What makes it different from others?

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

College can be a rough time, even for those who are 100% healthy. In this case, we have a protagonist with epilepsy. She's trying to find love that eludes her time and time again.I like films like this that look almost like hidden camera footage. When a girl and her roommate stay up watching TV, hanging off the couch talking about life, you are among them. It's really a hard time when you're out of high school in your early years of adulthood. You want the job, the enjoyment, and the love that culture promises and yet, it doesn't translate that way.We see a girl who is stuck in unrequited love, trying to improve a relationship tat is sadly one-sided. When one is new at love, there is so much that has to be learned the hard way. Then, there is the "Ducky" type of friend who shares her apartment. Is their friendship destined to stay platonic or will it grow into a sexual thing.Thes are the basic elements of this film. My wife thought it dragged on a bit. I, on the other hand, liked the mysterious ether-like feeling of the film. For me, it was a peering into the life of a brave young girl with no answers. I found it inspiring in an odd way. Maybe because I don't yet have the answers and I felt for her in that stage of life. I recommend it as a thoughtful romantic drama.

I won't say that Exploding Girl was more accessible down here in Brazil than it was in its home country, but I had the distinct advantage of watching it not merely as entertainment or a time-killer but as news from frontlines at which new technologies cross with an evolving emotional tone and evolving mores and the technology gives the emotional tone and the mores impetus.(1) As one of the last people in the world not to use a cell phone, I was pleased to see evidence to support my lingering suspicion that most cell phone communication is merely to "check in" — I think that was the language of the movie itself — and to provide reassurance that the caller will call again later, again to check in, again to provide reassurance of yet another call to check in later still and so on, I assume, ad infinitum unto death.2) But that's not really the whole of it. The constant cell phoning back and forth seems also to be necessary for purposes of temperature taking. First, there's the toneless "How are you?" and then an affectless, seemingly obligatory "I'm okay, how are you?" and then a further affectless "I'm okay" at the other end. Then it's allowed that the call has been just to check in and there will be another call just to check in later. But maybe it's not just the checking-in that's important but the taking of emotional temperature and the reassurance that everything is on an even keel, that no one's lurching too far out of the "okay" range, no one's getting either too hot and bothered or too chilly or cold and thereby threatening to tumble off into catatonia. And, if this is the case, then the constant checking in and temperature taking helps to hold people in the "okay" range. What do you think? Do I have this anything like right?(3) How mannerly these young people are, within of course the parameters of their evolving manners! How solicitous they are of each other! How caring! Greg has taken up with an old girlfriend during a summer away from his current girlfriend. He calls the current girlfriend up to break it to her. He does it unshirkingly, with no more trepidation or embarrassment than if he were calling to tell her he's held up in traffic and he's going to be ten minutes late to dinner. And then he calls again later to make sure she's okay. And she has of course told him in response to the initial announcement of his calling it quits that everything is okay, everything is fine, and now everything is still fine. Reminds me of something John Updike had Rabbit observe in one of the Rabbit novels, probably Rabbit Is Rich, namely, that these young people are operating at a lower sexual temperature than his generation operated at. And then there is, in this movie, the lifelong friend Al, who wonders aloud to Ivy if their relationship might not possibly develop beyond the palsiness that has so far been its outer limit and, when she doesn't immediately fall into his arms, he apologizes for possibly rocking the boat, threatening the equilibrium of things. Friendship and . . . something more than friendship — if this movie is to be believed, and in this respect it seems credible enough, the boundaries I speak of are blurring to the vanishing point. But, then, you guys up there in the U.S. already know all this stuff about the way relationships are evolving. You're not learning anything new from this movie. I am learning from it, I am learning a lot from it, and that's why I hold the movie dear.

The title "The Exploding Girl" is figurative not literal. I would add "of course" but that's not as obvious given movies nowadays. This is a low-budget, independent character study.It's about Ivy on college break, back home in New York City. Ivy struggles with love and friendship. And the film-maker shows us this with really slow-moving, seemingly unimportant scenes mired in the noisy streets of New York City. I know the city is basically supposed to be its own character, but the loud, constant bus and car noises and obstruction just lowered the quality of the film.Zoe Kazan's Ivy is very cute and likable, but even with her epilepsy, her college problems seem minor compared to the stress that other college girls experience. Her boyfriend back at college was painted one-dimensionally. And although I didn't mind Al, the reason given for him moving in with Ivy was very odd and never explained.It's called a "discreet character study". I will agree with that in the sense that meaning was hard to find, dialogue was indiscernible and silent at times, and reasons for few things happening was kept private from the audience. The brilliance displayed in the poster is only found once in the film, and is not enough to watch it. "The Exploding Girl" is only for the very discerning film viewer who likes slow-moving character studies of little importance.

I don't like "movies" shot on video, and this one is no exception. Its semi-improvised dialog was also a barrier to appreciation, as well as the fledgling director's pretentious approach to photography.Except for interiors, nearly all the barely-edited shots are long shots using very shallow focus - a technique I thought went out in the '60s. The cast's conversations are shot as if using a hidden camera (the hi-def RED camera is used here), from across the street with intervening cars or pedestrians frequently blocking the principals from our view. Add to that protagonist Mark Rendall's speech impediment (I counted him stating the word "like" 25 times in less than a minute) and you have distancing of the viewer taken to the extreme.Our heroine played OK enough by Zoe Kazan (she won a dubious Best Actress award from the lowliest of film festivals, the must-miss Tribeca event, which doesn't even take place in Tribeca anymore) remains a blank. She's an epileptic and sure enough, has too many beers, causing a seizure late in the film, but I didn't find that potential disability handled with any insight or relevance to the surrounding film. The story's emphasis on her also was a drag; it reminded me of that Golden Age of porno (now several decades back) when one sometimes experienced a horrific moment, usually during the second or third reel, of realization: "We're going to be stuck looking at this solitary girl for the whole movie!".Mercifully short, about 75 minutes after removing the slow-slow padding of the end credits, the feature had only two good scenes: one rooftop checking out the pet pigeons that starts as a too-obvious homage to Zoe's grandpa Elia Kazan (classic Saint/Brando scene from ON THE WATERFRONT) and ends up improbably as a Werner Herzog homage, capturing the strange abstract patterns created by flocks of birds in formation that was the signature image of Werner's 2004 film THE WHITE DIAMOND. The other scene I enjoyed was a simple finale ring shot of the hero & heroine asleep in the backseat of a car, unconsciously clasping their hands together.Low points were a "gee whiz" visit to a SoHo building supposedly once the site of Nikola Tesla's shop -like so many Manhattan non-landmarks it looks like nothing now; and the endless use of cell phones, one of which permitted an entire performance (Zoe's heel of a boyfriend Greg) to be literally phoned in. I am also nominating THE EXPLODING GIRL as the feature film with the lowest costume budget in recent history: it looks like they spent about $3.95 for the heroine's and hero's rumpled, slept-in crappy outfits; ditto ALL the extras (who obviously wore theirs from home).