Favourite Personal Movies

The best thing that happened to this movie is Ellen Page.

And the cover.

Which, coincidentally, also features Ellen Page.

I don't think I've had my expectations regarding a movie crushed so hard ever before as I did with Fish Tank.

I always thought that there could be only two possibilities. A movie can have a good plot, or a bad one. Turns out I was wrong. A movie can have no plot at all. Fish Tank shows us the story of a 15 year old teenage girl Mia and her various relationships. With her mother, with her sister, with her mother's lover, with her mother's lover's music tastes, with her dog, with a horse, with a social worker, with a guy who steals Volvo 9948 engine details from crashed cars parking lot, with a gang of aggressive teenage girls, with practically the whole world surrounding her. And that's it. You might think that by securing such an awfully big amount of possible plot lines and unexpected turns of events, this movie couldn't possibly fail.

But it does. Literally.

First off, there's the overall feeling. The characters are dead (this time's it's figuratively). Seriously, as a viewer, I know nothing about a character when he or she's first introduced. And so, I see this girl with a professionally planned haircut and a fitting outfit, who goes on the street and starts a fight with a group of other girls because of the subject of... dancing?!

What's that supposed to show me? She has bad temper? She's got self-esteem? She knows bad words? Fine, whatever, the director shows me a side of her attitude and now I look at the rest of her actions through this "lens" and it all doesn't make sense. One time she's shown as a BAMF b*tch who "rules dis shit" and the very next scene she's an angel send down from heaven to help mankind survive.

WTF?

If it's impossible to figure out the reasoning behind a characters' actions, that's bad enough. If on top of that, the plot doesn't actually give her any real actions till waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late in the story and is even contradicting human logic at times, it just screws up everything.

I mean, for the first 10 minutes of the film, the only words that I could figure out were "cunt" and "fuck". The whole movie goes "up and down" in terms of volume. On one occasion folks shout and scream at each other, on the other this film could go down as deaf-mute.

Not to mention, that the little amount of plot that actually appears in the story is dragged out so hard and filled with so much pointless filler content, it makes me wonder why the senate is discussing the SOPA and PIPA, while they obviously should be working on a law, which would allow to ban such movies for the crime of sucking.

The only "ray of hope" in this dark and awful mess of unfinished plot lines and dead characters is Katie Jarvis's more or less stunning performance (in comparison to the rest of the cast). It's actually the only thing that kept me watching till the end. Well, aside from the thought somewhere in the back of my head, that we might see a scene with her walking in underwear again.

To sum it up. Badly written characters, with a near-to-zero amount of actual plot lines, and a huge amount of filler contents secure "Fish Tank" a guaranteed place somewhere in the dead end of my Top 50 list.

If you have two hours of free time and don't know how to spend them... don't watch this movie.

You'll waste them.