Must See Movie...

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Too many questions left unanswered in this film. I felt for Amy, she is clearly a very disturbed girl who never got over her past sexual trauma. It was clear from the beginning she was on a downward spiral but what was ever done to help her? Her friends tried, but it seemed she was destined for depravity.I'm not sure why this young guy did not run the other way when he realized how disturbed she was. That might sound cruel, but did he not have any inkling to how disturbed she really was? Did he think he could save her? Did she snap because she thought he was cheating or would she have done so anyway? I think either way she was doomed.Where was her family? There was no mention of getting her psychiatric treatment, it was as if she was just viewed as eccentric and infantile. I think this was an important topic to address, but for me, as a woman, this was just too horrible for me to watch. This is the most vile and depressing film I have ever seen. I hope I never see anything this disturbing again.

This was not an easy film to watch. There is also no easy category to file it under so I am just going to call it a character study. Amy is an emotionally unstable young woman who works out her issues through visually stunning imagery sans audience. The imagery is neither pretentious or trite and the viewer gets the feeling that they are seeing work that the actress may have actually crafted herself. The pacing and tone of the film are unhurried and create an uneasy mood. The music is minimalistic, atmospheric and fitting. One of the things that I liked about this film, other than the aforementioned visual facets is that it isn't easy and is at times horribly uncomfortable(especially being a male viewer who has known women not wholly unlike Amy) and yet it is completely honest and original. I like the economy of means used in telling her story and would love to see more from this duo(Banker and Everson).

Yep, the girl we see could be termed "self-loathing" or "mad". And yep she sometimes behaves in strange ways that irritate both her on-screen friends and us viewers.What we never see is what she was like _before_ "the trauma". What we see is that "the trauma" has permanently scarred her, so that all her attempts at rehabilitation are self-destructive, and her friends attempts at healing uniformly eventually fail.The skewed behavior we see is definitely _not_ what's recommended. If there's an (implied) "feminist message", it's something like "our sexist culture results in some individuals that are permanently so screwed up they not only can't help the culture, they can't even help themselves very much, like this one".What we see is the disaster resulting from "the trauma". Reading what we see as some sort of "recommendation" fundamentally misses the whole point.Watching a thoroughly screwed up person may be "educational", but it tends to not be all that much fun. So what else does this movie deliver? The first "what else" is that quite a few little bits are very funny, for example showing up to a porn shoot wearing a tongue-in-cheek skin-colored outfit (rather than a "birthday suit" as intended) and seducing the other model into playing along with the joke.And the second "what else" is quite a bit of truly interesting art. It's unconventional, and a lot of it is vaguely disturbing. Yet at the same time it's undeniably beautiful.This film is squarely in the "mumblecore" tradition: low production values, tiny crew, amateur actors, about the concerns of thirty-somethings, little or no music, and very naturalistic dialog. (I personally am not a big fan of "mumblecore" in general, and my rating reflects my generic dislike more than it does anything about this film specifically.)

The girl in the story suffers from abject self loathing where her 'reparative ' superpower response is penis envy. She feels the need to be what she desires (a man) and hence the penis dress-up. Reeks of narcissism too. And what remains? A will to dominate over her self-loathing by bringing a man down to her level (by dressing him up as a woman) and endorsing him (her) as a lover. A sick power fantasy it seems to me. Add to that the action of she using the scissors indicating her desire to cut out the object of her envy from other men. And seriously- to call this 'feminist' reinforces (rightfully so?) the notion that feminism is indeed a sick ideology. While the hipster reviewers harp on about its 'greatness', its boring second half becomes a terrible bore. Add to that the nonsensical preachings of a mythical rape culture that does not exist in the western world.