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MovieMail's Review
If you take a wee look around for reference points with which to pin Miranda July's refreshing debut movie, You, Me & Everyone We Know to the butterfly board of contemporary cinema, more often than not you'll hear the likes of Magnolia, Crash and Short Cuts bandied about. Which is fair, in a way, because the movie is, after all, about a bunch of random, disparate people whose lives intersect in a variety of ways during the course of the movie (writer/director July herself appears semi-autobiographically in the guise of Christine, a performance artist constructing installations in her bedroom; Deadwood's John Hawkes is the father of two she falls for; the two kids themselves get their kicks by talking dirty to anonymous women in cyberspace; two Ghost World-y teens start teasing Richard's unprepossessing shoestore colleague and then later induct one of Richard's kids into the fellatio hall of fame - you get the picture...).
But it's actually more akin to a reversed out negative of Todd Solondz' Happiness - they both occupy a similar mindset (that of the mildly dysfunctional outsider): the only point of distinction is a relatively crude one: if Solondz could be said to explore all that is wrong with the world, July has a tendency to pin her (inevitably bruised and a little bit hapless) hopes to a tender if eccentric optimism. 'I am prepared for amazing things to happen,' Richard says as his bolshy wife walks out. And - like with Zach Braff's Garden State or Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent - amazing things is just what we get. I'll pick out a single example for you: early on, a man drives off with a newly purchased goldfish left abandoned on the roof of his car and Christine - afraid to alert the driver in case he either stops or drives too quickly and kills the fish - say a prayer for the fish in the moments before it falls on to another car and then into the road.
With a twee charm that may not be to everybody's tastes, You, Me & Everyone We Know is a quiet gem and, in Miranda July, signals the arrival of a bright if offbeat new talent.
If you take a wee look around for reference points with which to pin Miranda July's refreshing debut movie, You, Me & Everyone We Know to the butterfly board of contem... more >
If you take a wee look around for reference points with which to pin Miranda July's refreshing debut movie, You, Me & Everyone We Know to the butterfly board of contemporary cinema, more often than not you'll hear the likes of Magnolia, Crash and Short Cuts bandied about. Which is fair, in a way, because the movie is, after all, about a bunch of random, disparate people whose lives intersect in a variety of ways during the course of the movie (writer/director July herself appears semi-autobiographically in the guise of Christine, a performance artist constructing installations in her bedroom; Deadwood's John Hawkes is the father of two she falls for; the two kids themselves get their kicks by talking dirty to anonymous women in cyberspace; two Ghost World-y teens start teasing Richard's unprepossessing shoestore colleague and then later induct one of Richard's kids into the fellatio hall of fame - you get the picture...).
But it's actually more akin to a reversed out negative of Todd Solondz' Happiness - they both occupy a similar mindset (that of the mildly dysfunctional outsider): the only point of distinction is a relatively crude one: if Solondz could be said to explore all that is wrong with the world, July has a tendency to pin her (inevitably bruised and a little bit hapless) hopes to a tender if eccentric optimism. 'I am prepared for amazing things to happen,' Richard says as his bolshy wife walks out. And - like with Zach Braff's Garden State or Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent - amazing things is just what we get. I'll pick out a single example for you: early on, a man drives off with a newly purchased goldfish left abandoned on the roof of his car and Christine - afraid to alert the driver in case he either stops or drives too quickly and kills the fish - say a prayer for the fish in the moments before it falls on to another car and then into the road.
With a twee charm that may not be to everybody's tastes, You, Me & Everyone We Know is a quiet gem and, in Miranda July, signals the arrival of a bright if offbeat new talent.
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