shawn Hatosy).
A wandering, ill-defined supporting cast can be symptomatic of a real mess, but if anything, Factory Girl isn’t messy enough, with some tidy voiceover musings from Miller that the actors render redundant with just a few lines or gestures. With plot smartly de-emphasized in favor of scene-setting, Hickenlooper could’ve gone further with the film’s stylish visual hodgepodge of blurs, slow-motion, and high-contrast photography. Instead, the film holds back, a little too restrained to break out of the rise-and-fall biopic trajectory, even as Sedgwick’s lost life provides plenty of diversions from this formula. All of the talented background players look like victims of this slight reticence.
But is it so lamentable that a film about a semi-model-slash-semi-actress, willing to try whatever but only fitting in for a little while, registers more as a curiosity than a full-fledged film? If nothing else, Factory Girl gives an unsettling glimpse into what it’s like to be used up and then left out by an unforgiving art scene. Sedgwick liked attention and she liked having fun; at least the movie honors half of that.
Directed by : George Hickenlooper
Produced by : Simon Monjack, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein
Sound Mix : DTS / Dolby Digital / SDDS
Official Website : www.factorygirlmovie.net
Actors :
Guy Pearce | Andy Warhol
Sienna Miller | Edie Sedgwick
Hayden Christensen | Danny Quinn
Jimmy Fallon | Chuck Wein
Meredith Ostrom | Nico
Michael Des Barres | Al Sorenson
Jack Huston | Gerard Malanga
Mena Suvari | Richie Berlin
Alexi Wasser | Lexa
Peter Bogdanovich | James Townsend
Shawn Hatosy | Syd Pepperman
Tara Summers | Brigid Berlin
Illeana Douglas | Diana Vreeland
Beth Grant | Julia Warhol
Edward Herrmann | James Townsend
Sally Kirkland | Grandma Sedgwick
Mary-Kate Olsen | Molly Spence
Don Novello | Mort Silvers
Armin Amero | Ondine
James Naughton | Fuzzy Sedgwick


(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
February 20th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Quoted “crossbow0106 from United States”
It is very rare that you see people walk out of a theater within 40 minutes of the opening credits, but I counted 8. I should have been the 9th. Horrible dialogue (and, if it is the actual words, these people had nothing worthwhile to say!), the “Dylan” character completely unconvincing and the acting, save for Sienna Miller, who seemed to be trying, nothing more than uninspired. I think it would have been better if there was a documentary of Edie Sedgewick, at least then it may have been less haphazard. You try, but you just don’t care about these people, and in a biopic (sort of) thats just not tolerable. If anyone wants to learn of Edie, you’d best read “Edie”, the fascinating book edited by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. I bet those 8 people who left early did, which is probably why they hated it so much.