Amateur movie with Big budget

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

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

It's all about taste. But 6.0 on IMDb? Unbelievable.This is a superb film.SUPERB.Difficult subject matter? Yes.6.0? Don't make me laugh. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. That's why we have so many successful Hollywood blockbusters. Know what I mean? And those same people vote on IMDb.Watch this film. Expand your mind. You'll still be thinking about it days later.Trust Shimky. He won't waste your time.

If it's true, as Marshall McLuhan has suggested, that the medium is indeed the message, then "The Tracey Fragments" proves that theory in spades. This highly idiosyncratic work has as its focal point "Tracey Berkowitz - 15 - just another girl who hates herself" - a description that comes straight from the mouth of Ms. Berkowitz herself. Tracey is a deeply unhappy youngster who hates her (admittedly horrible) parents, is terrorized by all the "cool" kids in school for insufficient mammary-gland development, spends most of her nights riding the subway, hooks up with a psychotic lowlife who turns out to be a drug dealer, and searches for her little brother whom she's hypnotized into thinking he's a dog and who goes missing by a frozen river when she's supposed to be watching out for him. To help mitigate her misery, Tracey also dreams of having a relationship with a brooding "emo" bad boy at school and fantasizes that she is a famous, universally worshipped rock star.But it is not Tracey's story that is of primary interest here; rather it's the cut-and-paste film-making style director Bruce McDonald has employed to create a sense of fragmentation and dislocation in the viewer - intended, obviously, to mirror the highly chaotic and disordered nature of Tracey's world and life. With rare exceptions, the screen is occupied by as few as two and as many as a dozen shots at a time, often portraying the same sequence from slightly different angles or at slightly different moments in time, or portraying thematically related scenes simultaneously. The question inevitably arises, is the approach effective in what it's trying to accomplish or does it serve as a distancing device for those of us who are trying to enter into Tracey's mind and world. I imagine that different viewers will come to varying verdicts on that point.Personally, I appreciate what McDonald is trying to do here more than I admire it. "The Tracey Fragments," which Maureen Medved has adapted from her own novel, offers many probing insights into the subject of teenage angst, particularly as regards the tremendous pressure modern young people are put under to "measure up" and conform to some arbitrarily agreed-upon social standard. And "Juno"'s Ellen Page gives a stunning performance as the young woman caught in an ever-tightening web of self-hatred (this is, in many ways, the darker side of "Juno," and Page is much less mannered in this role).But, frankly, the movie probably would have been more moving and involving without all the migraine-inducing imagery which succeeds mainly in throwing us out of the story. In fact, there is only one scene in which the split screen technique actually serves a narrative purpose - and that is when Tracey is hiding behind a curtain while her drug-dealer friend is being savagely beaten by the irate boss to whom he owes money. Most of the rest of the time, the approach feels more like a gimmick designed to separate this film from the rest of the "distressed-teen indie" pack than an artistically viable choice in its own right.Still, if you can get past all the artiness and visual distraction, you might just find in "The Tracey Fragments" a thoughtful, sensitive and ineffably sad glimpse into a young woman's heart.

Like Mike Figgis's Timecode which presenting the film four frames simultaneously on screen, sometime you just need to admire a person who did it; regardless what is said and done in the story. For their determination for inventing and experimenting something that count as a film, even you knew that you're not having a good time. The Tracey Fragments is the movie that will embraced by people who really into a film-making process, if not just for any regular moviegoers.In Christopher Nolan's Memento, the film plays with time. It was edited and rearranged backward as if an audience suffered from amnesia like the protagonist. The Tracey Fragments was also heavily edited to represent subconscious of adolescence mind. What's in Tracey's mind is fragmented; reality and fantasy are overlapping with each other simultaneously in each tiny frame presented on screen. It's maybe difficult to catch up from time to time, but it's worthwhile if you're getting the hang of it.And just like Memento, if you watch it in a perfect sequence narrative, it will be just another straightforward drama that has nothing much to add on. And to make it worse, The Tracey Fragments is suffered from serious lack of decent dialogs. What we've heard are only whining or bitching about society from hormone-inducing teenage girl. And it's even more embarrassing when secondary characters like parents or strangers open their mouth.But it maybe filmmaker's intention after all, maybe he want to show us how uncomplicated and simple adolescence are. They may speak what's in the heart without processing through the mind. Their tyrantness, lust, and stupidity that end up causing someone else's life, maybe this is the film that trying to show Tracey (By the way, great vehicle for Ellen Page, she's just perfect for the part) a step to embrace her own reality and feeling guilty for the thing she have done.The running time for this film is only 70 or so minute. It took only 14 days to shoot, but it took 9 months to edit. The Tracey Fragments may not teach you anything, nor give you a good time in return. But for that kind of dedication, you just gotta give it to them.

http://eattheblinds.blogspot.comYou can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. As of late, this phrase has been front-page headlines for all the wrong reasons, but regardless, the meaning behind it stays the same. For all intents and purposes, Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments is a melodrama of After-School Special proportions, regardless of how hard the director (and his editor) try to dress it up as something more profound. Fragmented images act as multiple windows, forming an endlessly elaborate collage, peering into the dark recesses of 15 year-old Tracey Berkowitz's life and mind. This technique has been around for decades, it's origins forever tied to the annals of experimental film-making. Long before Bruce McDonald, the work of Stan Brakhage (the most prolific and famed of all experimentalists) was co-opted by music videos directors who made famous the disjointed, stylistic flourishes common to MTV in the 1980's. TTF looks and feels more like a music video than a conventional narrative film and since most kids who grew up on music videos have come of age, stylistically TTF cannot define itself as anything new.But amidst a mine field of cookie cutter Hollywood films, TTF does manage to distinguish itself as something more than the melodrama it merely is. If you can make it through the first 20-minutes you'll be rewarded, since at this point there seems to be a departure from the conventions of story telling into the hyper-personal, interior realm of a 15 year-old kid struggling with herself, her family and the unforgiving world around her. This portrayal may be framed within the plot driven melodrama, but McDonald reaches beyond plot by emphasizing the impressionistic quality of the visual collage he has painstakingly cobbled together. This is when the film becomes interesting, when the visuals take over and expand the film watching experience into something haunting and poetic. The dreariness and drab of Tracey's lower-class life transcends into something beautiful as each frame of her collage acts as a window into her soul. Ultimately, TTF's greatest asset is it's ability to effectively portray the mixed up mind of a teenager who is desperately trying to make sense of her world. We've all been there and we've all lived it, now you can relive the experience only this time, without the acne scars.