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Gerry Sucks

I really wanted to like Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. But I couldn’t. It is two hours of boredom. Pretentious boredom. Boredom that is trying very hard to look like Kiarostami and Camus. But fails. There is a trick to portraying pointlessness without making the movie itself pointless…a little like describing boredom without being boring…it can be done, but it is not done here. You can’t just throw together a bunch of Kiarostami-esque car rides, empty landscape, empty conversation, and a random killing and hope that it all adds up to something meaningful. What you end up with is a film that announces “Hi. I’m trying to be meaningful.” And therefore is not.

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