Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Whitech It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

nickb393 Websters defines exploding as "what happens when an explosion goes off" usually caused by the complex and nuanced relationships between various chemicals and elements. There is nothing complex or nuanced between the relationship explored in Bradley Rust Grey's Exploding Girl. I will go ahead and spoil the plot of this movie, if only to save others from the same fate that I suffered; Ivy (Zoe Kazan) gets dumped by her boyfriend, who we never actually see, but hear his monotonous voice via a series of phone calls (probably because he was playing XBOX or something and didn't want to be concerned with physically appearing in such drivel) and shacks up with her sexually ambiguous platonic friend, Al (Mark Rendell, the scene wrecking wussy brother of Josh Hartnett in 30 Days of Night). Ivy has epilepsy, which i presume is to draw some sympathy for her emotional plight kinda like how the old woman in the notebook had dementia. I personally would have found it more entertaining/believable if she had down syndrome. I feel as though there is a lack of quality roles for actors with down syndrome, and although the meaningless character study of Ivy could hardly be described as quality, it would at least be a step in the right direction for the acceptance of disabled actors. Anyway she has a bit of an epileptic spas out as epileptics do, again this scene didn't really add anything to the narrative, but I could strangely relate to it, as at this point I wished I had gone into uncontrollable spasms and hit my head on something so as not to watch the remainder of this pretentious garbage, but alas it weren't to be. Many of my loyal readers must be wondering, "why didn't you just walk out?" and the short answer is it was valentines day and I was trying to impress a date with my taste in independent cinema. In retrospect i should have just stayed at home and wacked off.Peace

delft_blue I wanted to love this film. In fact, the opening was quite breathtaking with the flashes of sunlight coming in through the car window. I also liked the plot idea of two friends and the possibility they just might be perfect for one another. But, it didn't all come together for me. There was something missing from this film, and the more I think on it, I realize that the only fully-fleshed character was Ivy. Greg, who you never see, is flat and predictable. You only hear him talking to Ivy in broken lies over a cell phone. He's barely explained.Greg's poor treatment of Ivy is supposed to be in stark contrast to Al, who adores Ivy and has known her since eighth grade or something. I got sick early on of the filmmaker pointing out how they seemed to complete each other with their sharing of a milkshake, pizza slice, cigarettes, earphones, and Al's readiness to come home whenever Ivy wanted him to. It was over-the-top, especially when early on a family friend mistakes them for a couple. I disliked how a conversation with Greg was often followed by a caring conversation with Al. I thought I could figure out on my own who the good guy was supposed to be.Everything about Al's character seems to have been created just to highlight how perfect he would be for Ivy. His lack of a back story is troubling. Who is he? Why does he not have a place to stay (or, why was his room rented and because of that, no mention of his parents or why he's in the city for the summer)? I wanted to know more about him! Also, why was epilepsy important in the film? I thought this would be central to the plot and it barely is. Ivy goes for blood work that is never reported on, and during a grand mal seizure the camera is angled so that you see the side of Ivy's arm and Al's back. In closing, though so much is hammered home in terms of how Ivy and Al would be a great couple, a lot of key details are forgotten, or left for the viewer to fill in on her own. You end up ultimately not knowing what this film is trying to say. I left this film caring no more about the characters than I did in the first scene. The filmmaker saturates the story with "look how perfect they are for each other" innuendo, but doesn't quite deliver in terms of other important details. Disappointing.

napierslogs The title "The Exploding Girl" is figurative not literal. I would add "of course" but that's not as obvious given movies nowadays. This is a low-budget, independent character study.It's about Ivy on college break, back home in New York City. Ivy struggles with love and friendship. And the film-maker shows us this with really slow-moving, seemingly unimportant scenes mired in the noisy streets of New York City. I know the city is basically supposed to be its own character, but the loud, constant bus and car noises and obstruction just lowered the quality of the film.Zoe Kazan's Ivy is very cute and likable, but even with her epilepsy, her college problems seem minor compared to the stress that other college girls experience. Her boyfriend back at college was painted one-dimensionally. And although I didn't mind Al, the reason given for him moving in with Ivy was very odd and never explained.It's called a "discreet character study". I will agree with that in the sense that meaning was hard to find, dialogue was indiscernible and silent at times, and reasons for few things happening was kept private from the audience. The brilliance displayed in the poster is only found once in the film, and is not enough to watch it. "The Exploding Girl" is only for the very discerning film viewer who likes slow-moving character studies of little importance.

lor_ I don't like "movies" shot on video, and this one is no exception. Its semi-improvised dialog was also a barrier to appreciation, as well as the fledgling director's pretentious approach to photography.Except for interiors, nearly all the barely-edited shots are long shots using very shallow focus - a technique I thought went out in the '60s. The cast's conversations are shot as if using a hidden camera (the hi-def RED camera is used here), from across the street with intervening cars or pedestrians frequently blocking the principals from our view. Add to that protagonist Mark Rendall's speech impediment (I counted him stating the word "like" 25 times in less than a minute) and you have distancing of the viewer taken to the extreme.Our heroine played OK enough by Zoe Kazan (she won a dubious Best Actress award from the lowliest of film festivals, the must-miss Tribeca event, which doesn't even take place in Tribeca anymore) remains a blank. She's an epileptic and sure enough, has too many beers, causing a seizure late in the film, but I didn't find that potential disability handled with any insight or relevance to the surrounding film. The story's emphasis on her also was a drag; it reminded me of that Golden Age of porno (now several decades back) when one sometimes experienced a horrific moment, usually during the second or third reel, of realization: "We're going to be stuck looking at this solitary girl for the whole movie!".Mercifully short, about 75 minutes after removing the slow-slow padding of the end credits, the feature had only two good scenes: one rooftop checking out the pet pigeons that starts as a too-obvious homage to Zoe's grandpa Elia Kazan (classic Saint/Brando scene from ON THE WATERFRONT) and ends up improbably as a Werner Herzog homage, capturing the strange abstract patterns created by flocks of birds in formation that was the signature image of Werner's 2004 film THE WHITE DIAMOND. The other scene I enjoyed was a simple finale ring shot of the hero & heroine asleep in the backseat of a car, unconsciously clasping their hands together.Low points were a "gee whiz" visit to a SoHo building supposedly once the site of Nikola Tesla's shop -like so many Manhattan non-landmarks it looks like nothing now; and the endless use of cell phones, one of which permitted an entire performance (Zoe's heel of a boyfriend Greg) to be literally phoned in. I am also nominating THE EXPLODING GIRL as the feature film with the lowest costume budget in recent history: it looks like they spent about $3.95 for the heroine's and hero's rumpled, slept-in crappy outfits; ditto ALL the extras (who obviously wore theirs from home).