Totally affected, I couldn't even finish it

Rating: 2/10 (28 December 2007)

It's a rare day that I can't finish a movie, because I like to see even the bad ones through to the end. But what is this nonsense? The movie wreaks of affected directing. The whole adage of "show don't tell" is flipped on its head here, because the writer/director is "showing" so much she is in fact telling. It is constructed in a very cynical way that breaks the illusion of the characters and the world that should be created around them. So many moments wreak of the director trying to say something implicitly, thus you are thinking more about the direction than the characters. I can just imagine some of the explanations. "Look as she sits on the window sill, looking out towards the town all alone... it marks her isolation from those around her." And in this smug directing, the characters are forgotten. They don't even interact for the first 30 minutes of the film, and it's just clips of anything almost randomly. Ooh look, there's a character receiving mail, there's a character walking through a lobby, oh look there's a character eating. Dull and pretentious.
All in all this is a travesty. Pompous directing left the characters way down the list to the point of not even being needed. I gave up after 45 minutes as it was going to another 45 minutes which was light on story, light on characterisation and heavy on amateur, over the top, affected direction.