Review of The Future (2011) by Alex L — 17 Dec 2012

In "The Future," Jason(Hamish Linklater) and Sophie(Miranda July, who also wrote, directed and provided the voice of the cat) find a stray cat. They take him to a vet where they are informed he is very sick and will take a month to recover. In the meantime, Jason buys a drawing before they both take stock of their lives. Realizing how limited their time is, both quit their jobs, Jason as tech support and Sophie as a dance teacher. This leaves them plenty of time to follow their hearts' desire, if not pay their bills. So Jason signs up to go door to door for an environmental cause all over Los Angeles while Sophie, getting inspiration from a now former co-worker, decides to post her performing a dance online every day for a month.

Give Miranda July some credit, she has some very heady ideas she wants to explore with her latest movie "The Future" like mortality, time and what we decide to do with it. The problem here is not that the movie is strange; it is that it is not strange enough. Considering the trouble she has in creating believable characters, why not just go full Akerman instead or try something truly avant garde? And as an artist herself, July strangely has little empathy for anybody else's artistic pretensions. Admittedly, some of the movie is funny, but never intentionally. That's not to mention a couple of very odd subplots and only one sequence that speaks fully to the movie's themes and then awkwardly so.