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Mattea Lee Hart
- Girl on Date
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Featured review
A nag that doesn't understand the heart of what it is saying
This film opens with a woman in bed lying next to her phone-browsing partner, before getting out of bed and trying to get his attention before giving up. The point is made but for another 4 minutes it continues to make the same point – that perhaps life is passing us by while we play with our electronic devices. Before anything else, there is a certain irony that it is Vimeo that partially brings us this short, since that site is at least complicit in keeping people hooked on their phones, however this is neither here nor there if the film is good.
The problem is that the film doesn't find anything beyond the single point it makes. What lies beyond the specific distraction in the relationship is that there is both a distraction and a sense of being distracted from – it really doesn't matter if it is phones, video games, crosswords, train-spotting or anything else, if you have a relationship then if you have a situation where one party feels like they are totally alone and the other person has no interest then you have no problem. And I say this from a point of knowledge. However the film doesn't seem to recognize that but instead makes it all about the technology, as if it is all the fault of the tool rather than the person, which of course it is not.
Not only does the film misjudge this and fail to really do anything with it, but it really worries it with heavy music, big distinctions in its flashbacks between the lonely blue glow of a screen and the wild openness of climbing a mountain together – it really overdoes it. In the end unfortunately, it feels like a nag – it feels like it made its point but then keeps on making it in more or less the same way over and over again, even though it is missing the point that it is not about the phone, or the tablet, or the laptop or whatever is the distraction, it is about there being a harmful distraction at all. Had it got this then maybe the film would have been better but as it is, it really doesn't work.
The problem is that the film doesn't find anything beyond the single point it makes. What lies beyond the specific distraction in the relationship is that there is both a distraction and a sense of being distracted from – it really doesn't matter if it is phones, video games, crosswords, train-spotting or anything else, if you have a relationship then if you have a situation where one party feels like they are totally alone and the other person has no interest then you have no problem. And I say this from a point of knowledge. However the film doesn't seem to recognize that but instead makes it all about the technology, as if it is all the fault of the tool rather than the person, which of course it is not.
Not only does the film misjudge this and fail to really do anything with it, but it really worries it with heavy music, big distinctions in its flashbacks between the lonely blue glow of a screen and the wild openness of climbing a mountain together – it really overdoes it. In the end unfortunately, it feels like a nag – it feels like it made its point but then keeps on making it in more or less the same way over and over again, even though it is missing the point that it is not about the phone, or the tablet, or the laptop or whatever is the distraction, it is about there being a harmful distraction at all. Had it got this then maybe the film would have been better but as it is, it really doesn't work.
- bob the moo
- Jul 5, 2014
- Permalink
Details
- Runtime4 minutes
- Color
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