Just when you thought you knew all the emoticons out there.
Well, I saw “Me, You & Everyone You Know” last night. Excellent movie. Beautifully acted. In his review Ebert said it was the best movie he saw at Sundance.
While I was sitting there laughing, people were walking out of the theater. I always like movies like that.
The writer, director, lead actress is someone called Miranda July who has a great face and some acting chops. It’s hard to say what the movie was about because it was mostly just about the characters, but their stories advance at a good pace while they all grow a bit.
If there was an overriding theme, you’d have to say it was about people’s romantic connections or something like that.
If I had to criticize something, I’d say they didn’t seem to completely finish the stories. But that’s not really a criticism. Too many movies just want to give you all the answers and go on way too long. This movie just kind of let the stories sit there at the end, some resolved, some still evolving.
spoiler about ))<>(( . Really don’t read if you’re going to see the movie.
There’s a scene where two brothers are chatting online with someone. The one little boy tells the person he wants to poop into her/his butthole and have the person poop back into his butthole and then just keep pooping back and forth forever. Totally funny. Later on, the kid draws a picture of it, and then makes up the emoticon.
I saw this movie a few weeks ago, and I was as impressed as you are. Really an amazing piece of film. So naturally, when I saw the title of this thread I thought, “Yes! Someone else has seen this movie!” I was very excited.
I immediately recognized the emoticon as well. I haven’t read what’s being said at IMDB, but I think I would tend to agree. I witnessed a lot of characters externaly exhibiting quirky behavior, but learned little or nothing about their inner lives; after a while, it became tiresome to me.
That’s a criticism I’ve levelled at many other movies (e.g. Garden State, Lost in Translation, Sideways).
The difference, to me, was that "Everyone we Know was 12-40 minutes shorter than any of those movies.
I found the characters much more contrived in “Garden State” and the comedic situations infinitely more contrived in “Sideways”.
Even as far as the kids on the internet go, I had a cousin who PROUDLY told our whole family when he was about 10 that he was online pretending to be a 30 year old gay guy.
In Garden State, Natalie Portman’s character was an actor’s conception of a quirky personality. In “Everyone we Know”, July’s character felt authentic to me. That’s why I was able to stay with it. I also can’t overstate what keeping the running time to 90 minutes does for most movies.
Given the translation of the spoiler, if that was the best movie he saw at Sundance, I don’t want to even try to imagine how bad the rest of them were. :eek:
