You won't be disappointed!

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Ivy (Zoe Kazan) is epileptic and returns home to Brooklyn on summer break from college. Her friend Al joins her to sleep on her couch when his room is rented out by his parents. She struggles to stay in contact with boyfriend Greg. Greg gets into a car accident with his high school friend Rebecca and decides to stay with her in the hospital. Ivy starts hanging out with Al.Don't get me wrong. Zoe Kazan is lovely. She's beautiful and has a charm about her. It doesn't mean that watching her alone for most of the movie is particularly exciting. She has some interesting phone calls. She really needs the second to be in more of the movie and he needs to be played by somebody more compelling. I understand the idea of being alone in a crowded city and losing one's connection. However, this movie lacks the drive to propel it.

Websters defines exploding as "what happens when an explosion goes off" usually caused by the complex and nuanced relationships between various chemicals and elements. There is nothing complex or nuanced between the relationship explored in Bradley Rust Grey's Exploding Girl. I will go ahead and spoil the plot of this movie, if only to save others from the same fate that I suffered; Ivy (Zoe Kazan) gets dumped by her boyfriend, who we never actually see, but hear his monotonous voice via a series of phone calls (probably because he was playing XBOX or something and didn't want to be concerned with physically appearing in such drivel) and shacks up with her sexually ambiguous platonic friend, Al (Mark Rendell, the scene wrecking wussy brother of Josh Hartnett in 30 Days of Night). Ivy has epilepsy, which i presume is to draw some sympathy for her emotional plight kinda like how the old woman in the notebook had dementia. I personally would have found it more entertaining/believable if she had down syndrome. I feel as though there is a lack of quality roles for actors with down syndrome, and although the meaningless character study of Ivy could hardly be described as quality, it would at least be a step in the right direction for the acceptance of disabled actors. Anyway she has a bit of an epileptic spas out as epileptics do, again this scene didn't really add anything to the narrative, but I could strangely relate to it, as at this point I wished I had gone into uncontrollable spasms and hit my head on something so as not to watch the remainder of this pretentious garbage, but alas it weren't to be. Many of my loyal readers must be wondering, "why didn't you just walk out?" and the short answer is it was valentines day and I was trying to impress a date with my taste in independent cinema. In retrospect i should have just stayed at home and wacked off.Peace

The star of 'The Exploding Girl' is Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia Kazan, the legendary director. It helps that Elia Kazan was Zoe's grandfather, as I'm sure it's helped her career. Nonetheless, I understand she's a pretty good actor irregardless of her famous surname. But here, in 'The Exploding Girl' she has virtually nothing to do.'The Exploding Girl' is up for a Spirit Award in the 'John Cassavetes Award' category (features made for under a budget of $500,000). It's similar to another Spirit Award nominee, 'Tiny Furniture', as they are both about a young college-aged female back at home from school, who have both platonic and romantic relationships with young men. Kazan plays Ivy who gets a call from her friend Al, whose parents have just rented his room out, and finds himself with nowhere to stay. The circumstances of this 'mixup' by Al's parents are unclear and the specious explanation provided by the film's writer/director, Bradley Rust Gray, appears nothing more than a weak plot device to place Ivy and Al in close proximity to one another.Al is a sensitive guy but I'm unable to remember much about him. Oh yes, he takes Ivy to a rooftop where pigeons are being bred and there are some nice shots of the platonic couple gazing skyward at a flock of birds (pigeons?) flying in the sky. The rest of the Exploding Girl plot concerns Ivy being dumped by her boyfriend, Greg, who we never see on screen. In fact, the entire Ivy-Greg relationship is depicted through a series of cell phone conversations! One shallow internet poster has asserted that American films focus on plot and Indie films are more like foreign ones—i.e., character driven. In this poster's mind, 'art' films don't have to have much of a plot and the mere presentation of 'sensitive' characters is enough to award accolades to such films as 'The Exploding Girl'. As a fledging screenwriter myself, I can say without hesitation that 'plot' is the most difficult aspect of a screenplay to develop. You can have all the great characters in the world but if you don't have a dynamic, original plot, your film might get off the ground, but it will never soar! I realized that 'The Exploding Girl' was going to be slow-moving after watching the first ten minutes. However, sometimes there are slow-moving films which reward you with a surprising twist at the end. Not so with 'The Exploding Girl'. It's all rather predictable stuff when we discover Ivy and Al holding hands as the screen goes blank and the credits then begin to roll.The film's scenarist appears to be a nice guy and nothing in this film is crude or objectionable. Nonetheless, there simply aren't enough unique plot reversals to prevent us from throwing this film into the proverbial indie trash bin. Perhaps with more life experiences, Mr. Gray may come up with a more dynamic story. Certainly, 'The Exploding Girl' does have a few arresting visual moments. But as long as another weary 'lovesick girl bounces back after being dumped by insensitive boyfriend' plot is thrown our way, this film (and other indies films like it) might be defined in terms of what 'Seinfeld' is supposed to be really about: nothing!

I am always grateful to see films like "The Exploding Girl" that rely on an economy of cinematic technique to tell a story that is about very human topics in way that makes the viewer engage. It is eminently visual, as a move should be. Listening to the audio track would leave you with nothing grasp. The lack of explication only intensified the sense of youthful tragedy for things that go unsaid and opportunities missed. There's always a problem for some people about small, personal films like this one: they aren't big, flashy or hair-raising. What this film zeroed in on is the pain and uncertainty of youth, and especially of young love. To that end, it was poignant and dead on.The only real problem I have to make about this film is that the filmmakers got too carried away with street-level camera shots that were willing to allow anything and anybody that intervened between the actors to stay in the shot, which resulted in a couple of overlong shots of blurred-out passersby or their body parts to obscure the characters. Okay, I get it that Ivy was just one more passenger on the train; but the indeterminate dark mass of fellow passenger blocking the shot for 15 or 20 seconds was just plain clunky.