A Ghost Story

Has anyone else watched the movie A Ghost Story, starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara?

I stuck with it for about 15 minutes and turned it off after I WOKE UP! I actually fell asleep and I was watching it at 2 in the afternoon! BOOOORRRRING.

Should I have stuck with it? Or was it best that I put myself out of misery?

I hope some folks chime in. I thought the trailer that I saw in the theater looked good but then I read a little more detailed description that made it sound boring. Sometimes I fall asleep during good movies (at home) so if this one is a clunker I might have to wait until it’s on Amazon Prime.

It is a verrrrry slooooow meditation on grief and moving on (x100000). It’s definitely an artsy kind of movie with a sort of ambiguous structure so if you don’t like that kind of thing, you might not enjoy it. Ultimately I thought it was very compelling but definitely not for everyone.

I want to see it but have not yet. It sounds like an interesting idea. But how is the execution, does the end make the movie worth it? These are the questions.

I’ve been avoiding spoilers, and I hope to see it soon.

My immediate reaction to the ending was one of annoyance. But it stuck with me, and I appreciated it more the more I thought about it, and now I think it’s just about perfect.

So, yeah, it’s one of those types of movies. Slow as molasses though. I keep thinking about the pie scene in particular.

I enjoyed it, but I’m a sucker for very slow moving atmospheric stuff (I liked Blade Runner 2049 and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford quite a lot).

I enjoyed it. But yeah, it was an incredibly slow burn, but I think that’s kind of the point of the movie (a meditation on the passing of time/grief/moving on as amaguri stated above).

I would recommend it, but with heavy emphasis that it’s one of those movies you have to be “in the mood for”, as there really isn’t a conventional plot. Personally, I thought it was executed well for what it was trying to be.

It’s both awful and pointless. But since nothing much happens it’s a blank canvas for people to ascribe virtually any hidden “meaning” to. It’s about grief. Or overeating pie. There’s not enough plot to contradict you, so how can you be wrong?

It’s this, exactly. Ghost grieves - until he accepts it. The end.

The bit at the party (an hour in) is the only bit with any meaningful dialogue, delivered in a particularly clunky way by a dungaree wearing redneck. And the pie, what the heck. I watched it and it went on and on and on and on. I paused it after an eternity to see if Internet reviews were as bored with it as I was only to find I should have let it play for another five seconds and it would have ended.

Even the bit in the hospital where he sat up was telegraphed about a hundred years in advance. And why was the smoke from the car crash coming from the wrong direction?

Lame story, bad direction, boring as hell, a hundred other films do the coping with grief thing better.