ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW

OPTIMUM RELEASING

RELEASED 19 August 2005

Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision (a slightly pretentious category if ever I heard one) at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’ is the debut feature from performance artist Miranda July. Writer-director-star July stars as Christine, an offbeat performance artist (no acting stretch there) who falls for a department-store assistant called Richard (John Hawkes) who has a divorce and two kids on his plate. Richard’s kids Peter (Miles Thompson) and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) spend their time on the internet talking to strangers looking for sex, while local teenagers like Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend) tease neighborhood pervert Andrew (Brad Henke) with their best friends-sexuality, and ask Peter to settle an argument.

Focusing on the beauty of life’s smaller moments, including the ridiculous but sad last moments of a goldfish, and a unexpected meeting on a bench between two online sex addicts, ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’ has a great sense of humour and a warm fuzzy feel. Some of the dialogue occasionally comes over contrived but the unusual situations the characters find themselves in tends to negate this failing. The child actors are superb, with Brandon Ratcliff supplying one of the year’s funniest scenes, the ‘Back and Forth’ (I can’t explain it in these pages, you’ll have to see it for yourself!). Blue-eyed star Miranda July has crafted an original love story for the noughties, a quirky diamond that shines brightly.

THREE OUT OF FIVE