“Did you see that? She fell down in front of the boss she has a crush on while carrying many things! What a wit!” Thankfully, this film is actually funny, and so is Renée Zellweger, the titular Bridget Jones, who is 32 and a bit clumsy, and believes herself to be both a tad overweight and running short of romantic options. Hollywood does this silly, shitty thing when they want to make it clear that a woman is “funny”: They make her clumsy. “July’s debut feature wasn’t the first movie about the internet,” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich observed of the film in 2020, “but it may have been the first to recognize how we’d express ourselves through it, and how the utopian promise of ‘social media’ would so plainly reveal how scared we are of getting close to each other.” There’s Christine (July) and Richard (John Hawkes), a video artist and a shoe salesman who seem to have something going until Richard cuts it off Richard’s six-year-old son, Robby (Brandon Ratcliff), and the older woman (Tracy Wright) with whom he begins a flirtation online two teenage girls (Natasha Slayton and Najarra Townsend) engaged in a troubling back-and-forth with their neighbor (Brad William Henke) and several other strange souls tentatively entering each other’s orbits. One of the quirkier additions to this list-and it would be, coming from the wonderfully wacky mind of Miranda July- Me and You and Everyone We Know is about both our need to connect, and how completely terrifying true intimacy can be. Her “sexy” dance, in the glaring light of Nick’s high beams, to Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing” is one of the great falls from grace, and worth the price of admission. One of these is from Alexis Dziena, who plays Nick’s very recent ex-girlfriend: She toyed with him and never appreciated the music mixes he made for her (spoiler: Norah loves them). It’s a good-time flick, with cheerful performances and the kind of supporting cast that make 90 minutes seem like a brisk 30. Norah’s lack of fulfillment isn’t what moves the action here instead, we’re on a search for her best friend and an oh-so-cool band’s secret show, with Nick’s (Michael Cera) hapless band, in his hapless car (a Yugo), through downtown New York City’s music scene. It may sound tawdry, yet this plot point harkens back to a sweeter, John Hughes–era teen comedy (with a few switches flipped) wherein the search for a simple sex act was enough motivation for a number of scenes, if not an entire film. The high schooler, played by Kat Dennings, is demeaned by her fellow classmates for having yet to experience the big O. There’s something almost quaint about Norah’s search for her orgasm.
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January 2023
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