Endings, Beginnings

Daphne Mirador (Shailene Woodley) decides to take a six-months break after a four year relationship with Adrian (Matthew Gray Gubler). She's struggling to find a job and vows to stop drinking. She's living under her sister Billie (Lindsay Sloane) and her family. She meets Jack (Jamie Dornan) and Frank (Sebastian Stan) at a party.

The story is aimless which seems to be the point. Daphne is aimless and it makes for an aimless watch. It's as tiresome as that sounds. It's a lot of hot people having boring melodramas. On a minor note, I don't like the text style. The hipster colorized text is harder to read and is simpler trying too hard. I would have quit after thirty minutes if it isn't against my policy. There is a lot of stops and starts. I have nothing to cling to with these characters. I don't care about them and I don't really know the guys. With Dornan, I'm just reminded of 50 Shades and that's not a good thing. That may or may not be his fault but it is definitely unavoidable. The sex scenes don't help. As for Shailene, I applaud her attempts at being a little different than the constant MPDG. She does need a more discriminating eye for the material. This is a hipster melodrama of the boring kind.

"Endings, Beginnings" is a spare story of a woman, Daphne, who appears to have no career or job, and seems adrift in her personal life after a break-up. She does a lot of party- and club-hopping in LA, and meets two hot dudes who happen to be close friends. This triangle gets messy when she falls into a sexual relationship with both of them. One is the classic bad boy who owes people money, smokes pot, but is great in bed. The other is a more serious academic and writer who offers the prospect of a deeper relationship, but she seems to find him less "exciting." Even though he's very cool and good-looking!

The shaky camera work, abrupt cuts, dreamy lighting and lack of dialogue or structured plot make this seem like a music video more than a feature film. Stan and Woodley have some raunchy sex scenes, and you can see why she finds him irresistible, but this is fairly shallow fare due to the direction and writing.

I'm here on IMDB looking up who stars in this movie because the movie is so badly shot and dark that I could barely tell what anyone looks like. I don't ever really think about cinematography- I go into a movie, watch it, and don't think much about the filming style. But in this movie the filming style is so bad that it's distracting. The entire movie is very dark- yes for some unknown reason it's all in the dark. Even the daytime scenes everyone is shrouded in shadows. So that kinda sucks. And then also all the conversations in this movie seem to be shot in profile. We only ever see the sides of people's faces. I'd love to get just one shot of someone's entire face. Like an actual face, with eyes, that is well lit, that would be great. But you're not gonna get that in this movie! You're actually not going to see an entire head in almost any scene. All the heads will be either from very far away or very close up so you'll see from the neck to the eyebrows only but not the actual top of anyone's heads and NEVER the front of their face- only the profile! I'm not even going to comment on the plot it's kinda bla or whatever but I'm halfway through the movie while writing this and just looking at this dark and terrible filming style. As I'm writing this Im also thinking, "Am I exaggerating?" But no I am not because every single time I glance up at the screen I see close ups of people's side profiles in shadow. Every scene. I don't need to keep seeing Shailene Woodley's ears. Also Jamie Dornan is a gorgeous man and we never actually get to see a shot of his whole face this entire frickin movie! Why even have someone so gorgeous in so many scenes and only show bits of pieces of face? Why is the cinematographer doing this to us? Whyyyy?!

I disliked the film. It is slow, and the plot does not go anywhere.

I guess this film is about real life and real people. How messed up we are, and relationships, how extremely complicated is everything. The actors did an amazing job, since all dialogues were improvised, no written script. The movie has a certain atmosphere that catches you where music and cinematography are in harmony, and you'll have a great deal to think about way after "the end".