#6: "I think she's buying us presents."

As we approach this 30th birthday of mine, I'm reminded of one of my birthday presents 5 years ago, my 25th.  My best friend decided to take me out to a movie, which makes sense because it's our shared love of cinema that threw us together in the first place.  It was actually a couple of weeks after my birthday, on a late Thursday night, around 10:30 or so.  I remember because it was the last showing of Me and You and Everyone We Know in town, so we had to go then.

I had heard about Miranda July's debut (and lone) movie toward the beginning of that year, as it won major awards at both the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals.  So it was a movie I had been very much looking forward to at the time.  As a late Thursday night screening, we weren't expecting much of a crowd, but a decently-sized one was present.  And, usually, we tend to be the only ones who stay until the end of the credits, but most of the audience remained this time.  We walked away thinking this was the perfect crowd to watch a movie with.


And what a perfect group of movie characters with whom to spend 90 minutes.  It's difficult these days to find characters who are really specific and idiosyncratic, unless you glance at any number of independent films whose sole modus operandi is apparently to be as obviously and deliriously quirky as humanly possible.  What's great about M&Y&EWK is how unselfconsciously weird all these people are.  It's nice and refreshing to see a movie with people who organically exist slightly on the margins--and who do so without affectation and are treated in a movie with such affection.

There are scenes here that almost prescriptively shouldn't work.  There's the quite awkward walk down the street where Christine and Richard ever so subtly up the ante on their desire for each other.  The standard dance of the sexes is intended to be oblique and tangential.  With these two, it's shy, yes, but direct.



There's also some very frank scenes of young, underaged kids talking about and engaging in sexual activities.  I'll leave the specifics of those for you to discover if you have yet to see the movie.  But it's a particular achievement of the film that there's never a moment in these scenes that feels exploitative or even creepy.  Instead, somehow, it's innocent and sometimes actually very funny.  The final frames of the film also possess that innocence and befits the idea you get throughout the whole film that--as the saying goes--people do actually make the world go 'round.