I need your help. Usually when I see movies I don't care for but many others do, I can see the traits they had that made them appealing. Magnolia to me is drastically overrated but I do appreciate the effort put into the writing and acting. Moulin Rouge made me feel like a prisoner forced to give information but I recognized it's music, style and setting qualities. Upstream colors left me dumbfounded. I want to ask all those movie critics what was the hidden plot that they saw and I apparently never did.
The plot (and I use the term very loosely) revolves about a young woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) who falls victim to a con man that by using pills, hypnotism and even a worm, turns her to a submissive zombie and drains out her bank account. Broke, unemployed and wrought with emotional disturbances , Kris meets Jeff (Shane Carruth, who's got a lot of explaining to do) and form a very special bond wherein they refrain from coherent sentences and normal behavior. Things go downhill from here.
The movie also introduces us to a weird Art Garfunkel look alike who spends his days recording sounds, growing pigs, doing something not very nice to one of them, attaching them with earrings and name tags and eventually sends a bunch of people a book. The book is imperative to establish the "what the hell?" mood that accompanies the film.
Things go even worse from here.
Kris is now busy picking small rocks from the bottom of an indoor pool and reciting random lines from a book (Is it Walden? is this the same book that the pig farmer had sent? does any of this makes sense?) Jeff's unburied past is revealed while we learn that the pig farmer/sound recorder won't get away with it (although we don't know what "it" is).
Oh, we've only just started.
There's another couple. They don't make any sense either but at least we can take a breather from Kris and Jeff while waiting for that redeeming moment to put all the pieces of this puzzle together. A moment that never comes. Not to mention the orchids. I didn't figure them out, either.
I hate to be the sarcastic and mean spirited critic but I have to point out that this film is not only overrated, its acclaimed under false pretenses. Somewhere after 20 minutes, Carruth stops from making any attempt to follow a story line, the dialog is grotesque and there is no effort to bind these pack of stories to something that might resemble a movie.
The strangest thing is that the movie's editing is superb and so is the cinematography. Carruth, who clearly has an acute visual sense, left any shreds of a story buried under the rubble of sentence fragments and awkward silences.
Yes, I HAVE read all the explanations and theories regarding the plot holes and they are meaningless. The plot holes don't exist because the story is one giant black hole. If this review (thanks for reading it, by the way) was a bunch of random letters, would it have mattered if some of the letters were actual words?
Next time, I'll catch an actual movie.
2 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.
The plot (and I use the term very loosely) revolves about a young woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) who falls victim to a con man that by using pills, hypnotism and even a worm, turns her to a submissive zombie and drains out her bank account. Broke, unemployed and wrought with emotional disturbances , Kris meets Jeff (Shane Carruth, who's got a lot of explaining to do) and form a very special bond wherein they refrain from coherent sentences and normal behavior. Things go downhill from here.
The movie also introduces us to a weird Art Garfunkel look alike who spends his days recording sounds, growing pigs, doing something not very nice to one of them, attaching them with earrings and name tags and eventually sends a bunch of people a book. The book is imperative to establish the "what the hell?" mood that accompanies the film.
Things go even worse from here.
Kris is now busy picking small rocks from the bottom of an indoor pool and reciting random lines from a book (Is it Walden? is this the same book that the pig farmer had sent? does any of this makes sense?) Jeff's unburied past is revealed while we learn that the pig farmer/sound recorder won't get away with it (although we don't know what "it" is).
Oh, we've only just started.
There's another couple. They don't make any sense either but at least we can take a breather from Kris and Jeff while waiting for that redeeming moment to put all the pieces of this puzzle together. A moment that never comes. Not to mention the orchids. I didn't figure them out, either.
I hate to be the sarcastic and mean spirited critic but I have to point out that this film is not only overrated, its acclaimed under false pretenses. Somewhere after 20 minutes, Carruth stops from making any attempt to follow a story line, the dialog is grotesque and there is no effort to bind these pack of stories to something that might resemble a movie.
The strangest thing is that the movie's editing is superb and so is the cinematography. Carruth, who clearly has an acute visual sense, left any shreds of a story buried under the rubble of sentence fragments and awkward silences.
Yes, I HAVE read all the explanations and theories regarding the plot holes and they are meaningless. The plot holes don't exist because the story is one giant black hole. If this review (thanks for reading it, by the way) was a bunch of random letters, would it have mattered if some of the letters were actual words?
Next time, I'll catch an actual movie.
2 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.