One of my all time favorites.

Just so...so bad

good back-story, and good acting

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Hal Hartley has always been an inconsistent filmmaker. He made the terrific Trust and a lot of good movies like Henry Fool and The Unbelievable Truth, but he has also made a frightening number of movies that are really, really, bad.After the excellent Henry Fool, Hartley reached a sort of consistency, pumping out consistently terrible movies one after the other like Fay Grimm, No Such Thing, Book of Life, and the abysmal Girl from Monday.Girl from Monday is a few different sorts of bad. It is a trite sci-fi story of the sort written by people who haven't read enough science fiction to know that their ideas are unoriginal. It is convoluted storytelling poorly held together by an inescapable voice-over in lieu of using action to tell story. It is filmed in a purposefully artsy style involving odd angles and breaks in action that does nothing to further the story and fails to create an interesting style.Hartley is always at his best exploring the lives of odd people who can't communicate. But this movie has little of that classic Hartley approach to conversation outside of a short chat early on between the two leads. Mainly it's either narration or two characters exchanging information in a straightforward but uninteresting way.Like No Such Thing and Fay Grimm, this is a genre movie from a director who is incapable of making genre movies. It is admirable that Hartley likes to try new things, but it's remarkable how bad he is when he gets out of his groove.By the way, some people have suggested this is Hartley being Goddard. I absolutely hate Goddard. Just so you know where I'm coming from.

The dialogue is stilted, the acting is just awful, the back story is sketchy---especially frustrating in a film that hangs on its back story---and the "futuristic" props are so cheap as to be comical. The social-scientific concept of the movie sounds rather intriguing when read in summary on Wikipedia, but it's not fleshed out in the film. Worse yet, there's no connection established between that concept and the extra-terrestrial aspects of the story. Overall, this movie lacks a coherent plot, on top of stunningly poor execution. Indeed, the best thing about this film is the titles design. So watch those and move on---don't waste the next 80 minutes of your life.

It has a promising plot line, and some quite interesting performances and direction, but overall I felt the film lacked substance. Except for its unique idea of sex-for-points, it's filled with simple notions such as "advertising is bad" and "freedom is good." Both are valid beliefs, but neither are explored with much originality.It played out like a weak version of an excellent novel or short story. Great soundtrack, though.(BTW, I believe the opening credits read "A Science Fiction by Hal Hartley," not "A Science Fiction Film by Hal Hartley," as the first reviewer wrote. Not sure exactly what he means by that, but it is probably significant to Hartley.)

So hopefully this was just a blip on the screen of an otherwise good career. Was the talk of the Sundance shuttle bus...but not in a good way.Too many amateurish techniques. Voice over narration in an attempt to get a noir feeling but most of the time was actually for exposition because the story wasn't getting told on the screen.Bad camera technique that would be okay in small doses (ie: a dream sequence) but was tiring and distracting from the opening credits onward. Kept waiting for the "real" movie to start.The girl from Monday doesn't make an appearance for quite awhile in the movie and then gets left in an apartment to learn to use her body (or course she swam out of the ocean quite well).Anyway...I had to leave about the time the boy was getting "raped" in the school bathroom. Time is too precious at Sundance and I went to "Rory O'Shea was Here" and the contrast couldn't have been higher between the two.Is probably a waste of time to anyone but his fans.D.