The Art of Crying

The Art of Crying is a dark "comedy" from Denmark about a boy struggling to cope within the confines of an excessively dysfunctional family. The reason I use comedy in quotes is because it's labelled as "black comedy" but I found it very difficult to laugh in the context of some pretty disturbing stuff. It is quirky and slow to start at first while the story is told by the youngest son and the characters are introduced one by one. His perspective is very realistic in terms of a young child naively trying to make sense of the world. The movie then leads down a path of strange unrealistic character actions that become too overwhelming to be believable at some point, or perhaps too frustratingly believable. The end result is watching a good movie but completely not enjoying it, and not in the way watching a depressing or scary movie is, but in a way that is uncomfortable and frustrating. I guess I wanted to just get up and slap some of the characters around.

Audience Watch: A girl sat down next to me at the last minute in the theater and proceeded to slowly unwrap a crinkly chocolate bar, then left it open on the seat next to her. So for the duration of the movie, I had some serious wafts of a very strong fancy 98% cacao chocolate bar in my nose, which is a nice smell for about 5 minutes and then becomes increasingly difficult to tolerate. However, more significantly than the chocolate bar situation was the woman whose cell phone went off in the theatre three times! On the third time, she proceeded to swiftly walk out of the theatre carrying her still ringing cell phone in her hand, instead of just pushing one button to shut it up! Then several minutes later, she actually walked back into the theatre after this outburst and sat back down again, at the risk of being torn to shreds by the entire theatre after the show.