Stay the Same Never Change

Audience Reviews

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Audience Member If you didn't love this movie you are an artless whore with no soul. The tone is phenomenal and was my highlight of Sundance 2009 ... Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/24/23 Full Review Audience Member an enjoyable little film from laurel nakadate, a video artist, who employed almost entirely non-actors to make up the cast of the film, used almost completely found locations to shoot in, and had the film scored by owen ashworth of casiotone for the painfully alone. its pretty good fesitval fair even though it does have some elements that are indicative of nakadates youth when she wrote the script. its little more than a series of loosely connected vignettes about teenage girls in kansas city going through some awkward growing periods. its obvious that nakadate understands feminine issues at that age quite intimately and has put a lot of what i can only presume was personal experience into her characters. she also is very insightful about at least one or two elements of masculinity, especially the ones that go over and against girls at that age. the men tend to be a bit flat, but she understands what kind of gaze they project upon women. be interested to see whats coming up next for her. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/07/23 Full Review Audience Member http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/stay-the-same-never-change/4103 that review is spot on. but it's actually worse than it sounds. it's never even close to being a beautiful as it is in still photos. it's so horribly bad. not even casiotone for the painfully alone saves it. Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Audience Member This was a REALLY odd film, and not at all how I expected it to be from reading the blurb in the programme: "featuring real people in their own real homes who have taken on the lives created for them by the director" I assumed we were either going to see a snapshot of someone's life or they would speak about themselves, and then the director would come in and present them with a scenario/storyline or character to be, and then we would watch them take on that role and act it out, and see how they dealt with issues as they came up. But it wasn't like that at all! It was one of those disillusioned suburban-America films, a type of misery memoir for the homemade video generation, following the lives of several characters - mainly teenage girls - who all live in the same neighbourhood, vaguely connected, but they are all beyond strange. One spends her time leaving monotone sympathetic voicemail messages on the phones of tornado victims, one is a super-emo obsessed with love and death, one girl is transfixed with going to the local races*, and the other has a boyfriend the shape of a life size blow up muscle man doll. Is this them living out their real lives, or is it fiction? It is never clarified. Usually quirky pieces like this are enchanting and charming and really stand out as something to be admired and cherished, the way you love a cult film that no one else has heard of. But this was slow and dreary and didn't seem to have a point to it. I did like the lack of melodrama, but it was almost comatose of drama at times. You began to just accept they were all a bit mental rather than actually being shocked or unsettled by their actions (an emotion the director was seeking). I was actually nodding off towards the end of it - with so many long days and so many films to see, this was not a stand out to get me excited or inspired. *or something like that - I didn't quite catch it and it's probably an Americanism. She did keep dressing up as a crocodile monster... Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 01/17/23 Full Review Audience Member This is what film festival were made for! David Lynch Meets Cindy Sherman Meets Napolean Dynomite meets Judy Blume Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/14/23 Full Review Audience Member Has a documentary feel to it--about a bunch of girls in the midwest and their relationship to the men in their lives; very subtle with a lot of implications which leaves interpretations up to us about what happens in a certain scene...desire, lust, submission...etc; has kind of a deadpan feel to it--some scenes work better as video art--which makes sense since that was the original format--gained more of an appreciation for this movie once the director talked about it after the screening Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/18/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Stay the Same Never Change

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