July Movies

The girl is good. Sophia Coppola's going to have to step her game up. Thank god. Since Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee invented post-70's independent film in the early 80's and put Sundance and Cannes on the map, the independent film movement has had just a little too much success for its own good. It's been a bit of a boy's club (albeit a bit more Lambda Lambda Lambda than Alpha Beta) and too many stupid honkey dudes have been allowed to pass off derivative drivel as "art flicks". There are still too few black, hispanic or asian writers and directors and every year the big Indie Blockbusters tend to be movies about white guys produced by white guys.

Now we finally have a true blue American independent classic in Miranda July's Me And You And Everyone We Know written directed and starring a white woman. And boy oh boy is it awesome. First let me avoid the plot and characters and all that shit and just appreciate July's cinematics. The framing, the colors, the set design, the pacing, the editing, the use of music, she gets it all right on the money. Unlike first features from cats like Spike Jonze or Todd Solodnz there is no need to apologize for her low budget amateurish style. Because she doesn't have an amateurish style. This is a woman who's been making art and videos and performing for years. She knows her way around a camera and she knows what to do in front of it. Her aesthetic feels fully formed and ripe. Sonya's had some bad things to say about some of her performance art so maybe it's a good thing that she's finally made the leap to traditional feature films because she's integrated the best of her personal style with the conventions of romantic comedies and the combination brings out the best in both.

July plays a performance artist who works as a cab driver for the elderly, ferrying old folks too and fro on their journey toward death. Martin Scorcese would oppress you with this Charonic symbolism but July lets her signs and symbols float about and bounce off one another with a lightness and humor that keeps everything up in the air until the film is over and the meanings are alowed to settle in the viewer's mind. She meets a freshly seperated shoe salesman who's struggling to raise two obscenely adorable sons who are too enthralled with their internet chat rooms and ASCII art projects to deal with the dissolution of their family. They go through the usual "he-likes-me-he-likes-me-not" bullshit that makes up a rom/com spine for the film.

Shooting off from that core narrative are several subplots about people trying to connect with one another in a mediated, materialist society. You've got a pedophile who molests his victims by describing the the things he'd do to them via handwritten notes posted on his widow, a girl who expresses her yearning for love by accumulating houswares as a dowry for her future family, and a curator who requires electronic mediation in order to interact with her fellow human beings. Occassionally, July pushes her thematic agenda a bit too much (as with the scene invovling the talking picture frame) but for the most part it feels just right. You know what she's getting at throughout, she's not cryptic by any means, but she still manages to surprise and delight you along the way. One scene in particular is soooo fucking funny that you are too busy crying and laughing to realize how profoundlly and simply insightful it is. This is great filmmaking. The harshest criticism I've heard is that it's not "mind blowing". People who want "mind blowing" films tend to be guys. They also tend to be the kind of guys who complain that their girlfriends don't give them enough blowjobs. There are plenty of movies out there that suck dick. This is not one of them.