Me and You and Everyone We know

After asking about six random people in various areas of the theater if the seat next to them was taken, and after seeing all my fellow unseated indie feminists (most well above the age of 70) fall into place in seats that just a minute ago I would have considered undesirable, I finally arrived at the opposite corner from the one through which I entered - second row from the back, halfway in, empty seat.
"Is that seat taken?" I asked anyone for the 7th time that evening.
"No!" exclaimed the youngish woman next to the youngish man next to my once and future seat, as if she were just as surprised as I was.
"Oh boy!" said I, "I thought I was never going to get one."
"Our row is complete!" proclaimed the woman.
"At last," nodded the man, who sounded rather indie and feminine himself.
"Man," I said, "this is the greatest row ever."
"Sure is," said the man, who was applying lipstick, "though we had a hell of a time getting in here. We had to have at least four people screaming at us 'You're cutting,' 'don't cut!' 'who's cutting!'...This one old woman said [wagging finger in time] 'You can't cut here.' "
"What'd you say to that?"
"I laughed."
"Did you laugh while shaking your finger, like you were laughing at her - [in imitation] ahaha!"
"[laughing a bit more gently] No, but we should have."
"Why were you cutting?" I offered.
"I'm not really into rules," explained the woman.
"Rules just don't work out for you?"
"Yeah-"
"Was there even a line at all?" I asked. "It seemed more like a mosh pit."
"Exactly!" the man wagged his finger at me, "There was a line, but it all jumbled together, I mean, it was impossible to know where to go."
"There was a line," declared the old lady next to me. "I waited in it for 45 minutes."

And so on - and then the movie started - and so on.

In short, it's cute. The characters all speak in the playful precociousness that you'd expect from someone named Miranda July who has called her movie "Me and You and Everyone We Know," often coming out with lines that may sound profound, but may not be, but get away with it because they weren't meant to be. This is to also say that everyone in the movie speaks in different permutations with different intonations all of the same voice - which July gladly admitted in the Q&A session afterwards, saying that it was probably due to a lack of discipline on her part. Probably, but it works perfectly for a movie in which everyone is connected (hence the title). It is also worth noting that unlike in, say, Magnolia, the characters get caught connected not so much by the metaphysical impositions of the writer, but by their own fun little contrivances (a method which Garden State would have done well to have stuck to), which naturally go on to contrive bigger things than they could have anticipated - as David Edelstein puts it perfectly, the movie is "set in an increasingly privatized culture, in which face-to-face encounters are extraordinarily fraught and people reach out through online chat rooms, performance art, or, failing at the above, retreat into fantasy." The human contact that evolves from such retreats is what gives the film its little punch; meanwhile, the obviously digital cinematography gives us final comfort that we are not quite in reality, and nor are we supposed to be.

This is quite a comfortable (at the very least "gentle") little movie, and if it isn't really likely to be the best movie this year, it's probably because despite the characters' constant daring, there isn't much of an edge to grab the viewer, or even for the viewer to grab onto. The children try to play at being adults, the adults try to play at being children, the teenagers (best of all) try to play at both, and meek hilarity ensues as all do a terrible job at it, but get along fine anyhow. In short, it's cute.

But July is onto something here, too. As she said herself, during the filming the poop joke delivered by the 6 year-old was right on his level - but with a bit of self-conscious sexual backstory, it was right on my, probably yours, and certainly everyone-who-was-in-the-theater-with-me's level as well. July is smart enough not to ever try to be too smart, and she has a knack for humanist humor, which works well enough to allow us to consider her characters' stabs at pretentiousness, preciousness, and profundity, without ever having to accept them ourselves. To paraphrase The Incredibles: when everyone is pretentious, precious, and profound, well, nobody is - but the reverse is true as well, and July knows it, and shows it off in the first good comedy I've seen from this year.

Also, for anyone who reads this - which, I suspect, includes nobody - I will hopefully be starting my own film blog rather soon to establish some webcred, or something, perhaps on blogspot, perhaps on typepad, in any case, with promising capsule reviews of Star Wars III and Kings and Queen to ensue, as well, perhaps, as some of the stuff on this site. So, uh...look out? I don't know.

Edit Note: I just discovered that Variety carried basically the same comment as I did about children trying to be adults and adults trying to be children. I'm not really sure whether to be proud that I came up with the same comment as an all-powerful movie critic did, or distraught that I'm not an all-powerful movie reviewer too, but I'm not really either, since I haven't reach much of Variety, since it used to cost money to look at their reviews online.