Pretty Good

Brilliant and touching

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The opening lines of Jason and Sophie is what this movie is all about. Sophie ask for some water because she thinks Jason is getting up and Jason states he is just changing position. Neither one gets the water, instead they play a game about mind control and stopping time.I so truly enjoy movies that offer up great symbolism for the viewer to contemplate when the story is over. In my opinion the relationship between Jason and Sophie has been over for some time and as Paw Paw says in the opening "Have you ever been in the darkness? Then you know this is something not appropriate to talk about". Jason and Sophie have entered the darkness of their relationship and neither one is willing to talk about it. Paw Paw is their collective conscience speaking to them internally.The remainder of this marvelous film is just showing how Jason deals with the reality and how Sophie deals with this reality. Sophie feels she needs to bury her inner child (thus the little girl digging the hole and trying to sleep in it) and jump into a full blown relationship with an older man. Sophie cannot do this and she crawls back into the womb of her relationship with Jason as symbolized by the yellow very stretchy tee shirt. Jason on the other hand seeks a less stressful path but must deal with the inevitable change when he realized he cannot stop time and continue with Sophie otherwise everything else stops with it. Their relationship has stopped growing and Sophie has damaged it.Sophie returns to find Jason resolved to the end of their love. Sophie goes to bed bringing us back to the darkness Paw Paw speaks of at the beginning of the movie while Jason stays in the light reading.

I watched this last night with no expectations, only the brief synopsis given. My history with 'quirky' indie dramas has been pretty hit (Napolean Dynamite) and miss (Eagle Vs. Shark), but i can happily count this oddly charming and original work among the hits.WRITING: Written by (, directed by and starring) Miranda July, the script plays interestingly with the themes of the passing of time, preserving what time we have, and creating your own, while crossing seamlessly between drama, psycho-study, romance and no-frills sci-fi. This is pulled off very well, as you see the characters, spaces and events around the protagonists reflecting the way the feel, the way they want to feel, and the way they appear, all the while mixing up the continuity of the time they see passing before them. There is genuine emotion in the writing, most significantly is the heart-wrenching plot point involving the waiting a cat must do before adoption, possibly the most engaging part of the film. However, the main character (Sophie) is quite unlikable, and so we sometimes lose focus of why she is doing what she is, and occasionally the script falls into traditional indie clichés like vague existentialist conversation and quirky character habits, but these matter little in an overall very well written piece.CAST: There were no performances that were noticeably bad, but only one that stood out to me above the rest. All the supporting performances were good, including a very endearing Joe Putterlik (I believe this was his only acting performance, but he does a great job). Miranda July is watchable, but as her character is so unlikable, it is difficult to really feel for her, although her turn as the voice of the cat is very good, and this is where her performance really kicks up a notch. The far and away best performance however is from Hamish Linklater, who evokes genuine sympathy for the care-free yet somehow stressed layabout he portrays.DIRECTING: Not a whole lot was really stand-out, but not badly directed. This is where the majority of the indie feeling comes from, and at times it feels overwhelmingly indie-ish, with drained colours and strange imagery, which is once again pretty hit & miss, as i felt occasionally uncomfortable, but quite often amused. But once again, the best part was the story of the cat, which is shot in long takes of its paws, and what it sees through the bars of its cage.OVERALL: These parts add up to an unconventional, relaxing, but engaging drama that takes a little while to warm up to, but contains very impressive writing, a great performance from Linklater, but most importantly the highly emotional internal monologue of a cat.

I would like to meet someone I respect who liked this movie. Maybe I'm missing something, and he or she could point it out to me.I suspect that I don't, though, and that "The Future" is just a really bad and cryptic movie. That's a shame because I really liked Miranda July's first movie, "Me And You And Everyone We Know", which was truly oddball but still managed to be absorbing. "The Future" is just bizarre and boring. It came out of one of a performance by July, which is just a really bad idea to begin with. Just like turning a nice cake or a well-knitted pair of socks into a building. Next time you can: don't. Next time you're trying to turn a few neat ideas into a movie, make sure the audience at least has a chance to understand them, and that there's at least some semblance of a plot or a story.

A retarded couple decide to adopt a cat and arrange to collect one from a sanctuary in a month's time when it has finished medical treatment. They are warned that if they fail to collect on time it will be euthenized. Realising that this awesome responsibility will mean the end of their old lives they decide to live the next month as if it is their last. He quits his old job and finds an even worse one, while she quits hers and seeks fame as an internet sensation, failing miserably. She either consoles or punishes herself for this with a shallow sexual relationship with an older creep who makes his young daughter dig her own grave then buries her in it up to her neck at night. Her depressed boyfriend consoles himself by confiding in an octogenarian philosopher, and the moon. They are both so absorbed by their own pathetic little problems that they miss the deadline and the cat is put down.The cat knows nothing of any of this, only that it is going to be adopted some time in the near future. In its occasional monologues to us it describes its joy at knowing that soon it will be taken home by a kind, caring couple and that it will never be cold, or wet, or hungry, or lonely ever again. After death it describes its surprise at finding itself, in spirit, still in the same cage, apparently for ever.I'm a cat lover and this broke my heart. As soon as the film finished I found my cats and made a huge fuss of them to cheer myself up. They thought I had gone soft in the head.Samuel Becket wrote plays about people like this, infuriating because of their inertia, their complete inability to move forward with their lives and find joy, or even authentic misery. His plays only make sense to me if I decide that these are not characters but thoughts inside someone's head. His plays are about unproductive thought, the ideas that stop us from finding the will power to seize control of our own lives and instead make us weak and passive. The pathetic 30-something couple are a circular internal monologue that cannot be defeated through discourse, an ego game that can only be abandoned altogether by an act of will. The cat is a baby, a better job, a better house, a move to another town, or anything that promises the possibility of change, unless it is forgotten about because the thinker cannot rise above his/her ego games.The cat is The Future.Cat lovers: does that help you to feel any better?