Overrated

From my favorite movies..

A different way of telling a story

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

I very seldom have ever had a really bad reaction to a movie...but this one did it for me! I ended up speeding it up...morbidly curious as to how it would end. This movie was so miserably dark and depressing that any 'lesson' that could have been had in regards to using the internet for 'romance' was totally lost... Granted, it may be a good idea to 'teach' people to be cautious and sensible when it comes to searching the internet for romance... But these characters...especially that of the girl's...was so emotionally a total wreck, that it was a poorly presented lesson. Yes, there are some sick minds out there...but instead of this movie showing the dangers of internet romance...it seemed to only emphasize the disturbed and emotionally needy mind of the young woman.

I can understand why some people might not like this movie. But I feel that the reasons why this movie gets such bad reviews are exactly the reasons why this movie is so good.Sure, the movie is very slow paced, the actual story telling keeps being stalled, and the main character doesn't do anything even when he has more than enough evidence. But isn't that what love does to people?To me, the movie uses this slow, almost destination-less, cinematography to evoke in the viewer the feelings Cody feels throughout the movie. Even when he has more than enough evidence to know the girl was lying to him, he still loves her and is so confused that just doesn't want to believe the truth. He keeps avoiding reality, trying to find more and more evidence hoping to find something better. So all the crazy scenes, all the empty shots, all the stalling, pictures the way in which someone might react to an inconvenient truth.

The writer director originally made a 17 minute short on this with some of the same cast. Clearly someone paid him to bulk this up to a feature length work. Problem is it's the same 17 minute film dragged out to 85 minutes with nothing new to add. It's slow and dull and leans heavily on mumblecore and hipster clichés of random dialog and in medias res scenes that have no beginning or context. You're supposed to be bored and baffled I guess. At any rate the dialog is weak and stupid because it's supposed to be real. But who wants to overhear random snippets of other people's lives? It does not a movie make. Of the two main characters, one is an obsessive paranoid and the other's a sociopath. But again that's supposed to be uber cool in hipster Bushwick. BTW is Bushwick really 100% upper class white kids? Well anyway as others have noted the plot is very simple the characters are all extremely odd and the whole thing is totally pointless. Add to that a lot of shakycam and closeups of phone and laptop screens and you'll be left wondering why this didn't stay a 17 short.

I wanted to leave within the first 10 minutes. The movie drags on and on, extremely slowly. I only stayed because I was with other friends and also because I knew the director, the actress, and the production cast were in the audience and I did not want to disrespect them. But wow, this was dreadful. The movie honestly could have been summed up into a 10 minute short story. I don't want to give out any spoilers but... He basically finds out serious information within the first 15 minutes of the movie, but he goes through unnecessary loops throughout the whole movie to confirm what was already known. Honestly, this movie reminds me of what happens when you give a privileged kid a lot of money and he makes a crappy hipster movie. It was long, awkward, lots of forced improv acting, and completely unoriginal. Also, did Apple sponsor the movie? I saw the Apple brand at least 25 times throughout the film.