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

[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!