1. measleschip

   10

   Totally awesome. I was in a bad mood but this weirdly negative movie cheered me up with its unusual world. Its def tubular.

   • Helpful? 1 of 2 users said Yes.
2. JoeP.

   10

   Great metaphors, story's deeper than it seems.

   • Helpful? 0 of 1 users said Yes.
3. ChadS.

   8

   Form and content vie for the viewer's scrutiny in "The Tracey Fragments", as Ellen Page, the poster child for propagandizing teen pregnancy, stars in this micro-indie from Canada about a runaway girl who combs the unforgiving city by twilight for her missing younger brother. Page, to her credit, never gets lost in the movie's anarchy in the frame, as the filmmaker treats the screen and film language like a mad semiotician. Picking up where Mike Figgis left off, this celluloidal offspring of "Time Code", forces the viewer to be a co-creator, a vicarious editor who chooses and orders the boxes in a sequential order of his own making. But rather than project four instances of simultaneous time like Figgis' groundbreaking film from 2000, "The Tracey Fragments" covers the same interior(or exterior space) of the moment from different angles, distances, and perspectives with sometimes one to five cameras, and sometimes more. If two characters are isolated in their own separate box, the viewer is given the agency to create his/her own shot/reverse shot editing strategy. If the person's filmic sensibilities lean more on the European side, the eyes train on the speaker and the listener in unbroken simultaneity. "The Tracey Fragments" transforms your living room into an editing bay. Sometimes the choices the film offers can also have an effect on the space-time continuum. As Tracey Berkowitz rides the bus in a box on the top half of the screen, her memory is visualized beneath her seated self in its own separate boxes. If your attention wanders from Tracey's argument with Lance(Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) to Tracey on the bus, the girl's time with the homeless drifter plays like a flashback. But if you disregard the top half of the screen, her fight with Lance remains in the present tense. Form wins in "The Tracey Fragments", but content is no slouch either. Page gives a brave performance as a young girl who wears her heart on her sleeve, and that sleeve is bleeding. She wants a functional family. She wants to fit in at school. She wants a boyfriend. She has none of these things. Her life is one big, festering wound. The black screen is like a skin, and under this skin is life, Tracey's life. The three boxes that puncture the black screen look like cuts. Tracey doesn't bleed, but the film does it for her. Her life is like one constant flow of blood, mermaid's blood.… Expand

   • Helpful? 0 of 1 users said Yes.
4. JayH.

   3

   As much as I like Ellen Page, I did not like her in this, nor did I like the movie. The split screens is pretentious tripe in an effort to show originality and style, instead it is irritating and pointless. The gritty cinematography is no help. I didn't care about the characters nor what happened in the movie. I have to agree with the critics on this one.… Expand

   • Helpful? 1 of 2 users said Yes.

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