Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

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

Candida It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

tromphisromphis The Tracey Fragments is a journey into the conundrums of human memory. The presentation and structure of the movie make it worthwhile watch for any cinemaphile.The use of multi-frame compositions is excellent, if flawed. The Tracey Fragments is at times uncomfortable to watch, but appropriately so. When Tracey relives the traumatic moments irreversibly etched into her memory, it is only appropriate you experience sympathetic distress. To watch this film you must make an active effort to obtain information by selecting a screen to focus upon, and consequentially you feel more like a participant than a voyeur. Through extremely sparing use of scenes with a traditional single frame, it makes these few scenes stand out like the crescendo of a George Gershwin song. The flaw with this film's extreme use of the medium to affect the audience's emotions is that it is apparent that it is doing so. Although you see the magician's trick, the showmanship is superb.Whereas the film's presentation empowers you to take an active role in partaking the movie visually, the storytelling is too authoritative. The presentation of the plot in disjointed fragments is conceptually excellent, but flawed in execution. Unlike David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, The Tracey Fragments does not blend fanciful fabrications and recollection of fact; the plot fragments are presented as a dichotomy of fruits of Tracey's imagination, and memories of formal events. However, It becomes increasingly evident throughout the movie, that Tracey's actual memories may be as misleading as the figments of her imagination.This film was shot in only 14 days, and it shows in the poor construction of some of the scenes. These shortcomings only make the movie a better analog for the memory of Tracey Berkowitz. The writing seems like a rough draft, but is all the more creepy for it. Ellen Page is excellent, even though she is more pretty than Tracey should be. The scenes with Tracey and Lance (played by Max McCabe-Lokos) are notably good and indicative of a chemistry built from previous work together.The Tracey Fragments is centered around its unique and powerful emotional impact. It is thought-provoking as well, but it is not notable as a purely cerebral thriller. I rate it highly on the merits of its strengths not on its lack of shortcomings. If it seems at all interesting to you, watch it; the worst possible outcome is that you won't like it.

splodgeroonie It doesn't surprise me that this has a relatively low rating on IMDb but as usual this doesn't accurately reflect the quality and depth of an original work of art such as this. Some people watch movies to be entertained and some watch films to expose themselves to something that might challenge them and make them think. I can do both but if you ever find yourself in that latter group then I highly recommend that you watch this film. If you find yourself strictly relegated to the former group I'd suggest you don't waste your time.Original, innovative, raw and challenging. There is a depth of emotion and an unravelling sense of mystery here that pulled me in and kept me captivated for the length of the film. Not to mention kept me thinking for days afterwards. It also ended satisfyingly well which is what I find most movies incapable of doing.View with an open mind and I believe you will be rewarded. I highly recommend this film.

Roland E. Zwick 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.

tedg Is there a better center for exploring simultaneous hallucinations than a "late blooming," possibly bipolar 15 year old girl, with creepy parents?It becomes easy to run into a point of view that has confusing, shifting vision. The trick is to show enough of a world that makes sense that we can see what doesn't. You need the horizon to know when you tilt. This is hard because you have to fold the two views into one eye, seeing the girl and seeing as the girl. Some of this has to make sense spatiotemporally and some has to goof with that same sense using it against itself.Along comes the device of multiple images on a screen. This dramatically increases the difficulty of shaping the cinematic effects, offering us challenging new dimensions.I liked this. I think it worked. Because it works and is new — and I mean pretty much wholly new discounting Greenaway. "Time Code" and "Hotel" played with these sorts of notions experimentally. This is placed between them, and with serious intentions to hurt. Hurt it does, and that's the first milestone for something that could matter. Ellen Page is more here of what she gained fame for in "Juno." She's fantastic. It makes Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry" seem pretty tame.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.