Lady Bird (15)

I know it's been ages since this film came out, but we've been determined to write this damn review even though we really haven't wanted to.

In fact there's a backlog of films we need to write up, but there's a blockage in the pipe.

And that blockage was this film.

You see, we were really excited to see this.

And while we may have missed it first time around, it came back for a mid-morning showing around the same time as I, Tonya so we got down there pronto.

I mean, it had five Oscar nominations. You don't get that by being crap.

But half an hour in we remembered Boyhood.

Everyone and their cat seemed to love Boyhood, despite it being one of the most mind-numbingly tedious cinematic experiences we can recall.

And while it's nowhere as bad as that, Lady Bird does a good job at trying to be.

It's been described as a 'coming of age' movie, and that much is certainly true.

We spend the whole movie in the company of Lady Bird McPherson (played perfectly well by Saoirse Ronan) as she decides what she wants to do with her life.

She wants to go to college, she wants to leave home, she wants to experience life and love.

And we get to experience all of this with her.

Which should be good. It should, at times, be tense and dramatic — we are, after all, dealing with a teenager.

I was one once. Everything was a sodding drama back then.

But somehow writer/director Greta Gerwig manages to weave a tale that is solidly one pace, a single note played repeatedly for 90 minutes.

That's like listening to Coldplay on repeat while smacking yourself around the head with a dead fish.

And it's not like there isn't any drama to play with her - we open with a row between mother and daughter, Lady Bird gets her heart broken, she gets seriously drunk.

But the scenes are played out with the same tone as the ones where she's bored at work.

I mean, how do you manage to make a teenager's life tedious?

Tedious to the point of making people wish they'd stayed at home.

And yet, upon release, the critics raved about it.

And to be fair, it looks lovely. You could watch some of the scenes all day.

But the pace needs to change, the tone needs to shift now and then, we have to actually feel the angst that Lady Bird is feeling.

Otherwise, what's the point?

In fact this film was so tedious it was really hard to even feel angry about it.

We just walked out feeling flat and more than a little disappointed.

Sadly we're unlikely to learn anything from this experience. When does Oscar season start again?