The reason I saw only the last half of Meet Monica Velour yesterday was because I was watching Dana Adam Shapiro‘s Monogamy in a tiny screening room right next to Velour‘s. (Both showings began at 4 pm). After about 45 or 50 minutes of Monogamy I was feeling so dispirited that I decided to jump ship. It’s not that Monogamy is awful — it has two or three interesting elements — but I just couldn’t stand the dysentery-like color scheme.

The color in this trailer is much more robust than the color projected during yesterday’s screening. All I know is that after a half-hour or so it began to make me feel ill. At first it made everyone and everything in the film look drab and drained. That was bad enough. But then it started to irritate me personally, and then it took over my mood, and then my soul.

Using bleachy color has become an accepted way of conveying artiness or heavy-osity. I get that. But brownish bleachy color makes a film look like it’s been lying in a cesspool, or has been processed in coffee grounds. Filmmakers would be well advised to avoid it from here on. Whatever you think you’re getting from this visual scheme in terms of edgy hipster cred will be more than counter-balanced by the feelings of nausea in the seats.

I haven’t felt such an acute visceral response to a color scheme since David Fincher‘s Fight Club, which I also dislike for its drab color, which I thought was kind of a cross between muted greenish guacamole and two-day-old coffee grounds lying at the bottom of a plastic garbage bag.