Ivy (Zoe Kazan) is epileptic and returns home to Brooklyn on summer break from college. Her friend Al joins her to sleep on her couch when his room is rented out by his parents. She struggles to stay in contact with boyfriend Greg. Greg gets into a car accident with his high school friend Rebecca and decides to stay with her in the hospital. Ivy starts hanging out with Al.Don't get me wrong. Zoe Kazan is lovely. She's beautiful and has a charm about her. It doesn't mean that watching her alone for most of the movie is particularly exciting. She has some interesting phone calls. She really needs the second to be in more of the movie and he needs to be played by somebody more compelling. I understand the idea of being alone in a crowded city and losing one's connection. However, this movie lacks the drive to propel it.

I won't say that Exploding Girl was more accessible down here in Brazil than it was in its home country, but I had the distinct advantage of watching it not merely as entertainment or a time-killer but as news from frontlines at which new technologies cross with an evolving emotional tone and evolving mores and the technology gives the emotional tone and the mores impetus.(1) As one of the last people in the world not to use a cell phone, I was pleased to see evidence to support my lingering suspicion that most cell phone communication is merely to "check in" — I think that was the language of the movie itself — and to provide reassurance that the caller will call again later, again to check in, again to provide reassurance of yet another call to check in later still and so on, I assume, ad infinitum unto death.2) But that's not really the whole of it. The constant cell phoning back and forth seems also to be necessary for purposes of temperature taking. First, there's the toneless "How are you?" and then an affectless, seemingly obligatory "I'm okay, how are you?" and then a further affectless "I'm okay" at the other end. Then it's allowed that the call has been just to check in and there will be another call just to check in later. But maybe it's not just the checking-in that's important but the taking of emotional temperature and the reassurance that everything is on an even keel, that no one's lurching too far out of the "okay" range, no one's getting either too hot and bothered or too chilly or cold and thereby threatening to tumble off into catatonia. And, if this is the case, then the constant checking in and temperature taking helps to hold people in the "okay" range. What do you think? Do I have this anything like right?(3) How mannerly these young people are, within of course the parameters of their evolving manners! How solicitous they are of each other! How caring! Greg has taken up with an old girlfriend during a summer away from his current girlfriend. He calls the current girlfriend up to break it to her. He does it unshirkingly, with no more trepidation or embarrassment than if he were calling to tell her he's held up in traffic and he's going to be ten minutes late to dinner. And then he calls again later to make sure she's okay. And she has of course told him in response to the initial announcement of his calling it quits that everything is okay, everything is fine, and now everything is still fine. Reminds me of something John Updike had Rabbit observe in one of the Rabbit novels, probably Rabbit Is Rich, namely, that these young people are operating at a lower sexual temperature than his generation operated at. And then there is, in this movie, the lifelong friend Al, who wonders aloud to Ivy if their relationship might not possibly develop beyond the palsiness that has so far been its outer limit and, when she doesn't immediately fall into his arms, he apologizes for possibly rocking the boat, threatening the equilibrium of things. Friendship and . . . something more than friendship — if this movie is to be believed, and in this respect it seems credible enough, the boundaries I speak of are blurring to the vanishing point. But, then, you guys up there in the U.S. already know all this stuff about the way relationships are evolving. You're not learning anything new from this movie. I am learning from it, I am learning a lot from it, and that's why I hold the movie dear.

The star of 'The Exploding Girl' is Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia Kazan, the legendary director. It helps that Elia Kazan was Zoe's grandfather, as I'm sure it's helped her career. Nonetheless, I understand she's a pretty good actor irregardless of her famous surname. But here, in 'The Exploding Girl' she has virtually nothing to do.'The Exploding Girl' is up for a Spirit Award in the 'John Cassavetes Award' category (features made for under a budget of $500,000). It's similar to another Spirit Award nominee, 'Tiny Furniture', as they are both about a young college-aged female back at home from school, who have both platonic and romantic relationships with young men. Kazan plays Ivy who gets a call from her friend Al, whose parents have just rented his room out, and finds himself with nowhere to stay. The circumstances of this 'mixup' by Al's parents are unclear and the specious explanation provided by the film's writer/director, Bradley Rust Gray, appears nothing more than a weak plot device to place Ivy and Al in close proximity to one another.Al is a sensitive guy but I'm unable to remember much about him. Oh yes, he takes Ivy to a rooftop where pigeons are being bred and there are some nice shots of the platonic couple gazing skyward at a flock of birds (pigeons?) flying in the sky. The rest of the Exploding Girl plot concerns Ivy being dumped by her boyfriend, Greg, who we never see on screen. In fact, the entire Ivy-Greg relationship is depicted through a series of cell phone conversations! One shallow internet poster has asserted that American films focus on plot and Indie films are more like foreign ones—i.e., character driven. In this poster's mind, 'art' films don't have to have much of a plot and the mere presentation of 'sensitive' characters is enough to award accolades to such films as 'The Exploding Girl'. As a fledging screenwriter myself, I can say without hesitation that 'plot' is the most difficult aspect of a screenplay to develop. You can have all the great characters in the world but if you don't have a dynamic, original plot, your film might get off the ground, but it will never soar! I realized that 'The Exploding Girl' was going to be slow-moving after watching the first ten minutes. However, sometimes there are slow-moving films which reward you with a surprising twist at the end. Not so with 'The Exploding Girl'. It's all rather predictable stuff when we discover Ivy and Al holding hands as the screen goes blank and the credits then begin to roll.The film's scenarist appears to be a nice guy and nothing in this film is crude or objectionable. Nonetheless, there simply aren't enough unique plot reversals to prevent us from throwing this film into the proverbial indie trash bin. Perhaps with more life experiences, Mr. Gray may come up with a more dynamic story. Certainly, 'The Exploding Girl' does have a few arresting visual moments. But as long as another weary 'lovesick girl bounces back after being dumped by insensitive boyfriend' plot is thrown our way, this film (and other indies films like it) might be defined in terms of what 'Seinfeld' is supposed to be really about: nothing!

I don't like "movies" shot on video, and this one is no exception. Its semi-improvised dialog was also a barrier to appreciation, as well as the fledgling director's pretentious approach to photography.Except for interiors, nearly all the barely-edited shots are long shots using very shallow focus - a technique I thought went out in the '60s. The cast's conversations are shot as if using a hidden camera (the hi-def RED camera is used here), from across the street with intervening cars or pedestrians frequently blocking the principals from our view. Add to that protagonist Mark Rendall's speech impediment (I counted him stating the word "like" 25 times in less than a minute) and you have distancing of the viewer taken to the extreme.Our heroine played OK enough by Zoe Kazan (she won a dubious Best Actress award from the lowliest of film festivals, the must-miss Tribeca event, which doesn't even take place in Tribeca anymore) remains a blank. She's an epileptic and sure enough, has too many beers, causing a seizure late in the film, but I didn't find that potential disability handled with any insight or relevance to the surrounding film. The story's emphasis on her also was a drag; it reminded me of that Golden Age of porno (now several decades back) when one sometimes experienced a horrific moment, usually during the second or third reel, of realization: "We're going to be stuck looking at this solitary girl for the whole movie!".Mercifully short, about 75 minutes after removing the slow-slow padding of the end credits, the feature had only two good scenes: one rooftop checking out the pet pigeons that starts as a too-obvious homage to Zoe's grandpa Elia Kazan (classic Saint/Brando scene from ON THE WATERFRONT) and ends up improbably as a Werner Herzog homage, capturing the strange abstract patterns created by flocks of birds in formation that was the signature image of Werner's 2004 film THE WHITE DIAMOND. The other scene I enjoyed was a simple finale ring shot of the hero & heroine asleep in the backseat of a car, unconsciously clasping their hands together.Low points were a "gee whiz" visit to a SoHo building supposedly once the site of Nikola Tesla's shop -like so many Manhattan non-landmarks it looks like nothing now; and the endless use of cell phones, one of which permitted an entire performance (Zoe's heel of a boyfriend Greg) to be literally phoned in. I am also nominating THE EXPLODING GIRL as the feature film with the lowest costume budget in recent history: it looks like they spent about $3.95 for the heroine's and hero's rumpled, slept-in crappy outfits; ditto ALL the extras (who obviously wore theirs from home).