Me and You and Everyone We Know
Over a month after seeing this movie, I finally get time to review the thing. Whew. It was playing only at one theater in the entire Twin Cities area: Uptown Theatre in Minneapolis. While the price was the same as big-box theaters (8 bucks per ticket), the ambience was completely different. The seats were harder, the air a little damp, and you could watch from the balcony. None of this detracted from the movie, in fact it made seeing an ‘indie’ film seem … more indie. The audience seemed a bit less numb to the movie, too: people actually laughed at the funny parts (though this movie isn’t even a comedy).
All that said, the actual movie was engaging enough to make the surroundings melt away. All the reviews I read had trouble quantifying the tone of the movie; I certainly can’t, either. It had an amazing capacity to push the limit of what you’ve seen on screen, address issues to the extreme - yet do so gently and without overdramatizing things. Perhaps you could call it “real.” That is, there was no heightened sense of reality that you see in every movie you watch: it was simply an artful insight into people doing things that people do and worrying about things that people worry about.
Those qualities made You and Me and Everyone We Know comforting. I have to admit, watching something outside the ordinary, beyond what Hollywood deems profitable for a target demographic, beyond the formulaic, was an experience I fully intend to repeat. Sometimes you want the safe and tested, the bubble-gum pop of movies, other times you want the insightful, the out-there.
Footnote: credit goes to Mykala for finding this movie.