The Tracey Fragments

[Kurosawa Fan]

Trailer (http://www.apple.com/trailers/thinkfilm/thetraceyfragments/trailer/)

Match Cut's favorite actress returns!!!

This looks terrible.

[Watashi]

I swear there was a thread on this already. Didn't this come out last year? It's suppose to be pretty good.

[Rowland]

Michael Sicinski's review for this has me excited:

"John Hughes and Peter Greenaway walked into a bar and one of them said to the other . . . Okay, not exactly, but one of the truly stunning aspects of The Tracey Fragments (which is an overwhelming experience even on the small screen) is its shockingly appropriate expenditure of experimental visual technique on a story that is absolutely devoted to inhabiting the subject position of a troubled 15-year-old girl. Now, immediately certain viewers will be put on the defensive by the very concept, while others will no doubt find it gratifying that what would be "formal wankery" is some other context has a concrete narrative justification here. Does avant-garde experimentation require a note from the office? Luckily, McDonald and his team are so deft at transforming the source material (a novel by Maureen Medved, who co-scripted with McDonald) into such a meticulously constructed multimedia force-field that The Tracey Fragments successfully treads a razor-thin line. Yes, the presence of a strong performance (virtually a one-woman show) by Ellen Page and certain unrestrained emotional sucker-punches in the story of Tracey "Itz" Berkowitz, social outcast and unusually tortured soul, allow the film to resonate well beyond the highbrow sphere where one would discover the experimental cinema and video art that The Tracey Fragments most resembles. (Late Greenaway, from Prospero's Books onward, is an obvious touchstone, along with image-layerers like Bruce Baillie and Bill Viola, as well as the loop-generating corner of the structural film world, people like Frampton, Sharits, Gunvor Nelson and Peter Rose.) The whole thing would indeed feel like yet another case of watered-down, second-rate avant-garde for the masses, were it not for the spookily unerring facility with which McDonald and his editing team, Matthew Hannam, Jeremy Munce, and Gareth Scales, combine, whittle away, add and subtract, enlarge and reduce single and multiple images and sounds within the frame. One single image will almost imperceptibly grow from the corner outward to fill the frame, while a second set of images slowly fades in like a set of pockmarks. Or, multiples views of the same broken landscape will be arranged on the "page," like a photocollage, destroying coherent film space but actually unifying the depicted space as a mood or an experiential location, a state of loneliness. Or, a single memory will play like a staggered loop, interfering with the present like a jammed transmission. It's true that, in the end, The Tracey Fragments would be powerful enough without placing a central, unspeakable tragedy at its center (one, what's more, that is directly tied to Tracey's sexual shame, a rather cruel bit of narrative overkill). What's more, the film would be that much stronger had it exhibited a tad more restraint over its latent melodramatic tendencies. But the bottom line is that The Tracey Fragments is precisely the sort of film which ought to be insufferable. It not only wallows in the woes of a disaffected adolescent; it orchestrates her angst as a kind of Picasso-Proustian molecular breakdown. Against all odds and every available canon of good taste and good sense for that matter, The Tracey Fragments is not pretentious or embarrassing. In its own deceptively modest way it's actually kind of amazing."

[Spinal]

I'll see it. I never disliked Page, just the character that made her famous.

[Watashi]

Somewhat agree. The same thing happened for me and Thora Birch's character from Ghost World. Though I would take Juno over Ghost World any day.

However, everytime I see the Smart People trailer in theaters, my stomach starts to curl from all the vomit.

[Qrazy]

However, everytime I see the Smart People trailer in theaters, my stomach starts to curl from all the vomit.

Bile, it's a magma/lava distinction. ;)

[trotchky]

I want to see this.

[Boner M]

Saw it last year, thought it was excellent. My thoughts are similar to Sicinski's, albeit more caveman-like:

Ellen Page haters might wanna avoid The Tracey Fragments, where she plays probably the most angst-ridden teen that cinema has ever seen, and which uses a split-screen device throughout so that you're watching up to 20 of her at the same time. As unbearable as that likely sounds, it's actually often thrilling and the emotional shrillness of the script is made palatable by the frenetic cinematic technique, which among other thing gives the film a much-needed sense of irony and humour that I recognised from McDonald's earlier road movies like Roadkill and Highway 61, with which this films shares the same snarling, punk-ish sensibility. There's always interesting juxtapositions going on between the various split-screen images, and in general it avoids a sense of cheap gimmickry that adds up to a successful cinematic experiment in form-as-content.

[Spinal]

Just watched the trailer and I'm definitely seeing this.

[Morris Schæffer]

I thought the trailer was impressive.

[Sxottlan]

Looks good.

I like Page. It's just at this point I think she should probably start playing characters more her age.

[Spinal]

Looks good.

I like Page. It's just at this point I think she should probably start playing characters more her age.

Yeah, when she said she was 15, I thought, "Still?"

[baby doll]

I'll probably see this eventually (I missed it's one screening at the local film fest and the local Co-Op screening, intended as a post-Oscar victory lap for the local girl). It would be nice to like an Ellen Page movie for a change, as opposed to Hard Candy and Juno.

With regards to the Ghost World comparison, look at who Enid thinks is cool and why, and who Juno thinks is cool and why, and it becomes evident that Zwigoff's film is vastly superior.

P.S., has Page come out yet? I guess I can't blame her for not doing so yet, because it's her private life and everything, but it seemed like during all the big Oscar hoopla, when everyone was paying attention, would've been an ideal time to do it. I mean, considering how hard it is for gay teens, I think she actually could've made a difference.

[baby doll]

Yeah, when she said she was 15, I thought, "Still?"Apart from Page's obvious star power, it's also a union thing. ACTRA (the Canadian equivalent of SAG) only lets you work minors so many hours.

[Kurosawa Fan]

P.S., has Page come out yet? I guess I can't blame her for not doing so yet, because it's her private life and everything, but it seemed like during all the big Oscar hoopla, when everyone was paying attention, would've been an ideal time to do it. I mean, considering how hard it is for gay teens, I think she actually could've made a difference.

Are you sure she's gay? I could've sworn I read somewhere that she was dating a male costar of some movie I'd never heard of.

[Watashi]

Are you sure she's gay? I could've sworn I read somewhere that she was dating a male costar of some movie I'd never heard of.
Pretty much everyone in Hollywood is gay. Didn't you get the memo, KF?

[baby doll]

Are you sure she's gay? I could've sworn I read somewhere that she was dating a male costar of some movie I'd never heard of.I went to art school with a girl who used to date her, but even if I didn't... C'mon. I'm not making any great claims for my gaydar, but seriously, she's gay.

[megladon8]

I don't think she's gay. Nowadays, nearly every girl in high school has some sort of "relationship" with another girl.


And one, simple line in the trailer completely 180'd my opinion of the film, from "I'll never see this" to "I'll be first in line".

What was that line, you ask?

"Original score by Broken Social Scene"

[Ezee E]

Looks good to me.

[Watashi]

Yeah, she's denied rumors to her being gay.

I think soori's gaydar is out of whack.

[baby doll]

I don't think she's gay. Nowadays, nearly every girl in high school has some sort of "relationship" with another girl.That's true. The girl I knew was straight-up, hardcore lesbian, but Page could've been on the fence.

[eternity]

This movie is the shiznat.

[Spinal]

When will Ellen Page stop playing characters I want to punch? I'm not sure. Tracey is a whiny, eye-rolling, pseudo-philosophical teenage girl who should be writing down her innermost thoughts in a nice thick journal that no one will ever read instead of jabbering on and on in a movie that I'm watching. The visual gimmicks are intermittently engaging, but the half-assed script never is. Even though we spend the whole damn film inside her head, we don't really learn a whole lot substantial about Tracey apart from the fact that she is irresponsible, annoying and, like, totally tortured by her totally uncool parents. Tracey's big problem is that she can't find her kid brother. The film's big problem is that Tracey's quest is merely a backdrop for a showcase of split frame editing and not something that the filmmakers seem to have much interest in developing.