Review of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015) by Anthony I — 27 Jun 2015

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is "500 Days of Summer" if Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Jean-Luc Godard, the Coen brothers, Stanley Kubrick, Harmony Korine, Wener Herzog, Hal Ashby, Woody Allen, Paul Thomas Anderson and the entire student body and faculty of NYU Tisch film school took turns at the directors chair.

There, there is my snarky cinephile reflection.. wink, wink, nudge, nudge. If you love the movies, and hate John Green novels with a burning passion, welcome to your heaven on earth. This is the ultimate hipster, meta-movie, movie that eye-rollers and Starbucks drinkers will love to death.

. but for all the right reasons. As a cinephile, I felt like I was apart of an abstract German art piece, where I was being smacked with a trout. In other words, I felt like the artsy dick that this movie knew I was.

But I found it, just really, really funny. These two guys are so smart, so clever, and so dedicated to film, that by the end of it all, I just wanted to hang out with them. They knew who they were, they knew they were in a movie, and they knew it was going to be a sappy love story where a girl dies at the end.

. spoiler alert.. she does, but you already knew that. But the film, aside from being hilarious, is absolutely beautiful. Not because of it's academic knowledge of cinematography techniques from the greatest film directors spanning hundreds of years, but because it handles it's love story so gracefully and realistically.

Without warning, the Dying girl takes a turn for the worst, and without warning, the film becomes devastatingly sad, and really heartfelt. I wanted to just hug myself. Two scenes in particular have some of the best acting and emotional depth of any movie i've seen this year.

Olivia Cooke could very well be nominated for an Academy Award for her performance. Bottom line, as a first picture for this director, this film is mind-blowingly good. It's as if Alfonso Gomez-Rejon has been with us this whole time, but in the form of every filmmaker we've ever known of.

I hope we see more films from him. I know they will be just as good.