Review of Landing Up

Landing Up (2018)
6/10
Down and Out in the Big Apple
5 January 2021
Warning: Spoilers
"Landing Up" was a watchable slice of life depicting two extremely intelligent women down and out in New York City. Katie Jo and Cece dream of having an apartment in Manhattan. But neither seems practical enough to recognize that they first need to get a job.

The film was a stretch in portraying characters who believed that their ticket to success was in finding the right man. It was almost as if this film was conceived for some era other than the twenty-first century. For Cece, it is a junkie named James with whom she has the occasional opportunity to shack up. In the case of Katie Jo, her personal address book contains a massive list of her hook-ups and the aliases she has used. Her discovery of David with whom she has some chemistry has some promise. Their "relationship" reaches the two-week mark in the course of the film.

The two women assume that if Katie Jo informs David that she is homeless, then he will dump her. The result is a cascade of lies. Yet another disturbing moment is when Katie Jo murders James, injecting him with an overdose, so that she and Cece can occupy his apartment.

This was not a depiction of the possibilities of realizing the American Dream. It was a sad story of the disenfranchised dreaming of landing up, but always facing the possibility of descending into a darker region of the lower depths. One always roots for an underdog. But these characters never gave a sign of working up, let along landing up, to their potential.
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