The Fits (2016)

What makes it different from others?

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Why I want to love this movie: -The acting was fantastic! I love movies with unknown and amazing talent. One of the interesting things about the acting was that you only really ever got to see and hear from the teens in the movie. All the adults are nameless, faceless (mostly), and all around useless/unimportant. That was very novel and interesting to watch that way. -Fascinating plot with very little dialogue. -Simplistic yet stunning directing and filming. The simplicity made everything that happened in the film important. Example: The main character Toni will just be walking in a scene and the camera will be focused on her, but there is so much going on in the background all the time. Keeping the camera focused on her even when she isn't doing anything except walking, gives the viewer time to notice what is going on in the background.Why I just can't give this more stars: -Too short! I normally don't notice how long a movie is, but this was so short that it felt like the movie wasn't over yet. -What is happening? Why is it happening? Why just girls? What was the dance scene towards the end? Is the theme about fitting in? Is it supernatural? Is it coming of age? ENDLESS questions! I generally enjoy movies that leave the viewer with questions and that make the viewer think, but this one was SO open ended it was frustrating. There was pretty much zero closure. WARNING SPOILERS: You think you know what is going on towards the beginning; the girls are pregnant and are suffering the side effects in an extreme way. As the movie continues, all the girls, even the ones too young to be pregnant get the fits (did they all just get their period? Yet ANOTHER question). Then Toni has a vision, floats towards the other girl, then also has a fit. Finish the movie with a slight smile and a confused look on my face.I would love if a film professional could examine this movie, because I think there is more going on than my tiny brain can understand. Overall, fantastic movie but I'm not so sure it will be on my repeat watching list.

By way of unintentional contrast, I watched The Fits not long after watching The Falling – a film similar in that it deals with mass fainting of girls around the age of puberty. I will not compare and contrast the films, except to say that while The Falling left me on the outside looking it, The Fits manages to draw me into a character for whom I have little in common, make me understand what she is going through, and very much feel for her throughout the film.The plot sees a young girl stop boxing with her older brother in the gym and start to pay attention to the all-girl dance troupe that practice in another hall. As she joins the group and starts to integrate, some of the older girls fall into sudden seizures (which are dubbed 'the fits'). The split between those girls who have experienced these, and those that have not forms tensions within the wider group. The film achieves this while doing (by doing?) several surprising things. The most obvious is that dialogue is very light on the ground, and when it comes it tends to be functional stuff rather than any exposition or grandstanding for the cast to get their teeth into. The other thing it does is let the actual fits be a background thing – something that is happening but is not our focus; instead Toni is our focus, and our relationship to anything in the film is through her.There are so many ways this could not have worked, but it pulls it off well. Hightower gives a great performance and is very well directed; so much I was invested in with her character was down to small reactions, body language, the sense of pent up feeling – all of it drawing me in and giving me things I could relate to even if the specifics I could not. The journey is very clear, and the implied meanings are fairly obvious – but it is the intelligence and subtlety of the story- telling through this character that makes it more than just a series of events (far from it in fact).The Fits is a beautifully observed character study, which never lets the plot device become more than the people – and Toni is accessible and engaging as a character, and thanks to a very well-directed performance from the young lead. It is not a perfect film, and the sense of space may annoy some viewers, or the weakness of some aspects may grate, but at its core it is a tremendous film with near total control over what it is trying to do and how it is trying to do it.

Who is Anna Rose Holmer? Well she's the writer and director of a 72 minute indie by the name of the "The Fits," which inexplicably has garnered a slew of accolades from a host of major critics. Like many fledgling indie directors, Holmer shows great promise in the technical area of filmmaking and The Fits doesn't disappoint when it comes to some great editing and cinematography. But as far as screen writing, Holmer doesn't have a clue how to develop characters or construct a plot featuring a modicum of suspense.Holmer's narrative is mainly shot in an inner city community center in Cincinnati, and her protagonist is one Toni, played by 11 year old Royalty Hightower, whom the critics have taken under their wing as cinema's next great child actor (I won't speculate as to why this has come to be—only to throw in my two cents that this is a young girl who lacks the requisite charm for placement in the pantheon of young, precocious, cinematic talent). The plot here (if there is one) concerns Toni's desire to join the Lionesses Dance Team, an all female pre-pubescent/teenage dance group that specializes in competitive dance drills. Toni finally makes the team, despite opposition from two older girls, who dislike outsiders infringing on their turf. In addition to the focus on choreography, there's the artificial intrusion of a plot point concerning some of the girls felled by seizures, fainting spells, which may or may not be blamed on contaminated drinking water inside the gym. The introduction of the "Fits"—the aforementioned seizures—does little to evoke suspense and awkwardly attempts to link the film's narrative to the horror genre.What then has captivated the critics about this very slight bauble of a film? Ty Burr, writing in the Boston Globe describes Toni's experience as a "rite of passage"—she's particularly impressed with a scene such as this one for some reason: " Toni piercing her ears in the community center's bathroom as her friends comment and help out."The NY Times critic, Mahnola Dargis, likes it because it's free of controversy: "The miracle of the movie is that, like Toni, it transcends blunt, reductive categorization partly because it's free of political sloganeering, finger wagging and force-fed lessons."Noel Murray writing in the A.V. Club feels that Toni's "awkward puberty" is a revelation: "For Toni, who practices and practices—fruitlessly—to move as gracefully and throw shade as fiercely as her peers, this new level of badass womanhood represents something else she may never be able to attain. The best she can do is to keep honing her own private, personal hybrid of fighting and stepping, while waiting for some inexplicable external force to define who she's going to be."Only Nikola Grozdanovic in IndieWire is on to something when he writes that Holmer is walking a very thin line between "special" and "disposable." Grozdanovic is perhaps the only brave enough critic to draw this damning conclusion about The Fits: " The emotional investment, fully rounded characters, and engaging events that are needed to make the film work on all fronts simply isn't there. Three writers (Holmer, Saela Davis, and Lisa Kjerluff) are credited for what turns out to be the film's Achilles' heel; and at some point on the way, it gets irreparably sprained."When all is said and done, The Fits is really a documentary masquerading as a short feature film. The subject matter is so slight that I wonder why its director was drawn to it in the first place. Director Holmer is guilty of perhaps a neophyte's hubris. With all the good scripts out there, why not work with someone who has an established track record or an exceptionally talented newcomer? Instead, it's the old indie film canard—a technical virtuoso attempting to develop a visually impressive but inert, intellectually barren script.

The Fits follows a young girl as she joins a dance team. Upon her sign up some of the other students begin to experience sudden seizures, or fits. The shots were pretty great. The camera would often roll for more than a few minutes, making the actors memorize all their actions and lines for each scene instead of being loaded with cuts that don't require as much acting and memorization ability. The thing is, though, that the lines that had to be memorized were few and far between. There's very little dialogue in this movie, so as far as that area is concerned none of the actors were particularly challenged I'm sure. As for action, yes, there was a lot of that. There were often lengthy shots of the main character going through the same dance routine over and over. Of course, there was room for error as she was just practicing, and it was always the same dance, but it was pretty impressive regardless. However, the movie falls short on several levels. First of all, the actors aren't actually all that good, despite their effort. The lead actress, Royalty Hightower, is pretty good for a child actor, but everyone else falls pretty flat. They just aren't nearly as convincing, and thus when we as the audience are supposed to care about them we simply can't. I didn't, anyway. The story itself was actually really intriguing to me, but it was so boring in actuality. As it progresses it slows more and more until it's just a straight-up boring movie. The way the story is presented, however, is unoriginal, dumb, and often formulaic. It's more focused on the main characters acting like little girls and having fun than it is about the fits themselves, despite the title of the film being just that. The fits are actually really not that important. Without knowing the title or plot synopsis of this movie I would not have guessed that the fits were actually supposed to be important. It's a coming-of- age movie so I understand that good titles may be hard to come by, but the fits could have had more significance regardless. There's this kind of stupid scene at the end where floating happens when it shouldn't be, and it looks hilariously fake. I actually laughed out loud at this scene. Whether or not it was actually fake, I don't know, but it looked awful and didn't make any sense. There are a handful of parts scattered through this movie where characters act so in-sync with each other that it ends up taking the audience out of the movie more than it does anything for it. It makes it feel fake. Mind you there were only a few of these scenes, but they were still distracting enough to make them hard to ignore. Overall The Fits is kind of stupid, and a largely forgettable movie. I understand what the movie was trying to do, and I think it was kind of cool what it did with symbolism and all that, but it just lacked in it's ability to present itself well enough as both a functioning and original story and a symbolic one. As for the stupid floating scene, I'm sure it means something, but the movie gave me no reason to care enough to put any more thought into it than I already had. In the end I wouldn't recommend this movie.