S... Year

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01/09/2019 One of Ellen Barkinâ(TM)s best performances ever! See more 04/23/2015 Though, at times, Archer's film is pretentious -- Ellen Barkin's performance is strong enough to hold interest. The film has a haunting quality that I quite enjoyed. See more 04/15/2014 A visually compelling (although occasionally flawed) expressionistic portrait of a woman who, after retiring from a successful acting career and leaving a relationship, must decide who she is. See more 01/30/2013 If you liked 'Wild Tigers I Have Known', or care about breathtaking cinematography at all, see this film. Any negative reviews it received have been carelessly jotted down by viewers who are either not familiar with Archer's visually based filmmaking or miss the point of the film entirely. In Shit Year and his first feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known, Archer uses surreal, abstract, and sometimes disorienting visual elements in order to immerse the viewer into the world and psyche of the protagonist. If you are looking for an action packed or linear, single layered plot, Shit Year isn't for you. If you enjoy films that balance beautiful experimental elements with complex and unconventional characters, do your eyes and mind a favor and watch this film tonight. See more 12/20/2011 Even after the fourth time, this is as good as movies get. Ellen Barkin is on another level. See more 09/25/2011 "Shit Year" wins the award for best movie title of the year but definitely not best movie of the year. It is a highly avant-garde hand-made film shot on black-and-white video. Ellen Barkin plays a famous screen actress around age 60 just realizing how alone she is. She has just had a brief affair with a 22-year-old actor who had co-starred with her in a play, and the affair has left her in a funk. It's not clear whether she has fallen in love with him or just cannot stomach being single anymore. Writer/director Cam Archer, who is not particularly deep, seems to have written the 22-year-old into the script just so he could film a nearly naked 22-year-old boy. And he does so with all the depth of a Calvin Klein ad. The attention to the main character is fairly deep, but not enough to trigger much caring on the part of the audience. I was mostly bored while watching "Shit Year." The avant-garde techniques weren't that interesting either. The film is more like theater than cinema. The actors step in front of the camera the way an actor would step onto a bare stage to do a scene. They perform what are basically monologues to give you a sense of what the character might be going through. Nothing is meant to be realistic -- more like re-enactment of pivotal moments in someone's life, where the audience understands that it is seeing highly stylized, fragmentary re-enactments, not the actual occurrences. This distancing effect and the general use of techniques from stage drama and art video I found moderately interesting. But for this kind of thing to work in cinema, it has to take one's breath away. The audience also has to care deeply about something. None of this happened in "Shit Year." Barkin gives a good performance. (When is Barkin not fabulous?) But unfortunately she's lost in a movie that never takes off. See more Read all reviews

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