Factory Girl Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Sad but beautiful vignette of a life wasted...

A really interesting and extremely well played look into the bohemian side of life in the 60's that created and dropped icons and twisted already fragile minds beyond what they could take. This isn't a particularly cheerful film but is very interesting, informative and important.

Edie is brilliantly played by Sienna Miller, and comes across as the fun seeking faun of 60s pop art scene, but inside fragile and manipulated and used by many around her. While Warhol (again I think brilliantly brought across by Guy Pearce ) is a weirdo who fed off the misplaced adoration of groupies around him picking up and dropping people he could use and feed off like confetti.

There are a few factual errors, In the film his father is said to be a Miner, and that is generally thought to be the case, he was actually a construction worker from Pennsylvania, the family were immigrants from Slovakia named Varchola, and as a boy Warhol gained much of his eccentricity by being at home suffering with a nervous disorder that caused blotchiness and he would stay home with mother rather then mix with others, in the weird world of the 60's this gave him a weird magnetic aura that blew up out of all proportions relative to his skill.

I feel his 'pop' art is more a hang off from his previous incarnation as a simply advertising illustrator, I certainly don't find his art as important or original as other contemporary artists say Picasso or Dali, in fact his output was probably blown into fame by the reputation gained by his drug fuelled hangers on.

I was brought into knowing Edie by the Cult song of the same name (Edie-Ciao baby) which I still play regularly, and I think this sums up Edie Sedgewick extremely well 'Caught up in an endless scene, Paradise a shattered dream'.... Indeed... well worth a watch.

Factory Girl (2006)

A beautiful, wealthy young party girl drops out of Radcliffe in 1965 and heads to New York to become Holly Golightly. When she meets a hungry young artist named Andy Warhol, he promises to make her the star she always wanted to be. And like a super nova she explodes on the New York scene only to find herself slowly lose grip on reality...