I remember the regret of a missed kiss. I remember the shaky bravery of my first kiss just as much as the fresh embarrassment of the first kiss I attempted but was rejected. I remember the look of their eyes as they waited, waited for me!, why me?!, and I remember the look of shock when I waited for them and they couldn't give me what I wanted. And now I feel forever removed away from those moments even as a world around me experiences them, over and over, the same crystals trapped in a kaleidoscope continually twisting.

The Exploding Girl is about that time and place of being young and yet somehow looking back, where relationships are as much…

While watching this film, I kept trying to decipher the meaning of the camerawork. The protagonist is shot from behind a variety of objects, from car windows and passing traffic to furniture and stair railings. It gets annoying, so I figured it must be intentional. Then again, it's mumblecore, so who knows? Perhaps we are being asked to see her kind of lost in the swirl of life and never quite center stage in the drama that surrounds her. Perhaps.

In any event, this is a film about a female college student named Ivy (Zoe Kazan) who is subject to epileptic seizures. Medication has them mostly under control, but she can suddenly be stricken when stressed and under the influence…

From what I read about this film I was anticipating a mumblecore drama revolving around a girl's struggle with epilepsy. Unfortunately the epilepsy part was practically non-existent, and the pieces left behind didn't combine into anywhere near a complete puzzle. Maybe expecting a thorough psychological examination of epilepsy was a mistake on my part, but then I can't see the point of repeatedly stating that protagonist Ivy has the disorder and then barely have it affect any part of the narrative. There's a brief scene late in the film where she has a fit but it doesn't seem to be a major problem in her life, which makes me wonder why even give her this character trait in the first…

48/100

Second viewing, no change. "I love Kazan in this," reads my tweet-review from 2011 (in which I apparently hadn't yet started using implicit first-person; today it'd start with "Love"), "but Gray's working so hard to be truthful that he crosses the line into banal." Two years later, reviewing Gray's (far superior) Jack & Diane, I described The Exploding Girl as "so diffident that [it's] in constant danger of being blown offscreen by a mild gust of wind." (Yes, the title is ironic, except insofar as it alludes to the protagonist's epilepsy.) Both opinions hold, but this time around the film played more like an unusually thoughtful and arty after-school special, predicated as it is entirely upon Ivy's ultra-tentative, frustrated relationships…