Monument

A group of students learning the hospitality industry are sent to a "learning" event center and basically forced to do everything work-related, from custodial to serving in order to pass

from the get-go, absolutely everyone smokes, wants to smoke, or is somehow kept from smoking. Maybe i'm just overly sensitive, since this a foreign film. Maybe everyone smokes now except in the US.

All the students seem tired and wrung out on the bus, before the story even takes off. What follows, after they arrive, is a bit like basic training - break them down and build them back up. There's not much in the way of horror here, but it is a well-made and engrossing film. That this is a student film made me even more impressed.

This feature length acting school project is experimental, improvisational, and expressionistic, and if you are upset by the vagueness of the plot, i think you're just watching the wrong type of movie. If you're willing to go on a creepily ambiguous journey you might find this, as I did, surprisingly affecting. I think even the "boring" aspects were used to explore routine as a means of repression, for instance, in a movie which forces both characters and audience to question its reality. Formal strangeness, arthouse uncanniness; I would say it's a weird, cool movie by some ambitious youngsters and as such it ain't half bad.

With no real point to anything prior, everything that happens is totally inconsequential the entire film other than for the sake of a character delivering a line so the movie has some form of dialogue, or trying to film a semi artsy shot with OOOH shadows, ohhhh decrepit concrete halls and rooms, ooohh metal. Films similar have been done a hundreds of times but done better with more artistic vision, more interesting characters, more symbolism, more twists and turns. No plot whatsoever, no good character development. No likeable characters. Watch people do chores for the duration of the movie in a hotel having little boring conversations periodically while knowing "this is symbolic or something right?" with no discernable payoff or meaning. My absolute least favorite type of film, some sort of abstract allegory or metaphor piece, that doesn't even make sense, like watching a toddler trying to fit the square peg in the round hole. I don't even think it was that deep though I simply think they wanted to just do a visual style/aesthetic and fill everything else in along the way. An extremely frustrating film, but not even in a "hurts so good" type of way, there are better movies for that feeling as well.

This is a definite skip unless you really are trying to waste about 2 hrs of your life. The reviews before pretty much sum it up, yes a movie was made and congrats to all involved. The movie is competent enough but there's nothing here that your mind isn't really protecting onto itself like a blank canvass. The opening is intriguing enough but you'll want to make friends with the fast forward button. Kudos for learning film technique etc but don't feel the need to consume an art students graduation protection and don't feel bad for it, is what it is. Anyways there's nothing that hasn't been said.

There is no ovearching plot (the clichest of clichey excuse for an ending doesn't count). There is no consistent genre (we have a little eroticism, a little body horror, some psychological drama, some standup, and some abstract artistic cinema). The graduates of a film academy are testing their skills. But can this loose set of theatrical etudes be called a movie?