I just realised that my first exam paper is in exactly 2 weeks. I am feeling the heat. The thing about not being in school is there's no tangible sense of stress that is felt amongst you and your schoolmates, so um, the date kind of crept up onto me. There was a general sense of urgency from the beginning, but now it has stepped up a notch. In other words, I am so screwed.
SO. To spare you from the discomfort of ranty rants, I think I'll talk about The Tracey Fragments. I was only reminded of it when I saw Ellen Page's tweets in my feed today, and she's so deadpan in her tweets, and oddly like the characters she plays. I love the characters she has played, by the way. Not that I've watched all of them. xD But I like Juno and, well. Tracey from the Tracey Fragments.
There is so much I like about the movie; and I'm not even sure if I've talked about it before.
The soundtrack by Broken Social Scene = haunting and appropriate and awesome. The way that the director uses split screens 70% of the time is great; I like that the audience doesn't get a chance to get bored. It's also very illustrative of Tracey's mind; that there are different plausible situations that she's thinking of, and there are so many concerns. Despite her apparent madness, Tracey is fleshed out to be a very realistic character, with her flaws and her innocence displayed in full view. It's very hard for the viewer not to feel for Tracey, especially when she seeks acceptance in the form of a mysterious boy at school, and when she rocks out with abandon in her daydreams.
I like the lack of a chronological narrative in the film; the scenes go back and forth on the timeline, which is pretty cool. It allows the reader to be in Tracey's mind, so to speak, as she recollects the events which brought her to a certain stage. At the beginning it was hard to differentiate the scenes of Tracey's daydreams and events that actually happened. This is relevant to Tracey, though, because from this you can tell that she's trying to forget her memories out of shame or regret, and replace them with her daydreams.
The way they edit the film is something great to take note of, because sometimes you realise that they could do it a completely different way, and the narrative would kind of be the same. That's the flexibility of this film. The director and producers released all the footage from the movie for anybody to re-edit into music videos or trailers, and made a competition for those remixing the footage. Which is super exciting, right? You could choose to tell the story in a completely different way, or be inspired to change the split screens, or omit the split screens, or make the WHOLE FILM split screen-ed which would be a lot to swallow. omg what if there were just 2 screens, one playing the narrative chronologically and one chronologically backwards, and there would be a point in the film where the events would MEET and it would be at this point where the footage from both screens would be exactly the SAME. The audio would be a headache to deal with, though. I KNOW they could just play Broken Social Scene throughout, and have subtitles. Or no subtitles, and have the audience figure out the plot with Tracey MIMING everything.
Sorry. There's something I have to clarify.
It's very rare that I write blogs in one sitting. If I do, you can tell, because it's a singular topic for the entire post or there's flow. But usually I put blogger up on a tab, gmail on the other, dailybooth on another, etc and I just flick through the tabs like TV channels. My attention span is fragmented!
I have to end early today, because tomorrow is a long day and I have to wake up early to go to the post office, to post some supersecret packages. yeah. see you :)
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