Not of this earth
From personal recommendations as well as the recommendations of rottentomatoes.com I rented "Me and You and Everyone We Know" because it was supposed to be delightful, uplifting, quirky, and feature disturbing images of sexuality featuring children. I figure it's a can't miss.
Man was I wrong.
I absolutely hate movies like this and despite recently deciding not to post here anymore I'm posting because I need a space to vent. "Freddy vs. Godzilla" or whatever version of that shit they are up to now is a bad movie. But nobody on any level is pretending it is a good movie. Some, for reasons I fail to understand, may find it to be an enjoyable movie but nobody would mistake it for being good. "Me and You..." is an insultingly bad movie because it thinks it is good and expects you to think it is good. What's worse is that people fall for it.
It's an illusion. A con. A sham. The trick it plays is in saying "I, as a movie, have torn the veneer off of the human experience and exposed in visual form the awkward frightened child that we all share. And if you don't see that then you don't get what being human is truly all about." Where have you heard that before? It's the Emperors New Clothes for fuck's sake! Nobody wants to be the one who can't see the visual poetry so they blather on about how "real" it is. Or they go on about the "surreal" beauty of it all. It is neither.
Example: Five-year-old boy chats online with someone about how he wants to exchange poop back and forth with them. The child can barely type so we are led to believe that the conversation never gets much past this point. When the boy finally meets their mystery online friend we expect him to be ass raped by some fortyish man in a wifebeater. That would be real. Instead it really is a mid-forties woman, a minor character, who exchanges a brief longing glance with the little boy as he lovingly strokes her hair. She kisses him briefly on the lips and walks away.
Visual poetry indeed. While this may qualify as surreal, the best of surrealism challenges one to reimagine their world and in doing so to see ordinary things in an extraordinary way. This borrowed the dreamlike qualities of surrealism but lacked a vision or point of view. If director Miranda July wants to throw odd images on a screen then do it but don't make us sit through two hours of obnoxious unmotivated dialogue to see them.
It's a formula just like every bad monster flick is a formula. First you slightly overexpose your semi-grainy film so that all the muted colors vaguely remind you of a seventies home movie. Then you throw in quirky yet deep dialogue that comes from nowhere (get about ten people and a bag of weed and you have your entire script written in under an hour) spoken by off-beat characters with diminished or non-existent affect. Lose all the modern jump-cuts and multiple camera angles (this is easy since your budget is less than the rent of a downtown apartment) to focus on long wide shots where your leaden characters stare at a fixed point while blathering on about nothing. Intersperse these scenes with slow zooms of the sun/moon/a lamp/a bug/something rotting. Finally, make sure at some point you at least have the suggestion of rape/pedophilia but just in a way that would make a normal person uncomfortable yet without judgment. You now have a "deep" film of lasting beauty and oodles of artistic merit. Just ask Miranda July/P.T. Anderson/Todd Solondz - they'd be happy to tell you all about it if they aren't just sitting alone in their bedroom staring into space while fingering a matchbook they stole from a ten-year-old and soiled with their own semen. That is what most people do isn't it? I mean that's totally real right? That's pulling the cover off our modern world and showing us what's happening on the inside in a darkly comic yet bittersweet way.
Fuck all of it. If these directors want to scurry around under the floor while masturbating and talking abou their mom more power to them - but don't put it on film and distribute it. Because it's just bullshit performance art masquerading as film. It's fucking beat poetry about cellophane and aardvarks claiming to be dialogue. I don't think it is too much to ask that if you're going to make a movie that you have something to express to the rest of us. Otherwise they can all shove their cinematic shell game up their ass.
Man was I wrong.
I absolutely hate movies like this and despite recently deciding not to post here anymore I'm posting because I need a space to vent. "Freddy vs. Godzilla" or whatever version of that shit they are up to now is a bad movie. But nobody on any level is pretending it is a good movie. Some, for reasons I fail to understand, may find it to be an enjoyable movie but nobody would mistake it for being good. "Me and You..." is an insultingly bad movie because it thinks it is good and expects you to think it is good. What's worse is that people fall for it.
It's an illusion. A con. A sham. The trick it plays is in saying "I, as a movie, have torn the veneer off of the human experience and exposed in visual form the awkward frightened child that we all share. And if you don't see that then you don't get what being human is truly all about." Where have you heard that before? It's the Emperors New Clothes for fuck's sake! Nobody wants to be the one who can't see the visual poetry so they blather on about how "real" it is. Or they go on about the "surreal" beauty of it all. It is neither.
Example: Five-year-old boy chats online with someone about how he wants to exchange poop back and forth with them. The child can barely type so we are led to believe that the conversation never gets much past this point. When the boy finally meets their mystery online friend we expect him to be ass raped by some fortyish man in a wifebeater. That would be real. Instead it really is a mid-forties woman, a minor character, who exchanges a brief longing glance with the little boy as he lovingly strokes her hair. She kisses him briefly on the lips and walks away.
Visual poetry indeed. While this may qualify as surreal, the best of surrealism challenges one to reimagine their world and in doing so to see ordinary things in an extraordinary way. This borrowed the dreamlike qualities of surrealism but lacked a vision or point of view. If director Miranda July wants to throw odd images on a screen then do it but don't make us sit through two hours of obnoxious unmotivated dialogue to see them.
It's a formula just like every bad monster flick is a formula. First you slightly overexpose your semi-grainy film so that all the muted colors vaguely remind you of a seventies home movie. Then you throw in quirky yet deep dialogue that comes from nowhere (get about ten people and a bag of weed and you have your entire script written in under an hour) spoken by off-beat characters with diminished or non-existent affect. Lose all the modern jump-cuts and multiple camera angles (this is easy since your budget is less than the rent of a downtown apartment) to focus on long wide shots where your leaden characters stare at a fixed point while blathering on about nothing. Intersperse these scenes with slow zooms of the sun/moon/a lamp/a bug/something rotting. Finally, make sure at some point you at least have the suggestion of rape/pedophilia but just in a way that would make a normal person uncomfortable yet without judgment. You now have a "deep" film of lasting beauty and oodles of artistic merit. Just ask Miranda July/P.T. Anderson/Todd Solondz - they'd be happy to tell you all about it if they aren't just sitting alone in their bedroom staring into space while fingering a matchbook they stole from a ten-year-old and soiled with their own semen. That is what most people do isn't it? I mean that's totally real right? That's pulling the cover off our modern world and showing us what's happening on the inside in a darkly comic yet bittersweet way.
Fuck all of it. If these directors want to scurry around under the floor while masturbating and talking abou their mom more power to them - but don't put it on film and distribute it. Because it's just bullshit performance art masquerading as film. It's fucking beat poetry about cellophane and aardvarks claiming to be dialogue. I don't think it is too much to ask that if you're going to make a movie that you have something to express to the rest of us. Otherwise they can all shove their cinematic shell game up their ass.