A not-uncommon prologue: Miranda July drives me crazy, in the best and worst ways. Whether I’m watching her films, reading her stories, or taking a crack at her various, Web-documented performances pieces, I can’t seem to get off the fence. I want to get off the fence. I want it so badly that attached to every primary response — every swing across the fence and back again — I experienced while watching The Future, the plangent follow-up to her 2005 feature debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, was the secondary desire to shoulder-pin myself there, if only for clarity’s sake. What seems most difficult to accept and so tremendously inconvenient to her appeal is that the talking cat — or whatever other of her grindingly earnest narrative totems — is not negotiable; it’s not even regrettable. If you want Miranda July, you want the talking cat.
The talking moon, the creeping T-shirt, the declarative power over the time-space continuum — you want it all. But you also want the exquisite vulnerabilities that blossom into themes under close attention, the ironist’s touch so subtle it floods the screen, the daring to turn the sadnesses of ordinary life into experimental fairy tales, as if no one told July that the cultural waters for swimmers of that particular stroke are polluted this season. The first step to clarity for those who share my feelings is accepting that this is not a fight with Miranda July — she does not share your concerns…
Brittny Gastineau Brody Dalle Brooke Burke Brooke Burns Busy Philipps Cameron Diaz Cameron Richardson
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