A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Somehow, it got 96% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 93 reviews)

Runtime: 100 very long minutes

Directed by: Ana Lily Amirpour

Starring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Mozhan Marno, Dominic Rains

From: Several different companies, including (unfortunately) Vice Films; I have big issues with Vice as an entity, which I will not get into now

Last night I saw this, an indie darling from the previous year. It got a lot of strong praise and as I explain below in my Letterboxd review, even though it sounded rather strange I still hope I would enjoy it. Nope, nope I did not. I thought it was a pile of rubbish and pretentious twaddle. I could have really ranted about it but my thoughts below are rather brief... at least by my standards.

You know, these sorts of pretentious indie hipster-riffic movies just aren't for me. Those of you that have followed me for awhile probably have figured that out already, but I wanted to make that clear. If others on movie forums or sites like this love such things, great; it just does not work for me.

I've known of this movie for awhile so I've always known that the plot and just how it came together was rather wacky: an American movie set in California but with Persian-American actors and the language spoken is Persian and it's supposed to be set in an Iranian city known as BAD CITY. The name of the town alone should have been a warning sign of the pretentiousness I would experience here but I still went in with an open mind and hope I would be charmed by it.

The plot... IMO there really isn't one, aside from a young vampire lady entering Bad City and interacting with some denizens of the town, most of whom are awful people and I never gave a damn about them or the story, as the plot was about as exciting as watching paint dry and I have no idea what the point of this even was, aside from the director allegedly being “cool” for filming this in black & white and having such a daffy plot. Apparently this head up its ass indie movie is a success to many for being this way; me, I typically am not of the “style over substance” camp and as that's what this movie is all about, that's a problem.

Overall, while I won't bemoan giving this movie a shot as I did not fully know it'd be the sort of thing that is not to my tastes, I think I should still be more careful in what I watch so that I don't waste my time or be befuddled by its popularity. The cinematography is good and some musical cues are fine. Otherwise, this was a long and dull experience.