The Girl From Monday (Hal Hartley, 2005)
This is the new Hal Hartley movie. I was very VERY excited to see it at Sundance, and especially to see the Q&A section because I wanted to hear Hal talk about his movies. Not very long into the film I started to get very VERY disappointed. I thought his last movie, "No Such Thing" was horrible. This isn't as bad as that was, but it's not exactly a return to the greatness of "Trust," "Amateur" or "The Unbelievable Truth." The cinematography sucked. The heavily stylized digital editing and stills were annoying. All of this turned me against Hartley's signature acting style and aloof weariness. It just got annoying and long winded. Yeah, an alien comes to earth to find this other alien and the world has undergone a massive revolution that "changed everything, but everything looks exactly the same" (in Hartley's own words) where your sexual activity directly relates to your buying power and marketability. A society run by marketing and sex. Whatever. My fiance and I were talking about it this morning, and this is how I had walked away from it: Hal Hartley is a revered and awesome director who has played a huge role in defining independent film as it is today. This movie seemed like a lame b-movie director's idea of being clever and taking a deep, violent stab at the current state of society and ending up with a lame movie that would (maybe) star Dean Cain and play on the Sci Fi channel. Like, "Dragonslayer," or whatever that one movie was called. I don't recall any shoving. And I wasn't awake (I started to doze after about an hour) for any of the unrelated conversations that he does so well.
| The Girl From Monday at Amazon |
