Everything you need to know can be learned in the Charlottesville Corner Parking Lot (CPL): the customer is always an asshole; chicks in Lilly Pulitzer are privileged dips; to make a compelling documentary, you don’t need a big budget if you have a cast of grad students, poets, philosophers, and “otherwise unemployable misfits” who engage in class warfare on a daily basis.
Shot almost entirely at the CPL, right next to preppy University of Virginia, and directly behind several meathead bars, The Parking Lot Movie does more than just chronicle the tortured hipster souls who hold court there, playing “flip cone” and pondering existentialism between arguments with bitchy co-eds over pocket change.
Director Meghan Eckman’s film is also a tribute to CPL-like institutions that soldiers in the pastel army barely notice as they cruise by in their luxury tanks.
