Me and You and Everyone We Know

[fflo]

So. Who's seen this movie and wants to talk about it? homovegetarian, have you? Humphrey and I watched it tonight, and I venture to say it was a novel experience for both of us. Though he slept through much of it, which is nothing new.

Most curious, this film! I'm struck right now with how greatly it seemed to lack pretension, given how off-beat it is. If there was a veneer of self-conscious hipness, I didn't see it.

Much stuff in it didn't work the way similar stuff usually works in movies (even good ones).

I think I'm going to have to see it again before sending it back. Not that I didn't enjoy those episodes of "Frasier" and all. (Also out from Netflix right now: Rain, with Joan Crawford, 1932.)

Comments

[homovegetarian.livejournal.com]

i have not seen it yet, but it is number 7 in my netflix-to-be list:) i'm currently enjoying season three of "home movies" and about to embark upon "undeclared" from the creators of "freaks and geeks" - it also has some of the same actors.
anyway, happy to hear a good review. . .

[fflo.livejournal.com]

i've watched me some undeclared. do tell when you've seen this me & you & cetera one?

off to look up "home movies" now...

[bigfinedaddy.livejournal.com]

D and I have seen it. I liked it, although it's been a little while since I've seen it and I, too, would like to see it again. I found it audacious, and commented about how certain I am that many a mainstream audience member would find it offensive and even upsetting. But I applauded its courage in dealing with children's sexuality, because that is something that we in this culture prefer to pretend does not exist. It does. I was a child once, and I remember that part of childhood quite explicitly. My sexual fantasies were very frequent and actually quite kinky, and I had my fair share (or more) of sexualized play with my little friends.
Then, beginning when I was about 10 or 11, I became very fond of calling "pipe line", which no one I know seems to have ever heard of. You could dial a prefix which didn't exist, and the recorded message would say "Your call can not be completed as dialed. Please hang up and try your call again, or call your operator for assistance." There was a pause between repetitions of that message, and you could (somewhat faintly) hear anyone else who had dialed that same prefix. People would call out their phone numbers, and then hang up and share an actual phone call. I would lie about my age during these calls, saying I was 16 or sometimes even 17, (which seemed to me at the time a very mature age.) And I would always use a fake name--Beth. If my friends were there with me it would just be a lot of dirty talk, often coy, with a feigned sort of "Oh my god, as IF I would DO that!!" If my friends were not with me, I would basically have phone sex. I can't imagine what I would have gotten into if I'd had access to the internet!!
I continued that activity all through my teenage years, when many of my peers had become sexually active in reality. But I was the fat chick, and at that time completely convinced that no one would ever touch me as long as I lived. But I wasn't the fat chick on the phone. I was hot, skinny, slutty Beth. That's actually the only level on which I find the behavior troubling in retrospect--that it reflects my (then) belief that I had no right to sex or sexuality as a fat person. Of course, at the time I first started doing it, I had no business having real sex. I was far too young. I'm sure many people would argue that I had no business having phone sex, either. But I must say I remember it all quite fondly.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a big part of what's fresh there---the childhood sexuality with no layer of salaciousness nor moral disaster overlaying it. Matter-of-fact. Existing in the milieu in which we know there are "dangers," and acknowledging the fear of them, but allowing the bulk of how sexuality works with the kids to be just discovery, without the disastrous results.

For me one of the best choices in the film was to include the false sighting of the 7-year old who's walking home alone in the bad neighborhood. That's such a convention in film---his thinking he'd seen his son & then realizing it wasn't him after all would mean, in most any other movie, that the kid had indeed fallen into some more threatening situation. Same thing with how the park bench plays out.

The adult characters having or seeking their internal childlike wonder isn't a terribly new theme, though it plays out in ways in this film that I've not seen before. It's the kids as just younger people that's so rare in an American movie. They're also not magically wise beyond their years or anything like that, but they're not caricatures of childhood either. And they're dealing with making connections with others in their particular worlds in ways that don't stand in great contrast to the ways the adults are.

That pipeline thing is SO cool, btw. A piece about that way of connecting would be quite the fit for This American Life. We had the "ghost number" in Kansas---played a weird, ghostly sound. Don't remember any child-culture secret phone numbers in Maryland.

The larger context of what you're talking about is the real story, though, of course. Finding a way to explore & develop one's sexuality within the constraints of the day and of our own circumstances. Fat being a pretty freakin' significant aspect of one's circumstances, for sure!

[crankyasanoldma.livejournal.com]

Ebert or Ropert, or maybe both, had it on their "Top Ten of 2005" list. Looked intriguing.

[lovelikeyeast.livejournal.com]

I was hoping to love this, as MJ was a big name in little circles in the mid 90s (pac NW-SF riot grrl film) and done some great work... primarily as a curator-organizer, I think.

But I found MJ's own performance pieces in it (and that voice, that voice like fingernails on a chalkboard!) to be really unbearable.

That said, the movie on a whole was still enjoyable and worth watching--and the kids in it were amazing! Their performances! The poo thing!

I was just last week reading this interview in The Believer, if you're interested.

xoxo

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps one way I benefitted from knowing very little about the film was not knowing the filmmaker was the actress playing/being that character until the credits at the end. That might've been a distraction from the suspension of disbelief, at least, though I prefer to think it wouldn't have limited me in seeing the character with sympathetic eyes. There's something about how un-poseury the film itself seems that is true of that character as well. In a way her screechiness, particularly in the "raw" self-indulgey part of the videotape work sample, fits with the unselfconsciousness. She's clearly not trying to modulate her (literal) voice for others, you know? Here it is, for what's it's worth. And the film has seems to have that attitude too.

It's clear ---and essential to the feel--- that she's a freak. A bizarrely optimistic freak, maintaining a why-not kind of attitude even in the face of things like that hilarious elevator rejection from the art woman OR the suddenly hostile (and scary) attitude of the shoe store guy in his car. I mean, if regular life isn't enough to stop her dead in her tracks, surely those things would be. But no. Hunh. Imagine that.

I guess that's her being unruined-ly childlike. Though, as I said to BFD above, it's the child characters (what the young actors are asked to perform and how they perform it) that are captivating, indeed. And so unusual in a movie, kids getting to be real. Copying and pasting.

Part of what she seems to be playing with is that dichotomy of an artist as naive/unspoiled/fresh-eyed yet commenting wisely/knowingly from outside the mainstream with (higher/lower) truer vision.

But now I'm just blathering on, and too lazy this holiday afternoon to try to clean it up. Thanks for the links! I love this exchange in the interview:

BLVR: Actually, there are kids' books that are basically that---ninety-nine activities for a rainy day and things like that.

MJ: That's true. And I’m always the kind of friend or girlfriend who suggests, when there's some cataclysmic problem in the relationship, I'm like, "Well, maybe we can come up with a creative activity that will help us out." I'm like, "Let's get out the pens! Draw a picture of how much you hate me!"

Haw!