Hey guys, I haven't been to the board in a while (regretfully), but I wanted to shamelessly celebrate/plug my stepmom's friend, who's getting a lot of attention right now for her film "Me and You and Everyone We Know".
Here's an article by Ebert:
A chance bus ride to the fest's best
BY ROGER EBERT / January 30, 2005
It happened like this. I was sitting in a movie that wasn't working for me. I walked out of the screening, thinking to take the shuttle bus to Prospector Square. But the next bus was going to the Yarrow, and so, what the hell, I went to the Yarrow.
There were two press screenings at the same time. A San Diego State film student in the lobby said he heard good things about "Me and You and Everyone We Know." And that is how I saw the best film I've seen this year at Sundance. Just like that.
The movie was written and directed by Miranda July, the well-known performance artist, who developed it at the Sundance summer workshop. She stars as Christine, a would-be artist and full-time Elder Cab driver. She falls in love at first sight with a shoe salesman named Richard (John Hawkes), who is separated from his wife and helping to raise his two sons. It also involves two sexually curious teenage girls, a solemn neighbor girl, a dirty old man, some art curators, and me and you.
We are involved because the movie, with perfect control of tone and an insidiously haunting sound track, weaves us into its world. I have rarely felt so contained by a film. "Me and You and Everyone We Know" is delicate, tender, poetic, and yet so daring in some of its scenes that you sit in uncertain suspense, wondering if July can get away with her audacity, which ventures to the edge of what mainstream audiences find acceptable. She can. She knows exactly what she's doing.
Like David Gordon Green, Miranda July writes dialog that you have never heard anybody say before, and yet you believe these characters would say it. I will not describe the plot, partly because the plot is not the point: It is simply the path these enormously sympathetic but lonely and strange characters follow on their way to tomorrow.
"What if I am a killer of children?" he asks her at one point.
"That would put a damper on things."
Let me tell you about one scene. After Christine first sees Richard the shoe salesman, they talk briefly and something happens between them. She knows it. He knows it, but doesn't want to deal with it, because he is going through a divorce and has two boys to raise and doesn't need romance just at this time.
He leaves the store to walk to his car. She catches up with him. They walk together. Playing with words, they pretend that this walk is their lifetime. So when they get to Leland Street, that will be halfway through their lives. At Tyrone Street, she has to turn one way, and he the other.
"But I'm thinking like Tyrone is our whole lives," she says. If they don't separate at that corner, they could walk on together forever. Their walk down the sidewalk is one of the most perfectly written and conceptualized scenes I have ever seen.
And another one on Variety in their "10 Directors to Watch For":
Miranda July
By BETH PINSKER, Tue., Jan. 18, 2005, 8:00pm PT
Having spent the last decade-plus multitasking performance art, short films, fiction, journalism, video art installations, Web-based presentations and the grassroots film distribution network Joanie4Jackie, Miranda July is a little flummoxed to have devoted the past year concentrating on one project. Whenever the self-trained experimental artist would emerge from an editing room in Los Angeles, where she cut her first feature film, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," she wouldn't know what to do with herself.
"If I had a spare hour, (I'd think) what should I do? Maybe I should write a short story," she says. At one point, she jumped headlong into writing a new script. Then she stopped and said to herself, "You're crazy."
Making a full-length feature is harder than her other media, she admits, even if it's not that different aesthetically or conceptually from her other creations. "People who know my work will recognize it in the film," she says. "There are characters that are the same, and the whole story deals with themes I've been working on, like, all my movies have children in them with a certain kind of power you don't always see."
The main difference is that instead of playing all the parts, as is customary in performance art, she took on the not completely unfamiliar role of a shy performance artist only. Other actors play the philosophical shoe salesman she falls for, his two children and their neighbors.
Although July has been showing her work since high school (and is practically a cult figure in Portland, Ore., where she spent most of her adulthood), the film promises to widen her audience. A planned release from IFC Films would likely reach more people than the rest of her work combined. Her film also unspools in Sundance's Dramatic Competition.
"It's exciting to have somebody coming squarely out of that experimental world make her way into a more mainstream independent film community -- but with those sensibilities intact," says Ruby Lerner, president of the Creative Capital Foundation, which has funded July's work. "I love that. I think that's the future."
July says she's ready for the explosion of interest in her, and she's also not afraid of any backlash from her underground fan base.
"When I moved from punk clubs to fine arts spaces, the same sort of thing happened," she says. "All those kids just came to the Whitney and other places like that. All those venues said, "this is really different from our usual ticket buyers." So hopefully, the same thing will happen again."
I read a story she wrote for the Paris Review awhile back and thought it was wonderful.
It's fitting that she's now a director. Miranda July sounds like a movie title, not the name of a person. This sounds very interesting, can't wait to see it.
congrats to her
for what? :saywhat:
she'll make a great movie one day if she sticks with it. we need this chick .
Quote from: JimmyGator on December 09, 2005, 02:27:38 PM
she'll make a great movie one day if she sticks with it.
uh yeah, another great movie.
i unno...part of me wants to say that me and you... was great, but until another viewing i'm sticking with "really good and one of the best of the year."
but i like her a lot.
When I lived in Portland, Miranda's office was about 4 blocks from me. She was doing only video/performance art then, but I would see her around, and she was really a very nice, personable, talented woman. I once interviewed her, and she was one of the most gracious interviews ever. Even though she left Portland after I did, I'm still sad that one of my hometown's talents has gone missing. . . .
She is on the cover--in cartoon form!--of the new issue of Punk Planet, with a really in-depth interview inside (it details her horrible experience with the release of the MAYAEWK DVD, which sheds some interesting light on how the filmmakers can get screwed in these processes).
On this DVD there is a short film, Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?, written by Miranda July, directed by Miguel Arteta (who, in the accompanying booklet, reveals he and July were dating), and starring July, John C. Reilly, and Mike White. It's cute, if slight. The DVD is put out by McSweeney's and is supposedly a quarterly deal.
Wholphin (http://www.wholphindvd.com/)
Quote from: godardian on February 05, 2006, 08:44:27 PM
On this DVD there is a short film, Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?, written by Miranda July, directed by Miguel Arteta (who, in the accompanying booklet, reveals he and July were dating), and starring July, John C. Reilly, and Mike White. It's cute, if slight. The DVD is put out by McSweeney's and is supposedly a quarterly deal.
Wholphin (http://www.wholphindvd.com/)
yep. we have a thread about it. http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=8332.0
Quote from: Pubrick on February 06, 2006, 01:05:28 AM
Quote from: godardian on February 05, 2006, 08:44:27 PM
On this DVD there is a short film, Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?, written by Miranda July, directed by Miguel Arteta (who, in the accompanying booklet, reveals he and July were dating), and starring July, John C. Reilly, and Mike White. It's cute, if slight. The DVD is put out by McSweeney's and is supposedly a quarterly deal.
Wholphin (http://www.wholphindvd.com/)
yep. we have a thread about it. http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=8332.0
:oops:
I received the Sep. 18 issue of The New Yorker today. It contains a short story by Miranda July entitled "Something That Needs Nothing."
On the "Contributors" page, it states: "Miranda July has a collection of short stories, 'No One Belongs Here More Than You,' coming out next spring.
http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/ (http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/)
and on the third day, miranda july released a book.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calendarlive.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2007-05%2F29555006.jpg&hash=55d6596315e0f4250dd653c51e028aff0ab76fe6)
Miranda July, storyteller
The director-writer-star of the film 'Me and You and Everyone We Know' offers quirky takes on relationships in her new book.
Source: Los Angeles Times
A few weeks before the release of her debut story collection, Miranda July played lead typewriter with a friend's band. This came between updates to "Learning to Love You More," an art project with her friend Harrell Fletcher that suggests things like "Re-read your favorite book from fifth grade" and "Make a child's outfit in an adult size." The homemade website for her first book, the story collection "No One Belongs Here More Than You," consists mostly of photos of handwritten messages on her stove, including a shot of oatmeal July had cooked for breakfast.
These self-consciously adorable exploits would seem to place July firmly among the McSweeney camp — those childhood-fetishizing, Dave Eggers-worshipping, mainstream-rejecting writers whose heyday appears to have fizzled. But the lean, accessibly weird stories in July's book, which will be published May 15, tell a different story about the ambitions of the 33-year-old author, performance artist and director (her first film was the offbeat and, yes, self-consciously adorable 2005 indie romance "Me and You and Everyone We Know"). Yes, there are much-too-precious scenarios in some of these stories, such as a heroine who gives swimming lessons in her kitchen (kooky!). But there is also an unlikely emotional resonance to many of them.
Observing the breakfast scene recently in Los Feliz's Figaro Café with wide, frost-blue eyes that suggest she's constantly thinking of something more interesting, July explained that the collection was her attempt to find humor in awkward human interactions.
"After the movie, I was trying to pull myself together creatively, and I was very broke," July said. "I thought, 'Well, if I can finish this book and write a bunch more stories, I bet I can sell it now that I have a little bit of an audience.' I was happy to have something to do, a task at hand."
"Me and You and Everyone We Know" was a film-festival favorite, if a split decision with critics. As the writer, star and public face of "Me and You," she had mixed feelings about the film's lengthy press tours and its accompanying bit of celebrity.
"It really confuses your sense of self when you're talking about yourself constantly," July said. "You become kind of unreal, repeating the same things again and again. It's a mild form of torture at a certain point. There's a relationship between writing and performing to me, but you can't be camera-ready all the time."
In a career arc that would make most MFA students weep into their student-loan bills, July's fiction was accepted first by the Paris Review (before her film's release) and then Zoetrope, Tin House and the New Yorker. The stories stood out for their taut absurdism and comic timing that was, of all things, actually funny. In "Something That Needs Nothing," two young girls learn the unexpected tedium of adult work: "Everything we thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit."
But it was no secret that July's cachet with a young film-and-stage-savvy audience was a factor in getting published. "The bottom line is that it's a business, and everyone saw that there was an audience for this and it wasn't a regular book of stories," July said. "But I'm not surprised, because I feel like I'm working hard."
Her studied, delicate-flower literary persona somehow compels even her detractors to hear her out. Rob Spillman, editor of the journal Tin House, which first published her story "The Moves," asked July to speak at the magazine's literary festival for that very sensibility.
"Everything she does is about performance," Spillman said. "Half the people thought she was grating, twee and shallow. It was fabulous to watch them squirm."
The Berkeley native's life in L.A. may well have been lifted from one of her stories. July writes from the obligatory "little house in Echo Park," and though she loves living on the Eastside and hiking with her boyfriend in the canyons north of Hollywood, she admits that Los Angeles could easily be any other place as far as her creative life is concerned.
"I'm not inspired by place," said July. "I'm concerned with a pretty small world.... There's as much landscape, drama and intrigue here as I could possibly want in terms of my feelings and anxieties, and it feels like that's enough."
One of July's few fiction-writing friends in Los Angeles is Trinie Dalton, the author of "Wide Eyed." "Something that most people don't notice in Miranda's work is that she talks a lot about what it means to be a woman, how it's kind of a secret club," Dalton said. "The moments where men interact with women are awkward, there's a sense that men are outsiders."
July's book actually covers a lot of demographic ground, from an older man having his first homosexual encounter in "The Sister" and a young girl who dabbles in lesbian prostitution in "Something That Means Nothing," which appeared in the New Yorker.
Lesbian stripper fans
DRESSED in impeccable thrift-store chic, July said she was aware of how easily stereotyped she was and hoped that the book would allay that.
"I sent the New Yorker a bunch of stories to pick from, and I don't think there is another story as 'pop' in a way," July said about "Something That Means Nothing." "It's maybe a little more of a cliché of what you think I'd be writing as a young woman. I was waiting for all those people who only want to read about lesbian strippers to read the book and be like: 'There's nothing else in here like that!' I hope that demographic isn't disappointed."
As she works on a few smaller projects, like a "Learning to Love You More" book, July has begun scripting her next film and is playing with the idea of a future novel. She admits to "feeling the pinch" of obligations to more fully commit to one medium after success in each. But as praise and new artistic opportunities seem, right now, to be overflowing, July is still trying to learn how to relate to the people around her.
"I myself feel sort of barely within the bounds of reasonable behavior a lot of times," she said. "I'm one of those people who when you're with me, I'm trying to listen to the conversation of people next to us. I think I'm sometimes pretty remote; I do vacillate between that kind of distance and then go too close. I'll wear the same clothes for seven days, then get dressed up and go out."