Review of Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) by Adam B — 22 May 2010

I have a hard time with movies like this, that seem to just want to change my life and make me love them more than they even want to just be a movie. There's lots of great and beautiful stuff here, and lots of good stuff, but, for me, there's also too much trying to be Important, while simultaneously hiding behind a security blanket of humble indie-comedy-drama-ness, which, for me, is one of the more prevalent acts of cinematic cowardice these days. In some ways, my experience with the movie was like those two shoes--the more the one clings to the other, the more the other runs away. I would have liked this movie lots more if it hadn't been so goshdarn clingy.

What remains, for me, after watching it, are some wonderful moments, an overall feeling of having been uplifted and moved in spite of myself (due in part to that music, which, in spite of being a bit obnoxiously Indie-Meaningful-Moving, is just so darn hard to resist for me). I just wanted to like it more than I did.

I also have to admit that, even though this is a mostly pretty tame R in my book, I'm often troubled when kids appear in these sorts of contexts in movies. As an audience member I don't mind it so much--kids find themselves in strange, adult places in the world all the time--but I tend to be rather sensitive when it comes to filmmaking ethics. I get distracted wondering about how much the filmmakers explained to the kids about the scenes they're in--which strikes me as inappropriate--or how much they didn't--which also seems rather exploitative. It's difficult, because I think stories like this are still certainly worth telling, I just wonder how you go about doing it responsibly, or if that's even possible.