"Me, You and Everybody we know" (2005), "Kajillionaire" (2020), Miranda July.

Miranda July is a multidisciplinary artist known mostly for her quirky movies. 

I can declare that she is the queen of the post-meet-cute scene. The meet-cute is the scene when our protagonist couple see each other for the first time. On the next minutes, they confirm the meeting and the future with a follow up. In "Me and You..." a stretch of street represents a life-long relationship which the characters traverse sharing years with each step. In "Kajillionaire" the entire last third of the movie works as a date culminating in the sight of a cash register panel, posited between the two, signaling forever freedom. It is all very enchanting.  In both cases, the notion of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) saving somebody with her strange manners and aloofness is rapidly dispelled.  July's movies don't have a Zooey Deschanel arquetype. Despite the surrounding weirdness, characters respond like adults would in real life. 

Now, it would be easy to accuse July of being a simple indie hipster, but there are indications that she has grown as an artist and does not belong with the nihilist retro consumerism of gentrified Brooklyn. In her first movie July packs multiple themes intercalated in a short runtime, as if it was the only chance she would had as a filmmaker.  However, "Kajillionaire" shows a mature director that can sustain interest by focusing on romance and family. 

"Me and You" lives entirely in the period between the birth of the popular Internet and the kingdom of smartphones, social media and Tinder, namely 2005. Digital art and the digital world are included as one of the main themes, both in the plots of July trying to make it as an artist (including criticism of the art scene) and young children arranging an online date with an adult through outrageous messages in a desktop computer messaging application.  A Boomer side character tells Julie to just take what it's hers, in this case the possibility of an exhibition in the local art museum.  In "Kajillionaire" angst again this kind of Boomer delusion is expanded into the main problematic of the movie. 

Two more things to add: July creates astounding tension out of thin air, in sequences that belong to a thriller but whose stakes are definitively small.  In "You and Me..." a father forgets a bag with her daughter's fish in the top of his car, and then drives. We are all witness to the impending disaster. Tension soars. In "Kajillionaire" the formal plot centers on a family of small-time crooks, thus it is part of the normal narrrative of heist films.

And finally, sexuality.  The unconventional pairings of "You and me... " include a child and an adult woman, a sexual scene between an early adolescence boy and two developed late adolescence girls, those girls and a young adult man, and the often hidden coupling between two old people in the last years of their lives. Nowadays some of those pairings would put Julie into the league of provocateurs such as Greg Arraki, Gaspar Noé or Todd Solondz.  Seems that 2005 is so close but so far away. 

"Me and You and Everyone We Know" - Recommended. 

"Kajillionaire" - Recommended. 

Bacurau, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Red Beard. Short reviews.

"Never Rarely Sometimes Always" (2020), Eliza Hittman. 

NRSA is not a fringe hateful right wing political party, but a movie about a serious subject that puts all the fault in humans with a certain distribution of chromosomes in their DNA. Hittman (proper for a hit job on men) films her two characters in close-up for minutes, following their odissey to New York so one of them can get a late abortion. The movie, though, avoids any important controversy.  Is it in favor of abortions for unintended pregnancies or only those that are result of abuse? We don't know.  It remains unclear.  Because the center of the film is hate for men, for all of them. The message of this misandrist piece is "men are evil, always".  It is not even functional as a documentary, because the view remains so entrenched in the girls' faces and bodies that we can't even understand how the locations play in their troubles. Is the bus station far or close? What's their itinerary? Do they go in circles? You see them walking to a clinic with difficulty, when you note a metro stop right there at the door.  Is it because they're  inexperienced or because the director is not really interested in practical matters like script? The biggest question is not about the movie but the world of film criticism.  Why is this universally acclaimed? Fear. 

PD: Good acting by the two girls. 

"Bacurau" (2019), Juliano Dornelles , Kleber Mendonça Filho. 

Thinly veiled Brazilian allegory about American imperialism south of the border.  A minuscule town is being attacked in all fronts and could dissappear. The locals want to fight back.  It is very enjoyable albeit short despite the running time.  The set of notable characters presented are memorable, from the mathriarc's friend (the spectacular Sonia Braga) to the local young bandit/criminal/revolutionary leader.

"Akahige" (Red Beard, 1965), Akira Kurosawa.

Episodic humanist film about a young doctor learning the meaning of his profession from an old mentor in a public clinic in 19th Century Japan. Multiple shots are carefully constructed masterpieces of mise-en-scene, camera movement and lighting, in beautiful black and white. Episodes relate poverty to marriage, family, love and loss, and each one is memorable. There's even an action scene. It sits deep down at the end of the TSPDT list and like all classics it deserves  analysis which is outside of the scope of this short recommendation (I'm writing this in a bus in my way to work). I fear that nowadays this film would be "canceled".

"Space Force" (2020), Steve Carell & Greg Daniels

Greg Daniels' (The Office, Upload) "centrist" ideology shines though all the seams in this series, a thinly veiled attempt at hiding his nationalistic and pro-capitalism views wrapped in the sensibilities of an identity politics Democrat. Steve Carell is in charge of the new Outer Space division of the American military, hijinks ensue.  It is not a satire, because that would entail at least criticism of the establishment.  What we have instead are jokes about the poor and the uneducated, the working class and the fly-over Americans, treated with less respect than a monkey in space.  Coastal snobism is evident, even protecting a Theranos-like mogul from the consequences of her acts.  It's very bingeable though, with short episodes and high production values.

"The Last Picture Show" (1971), Peter Bogdanovich

A few pointers about this known masterpiece. Bogdanovich goes back twenty years from the seventies and maintains his typical documentary feel. This time he shows one year in the life of high school seniors in Abilene, a small Texan town in the middle of nowhere. Music is diegetic, silence and boredom only broken by rampant promiscuity and the movies screened in a small cinema. The end of movies is the end of the world for somebody like Bogdanovich, a guy that expressed a couple of years before that all the good ones were already made. Time jumps are plentiful and keep the misery moving along, personal stories depend on fortunes made, forty-somethings feel ancient and just want to kneel and die. Actors are wonderful, all of them, especially the main trio (Bottoms, Bridges, Sheperd). The strange thing is that we seem to have gone backwards in many areas (the ubiquity and representation of real-life sex and romance being one), but now we have unlimited entertainment content in every smartphone. I wonder how's life now in today's Abilenes.

"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Season 3" (2019)

The third entry on the Maisel saga is a Jewish mother: insufferable but endearing.  Basic verbal jokes are established by unrealistic trite repetition, until they become part of your expectations. Sherman-Palladino machine-guns the viewer with her patented shtick, a million words per minute simulating Abbot and Costello routines.  And sometimes, it even works.  Interestingly, this time the plot is paused by varieté numbers, including an homage to the club sequence of the art film "I am Cuba".  Palladino wants go to back to a time where you could unironically be entertained by romantic songs, tap dance, and "subversive" comedy, before post-modernism, when bad and good felt as easy to define. It is also the time when the United States was still a developed country to be proud of, especially in this fantasy version where everything looks fabulous and everybody can answer with an appropriate funny quip.  If you can bear it, and in small doses, Maisel will put a smile in your face. 

I am Cuba sequence:

https://youtu.be/8aT3Ii3hWM0

"Paper Moon" (1973), Peter Bogdanovich, capsule review

Filmed in the 1970s but situated in the 1930s, the magnificent black and white photography of Laszlo Kovacs recalls all of Bogdanovich's heroes behind the camera.  Ford, Welles, Hawks, they all show in one way or another in this enchanting tale of a scammer and his maybe-daughter having adventures during the Great Depression.  Acting is stellar, with a well deserved Oscar win for Tatum O'Neal, daughter of co-lead Ryan. Economic inequality, police corruption, small-town hypocrisy, all shown up, but the movie succeeds to stay light and warm without being mawkish. Some elements, however, would not succeed in bypassing the political correctness of our era. Recommended.