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Up late again, but on the bus and downtown in enough time to catch …
The Exploding Girl (Grade: A-): Essentially, the story of Ivy (Zoe Kazan), a young vulnerable woman, with epilepsy, who travels home on a break from college to upstate New York to visit her mother. Not so much mumblecore in presentation, but rather more naturalistic and heartfelt, director Bradley Rust Gray (Salt), in focusing on Ivy’s every day life, and her relationship with her terminally indecisive friend, Al (Mark Rendall, in an outstanding performance) presents a more honest portrait of what it means for a twenty-something to live with the restrictions imposed by adult epilepsy than any you’d ever find on a disease-of-the-week TV show. For very good reason, Zoe Kazan won the Best Actress award at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. The Exploding Girl has finished its 2009 VIFF run.
Now, we could tell you that we didn’t get downtown in time to pick up our ticket for Police, Adjective, and that we prevailed on a ‘too busy for words’ Pierre LeFebvre (pictured below) to take VanRamblings’ pass to give to ‘way-too-busy-for-words’ Exhibitions Manager, Bob Albanese, to give to Mr. Shayne, so Mr. Shayne could pick up a ticket for the evening screening, because VanRamblings had a Thanksgiving dinner to attend, and wouldn’t be available to stand in line at 4:30 p.m. to pick up … well, we could tell you that tale of sadness and woe, and of how we imposed on Mr. LeFebvre and Mr. Albanese, and tears would flow, and readers would be aghast, but …
Instead, we’ll eviscerate …
Police, Adjective (Grade: D-): The story of a Romanian police detective experiencing a crisis of conscience, surrounding the surveillance of three young people who are doing no more than smoking a little dope. That this teenage activity is not looked favourably upon by the authorities, and more particularly his boss, turns into a long, boring, pointless philosophical discussion about morality, and the role of the state to uphold social mores. Patrons walked out in droves. VanRamblings didn’t. We should have.
