Last night in the mens' room of the Elgin I was drying my hands next to a guy who was telling his friend that he hadn't been able to do anything since last week because he'd been seeing so many films. His friend asked how many and he said "eight." At which point I burst out laughing, and not just regular laughter, a full-on Joker laugh. And I stumbled away clutching my ribs and repeating "eight" over and over again. This was not performance. This was just where I am now.

So on Sameer's dime I saw The Tracey Fragments last night last thing; no midnight. I got to the Scoshe (sp?) early and there was a mob outside; I asked a guy in the glut "who are they bringing in there? BATMAN??" Turns out it was for Gael Garcia Bernal. He's a fucking tiny person. What did his rabid fans think was going to happen there? The best they could hope for was a solid actor-trampling, and then they lose their prize forever. Maybe that's the point.

Ellen Page is a tiny person as well. She sat behind me in Fragments. Jason Reitman was there too; I shook his hand and told him how much I liked his film, but I was kind of irritated to see people using him as a gateway drug to get to Page - a Chinese girl came up to him, identified him, and asked him to introduce her to Ellen at his earliest opportunity like he was her fucking doorman or something. Something ain't flicked on right in these peoples' brains. But then, during Une Fille Coupee en Deux last night (which was all right but ultimately forgettable), when Matty Price leaned over and suggested a Ludivine Sagnier / Ellen Page sandwich, I lost the movie for about five solid minutes. The look on my face was later described as a combination of horror and religious ecstasy. So who the fuck am I to talk.

As for the film itself, The Tracey Fragments was essentially a mere prototype of something that will someday be done far better by someone far smarter. Bruce McDonald, and no other, fucked this up. Page's performance was unmodulated and shallow, and the technical craft underneath the big slicey-dicey split screen stuff, which has been gaining all the attention, was pre-film school amateur hour at best. A big part of the problem was the sheer shittiness of the visual data - the film must have been shot on bargain-basement handicams; I doubt there even was a director of photography; there certainly wasn't any lighting. The problem being, you can't take visual information that poor and then chop it up and reformulate it into more complex visual artifacts - it doesn't hold up to the audience's gaze, and just becomes so much noise. When Tracey has her big run-from-the-pimp-in-her-briefs-and-a-shower-curtain moment, and her world de-evolves into a kaleidoscope of every thing she's experienced so far, the result looks rather like a digital tape breaking up - which could have been a sublime visual point, if it were not entirely accidental.

Nonetheless, I must admit that the idea, at its core, was a good one. For a few brief, (ahem) fragmentary moments, the split screen technique combined with better-than-average teen girl voiceover and the reliable Ellen Page watchability really does achieve something in conveying the mindset of the girl. It just has to be done better than this.