Facebook – Conversations with Other Women: A “Review”

This movie is too contrived when it comes to its plot. Its too cliche ridden: couple, cheating, sad people, and love.

But the point of the movie isn’t the story, now is it. The point of the story is having the two main characters (played very well by Eckhart and the usually-drab Helena Bonham Carter) live through this situation on the same screen, nonstop. The only thing is…

The screen is split down the middle, each showing different parts of the same scene.

Sometimes this is two different camera angles, one on each character during the conversations, and sometimes one of the sides shows flashback moments and other characters. And sometimes it presents two alternate ways for situations to play out.

And the whole thing works. The gimmick works 100% of the time. There is never a moment during this split screen thing that I thought “ugh, is this still going on?” and that’s because it is actually different than a gimmick. A gimmick, to me, is using “chapter breaks” to separate the portions of the movie (looking at you, Tarantino!). This movie never stops the split screen once. Never do the characters end up on the screen at the same time in one image. Sometimes they do, but its in the two images. They appear twice. Never does the full screen work.

Here’s the real marvel of this movie… it could never work in full screen. Never. There is no way to compress the images or pan-and-scan. Never could it work. And how many times can you say that about a film?

There is, however, a chemistry between these two actors and, without that, no awesome gimmick would ever work. Kudos, film. Kudos.

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Added September 21, 2016
I should own this movie because it is fairly awesome.
Side note: tired of seeing all these film reviews, but I know there are more comin’.