KAJILLIONAIRE - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 1

Miranda July's third feature is everything I have come to expect and love - a kooky, quirky almost surreal comedy that contains at its core such deep love and earnest humanity that it can make you cry.   I truly understand why this film gets as many one-star ratings as five-star raves:  it lives in the same rarified space as films by Michel Gondry and Charlie Kauffman and it's clearly not going to be to everyone's taste. All that I can say is that I laughed out loud for pretty much all of it - and that I got deeper into it I was so invested in its lead character that I could've cried tears at the ending.  This film moved me, and its characters will stay with me.  I keenly want to know what happens next.

The film opens on a family of grifters, robbing mail boxes to pay the rent on their weird office beneath a bubble factory, whose overspill bubbles they are in charge of cleaning up.  The dad, played by Richard Jenkins, is a kind of goofily charming but increasingly creepy scam artist who seems to have a rather nasty hold over both wife (Debra Winger) and daughter. And the key story here is how the twenty-something year old daughter (Evan Rachel Woods) breaks out of the infantilised and yet loveless relationship with her parents by a chance encounter with a pretty woman called Melanie (Gina Rodriguez).  Melanie is our way into the movie. She comes from a normal, real world, albeit with an oppressive mother she's trying to escape. The way in which she's fascinated and entranced by her new friend allows us to find her strangeness endearing too. And in a sense, while Woods and Winger are giving the most mannered and big performances, it's Rodriguez who has the hardest job in playing the straight man.

I found the slowly building relationship between the two women utterly beautiful and the emotional catharsis as Woods' Old Dolio believes she has endured The Big One to be a thing of real joy.   How can the simple passing of a toothpick across a table break your heart? This is what Miranda July does. And it's a strange kind of emotional genius.

KAJILLIONAIRE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. The film played Sundance and London 2020. 

ME, YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW - Nutty, but in a good way!

ME, YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW is a gorgeous, whimsical, slightly nutty movie about cute people who think good things, want magic in their lives and refuse to be bowed down by all the emotional brutality we experiece on a day to day basis. It follows a genuine nice guy who "wants his kids to have magical powers". His wife has left him and he works in a shoe store. In walks a beautiful video installation artist who happens to drive a taxi to make ends meet. She falls in love with him - he needs to take a chance on her. Meanwhile, they are surrounded by the kind of kooky suburban goings-on that we'd expect from a Daniel Clowes comic. Somehow, when the guy's little kid starts talking dirty to an older women in an internet chat room, or when the guy's colleague starts leaving lewd messages for two hot teenage girls taped to his door - it all still seems sweet, innocent and magical. And yes, I know how that last sentence sounds, and I know why the MPAA gave this an "R" rating for sexual content involving kids, but really that rating does not reflect the feel and subject matter of this flick. In many ways, this is the modern day fairytale that SHOPGIRL was trying to be. But before I extoll you to "go check it out", I should fairly point out that if you find "cute" annoying in life - if you prefer films to feature guns, t*ts, explosions - then ME, YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW is not for you. And that's also fine. That's why god gave us Arnold Schwarzenegger.

ME, YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW premiered at Sundance 2005 where it won the Special Jury Prize . It also won the Golden Camera and three other awards at Cannes. The movie went on limited release in the US and UK in summer 2005. It went on release in the Netherlands yesterday and goes on release in Germany on the 23rd February 2006. ME, YOU and EVERYONE WE KNOW is available on Region 2 DVD.