doisbuzianos I won't say that Exploding Girl was more accessible down here in Brazil than it was in its home country, but I had the distinct advantage of watching it not merely as entertainment or a time-killer but as news from frontlines at which new technologies cross with an evolving emotional tone and evolving mores and the technology gives the emotional tone and the mores impetus.(1) As one of the last people in the world not to use a cell phone, I was pleased to see evidence to support my lingering suspicion that most cell phone communication is merely to "check in" — I think that was the language of the movie itself — and to provide reassurance that the caller will call again later, again to check in, again to provide reassurance of yet another call to check in later still and so on, I assume, ad infinitum unto death.2) But that's not really the whole of it. The constant cell phoning back and forth seems also to be necessary for purposes of temperature taking. First, there's the toneless "How are you?" and then an affectless, seemingly obligatory "I'm okay, how are you?" and then a further affectless "I'm okay" at the other end. Then it's allowed that the call has been just to check in and there will be another call just to check in later. But maybe it's not just the checking-in that's important but the taking of emotional temperature and the reassurance that everything is on an even keel, that no one's lurching too far out of the "okay" range, no one's getting either too hot and bothered or too chilly or cold and thereby threatening to tumble off into catatonia. And, if this is the case, then the constant checking in and temperature taking helps to hold people in the "okay" range. What do you think? Do I have this anything like right?(3) How mannerly these young people are, within of course the parameters of their evolving manners! How solicitous they are of each other! How caring! Greg has taken up with an old girlfriend during a summer away from his current girlfriend. He calls the current girlfriend up to break it to her. He does it unshirkingly, with no more trepidation or embarrassment than if he were calling to tell her he's held up in traffic and he's going to be ten minutes late to dinner. And then he calls again later to make sure she's okay. And she has of course told him in response to the initial announcement of his calling it quits that everything is okay, everything is fine, and now everything is still fine. Reminds me of something John Updike had Rabbit observe in one of the Rabbit novels, probably Rabbit Is Rich, namely, that these young people are operating at a lower sexual temperature than his generation operated at. And then there is, in this movie, the lifelong friend Al, who wonders aloud to Ivy if their relationship might not possibly develop beyond the palsiness that has so far been its outer limit and, when she doesn't immediately fall into his arms, he apologizes for possibly rocking the boat, threatening the equilibrium of things. Friendship and . . . something more than friendship — if this movie is to be believed, and in this respect it seems credible enough, the boundaries I speak of are blurring to the vanishing point. But, then, you guys up there in the U.S. already know all this stuff about the way relationships are evolving. You're not learning anything new from this movie. I am learning from it, I am learning a lot from it, and that's why I hold the movie dear.

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

mzimmermann13 I am always grateful to see films like "The Exploding Girl" that rely on an economy of cinematic technique to tell a story that is about very human topics in way that makes the viewer engage. It is eminently visual, as a move should be. Listening to the audio track would leave you with nothing grasp. The lack of explication only intensified the sense of youthful tragedy for things that go unsaid and opportunities missed. There's always a problem for some people about small, personal films like this one: they aren't big, flashy or hair-raising. What this film zeroed in on is the pain and uncertainty of youth, and especially of young love. To that end, it was poignant and dead on.The only real problem I have to make about this film is that the filmmakers got too carried away with street-level camera shots that were willing to allow anything and anybody that intervened between the actors to stay in the shot, which resulted in a couple of overlong shots of blurred-out passersby or their body parts to obscure the characters. Okay, I get it that Ivy was just one more passenger on the train; but the indeterminate dark mass of fellow passenger blocking the shot for 15 or 20 seconds was just plain clunky.

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).