Sitting on his dorm bed, feet away from the roommate sharing his college prison, both silently absorbed in their own screens, Alex’s stuffed wolf* - like Arthur from Beginners, speaking through subtitles - gives him some much-needed tough love: “Just ask his about parties. Living far away from home for the first time, freshman Alex (Cooper Raiff, who wrote, directed, and stars) is having a tough time adjusting to life at his Los Angeles liberal arts college. Shithouse (2020 | USA | 102 minutes | Cooper Raiff) If you’re willing to suspend disbelief, follow these strange characters and you’ll find yourself safe in incredibly capable hands.Ĭover image, KAJILLIONAIRE (Credit : Matt Kennedy) Now available in theaters and VOD via Focus Features Even as their plots become more outlandish and strain credulity, she remains open to their humanity, allowing the story to flex and find room for surprising explosions of tender revelatory sadness and discovery. July’s story of these weirdos is constantly mutating.
The arrival of Melanie serves as a catalyst on many fronts, opening new opportunities for grift and nudging characters into long-suppressed growth. When, amid one of their more ambitious schemes, a relatively normal outsider (Melanie, Gina Rodriguez) invites herself into their club to spice up her own life, it shakes up the family dynamic even more than the earthquakes constantly rocking their corner of Los Angeles. Less a family than a tightly-knit cult, the only overt emotion that colors their interaction is paranoia and a constant hunger to execute the next grift. Returning from their caper, the family contort in a form of modern dance to avoid the landlord who rents them the home that they’ve made from a windowless office suite where cotton-candy pink suds coat the walls at regular intervals.
#Lonely screen black screen series#
It’s instantly evident that you’re in the Mirandaverse from the opening shots - a sky blue Los Angeles post office, creamsicle orange bus, oddly buoyant soundtrack (Emile Mosseri, the Last Black Man in San Francisco) - where we meet shaggy haired, clothed in oversized tracksuits, fully repressed Old Dolio launch into a parkour-eseque series of tumbles and evasions to extract valuables from neighboring post boxes.
With Kajillionaire she gives us a deeply odd family of laughably low-level con-artists of the saddest order: Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert (Richard Jenkins) and their twenty-six-year-old daughter Old Dolio (yes, that’s really her name, played by a husky-voiced Evan Rachel Wood) whose every waking moment is dedicated to sustaining their bizarre and meagre existences through swindles, scams, and contests. Through her films and writing, she amplifies the to a state of hyper-reality, exploding the ordinary, to make the subtle perceptible to mere mortals. Writer/director Miranda July ( The Future, Me and You and Everyone We Know) has shown herself to be keenly attuned to the strange and unspoken vibrations that exist between humans. Kajillionaire (2020 | USA | 104 minutes | Miranda July)
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