TinsHeadline Touches You

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

The_late_Buddy_Ryan Art star Miranda July picked up a lot of mainstream cred with "Me and You…," but I felt like she was taking a step backward, deeper into the indie fringe, with this sometimes perplexing tale of two LA slackers (MJ and Hamish Linklater) whose lives are thrown into disarray when they try to adopt a cat. Sophie teaches a dance class ("Frisky Feet"!) for undemanding toddlers; Jason works tech support from home. The cat will arrive in 30 days, so they decide to quit their jobs and devote the last of their unburdened youth (as they see it) to an intensive campaign of self-realization. Jason becomes a canvasser for an environmental group; Sophie declares herself "free to dance," but soon discovers the awful truth—she's a dance teacher, not a dancer…. There's nothing here as perfect as, say, the online flirtation between the little kid and the randy curator in "Me and You…," but there are lots of enjoyable moments (starting maybe with the way the receptionist at the dance studio says "Circus DES Soleil"). The script incorporates magic-realist elements from MJ's performance pieces (soliloquies for an anxious stray cat, which are pretty great; a climactic scene in which a distraught lover tries to stop time and avert a breakup), and she's discovered a great nonactor, an 81-yr-old man named Joe Putterlik who sold "refixed" small appliances through the "Pennysaver" (the subject of another of MJ's noncinematic art projects) and was encouraged to improvise his dialogue.

Karl Self 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.

Spiked! spike-online.com Indie cinema once provided a vital antidote to the formulaic output of the mainstream. Today, however, it encompasses a very particular style and set of audience pleasures. One can scoff at Hollywood's 'if it has enough explosions, they will come' approach to filmmaking, yet successful indie films seem to function in much the same way. The palette is different, but it is no less predictable: quirky characters, hand-held-camera work and an off-beat soundtrack.On the surface, these indie flicks appear to be doing something infinitely more complex and interesting than their mainstream counterparts, yet pseudo-intellectual references and non-linear storytelling usually hide a conventional and simplistic narrative. Miranda July's The Future appears to be the very definition of modern indie cinema's vacuity.This film - July's second feature as writer, director and star – tells the story of internet addicts Jason (Hamish Linklater) and Sophie (Miranda July), who, previously contented with their menial existences, are forced to rethink their priorities. The pair decide to adopt an injured stray cat, thinking that he will only hang on for another six months or so anyway. The vet soon informs them that if little 'Paw Paw' bonds with them he could well live on for another five years. Sophie and Jason are faced with the realisation that, if this turns out to be the case, they will be 40 by the time they are once again free from responsibility.With 30 days remaining before Paw Paw is well enough to be brought home, Jason and Sophie quit their jobs in order to pursue a higher calling, reasoning that at 40 they will be too old to do anything meaningful with their lives. So Jason volunteers for a local plant-a-tree foundation and Sophie decides to record herself doing different dance routines and uploads them to YouTube.The film opens with the two sat on their couch, tapping away on their respective laptops. They begin to talk about the virtues of having a miniature crane to fetch them beverages and whether or not Jason has the ability to freeze time. Such inane dialogue continues throughout the film, alongside more morose conversations about the pressures of growing older.As with 500 Days of Summer and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, an off-beat indie aesthetic tarts up a rather vague meditation on love, life and aging. That the film takes place in a typically kitschy vintage world helps give it a feel of portraying a meaningless hipster dreamscape.Yet beneath all the thrift-store clothing and kooky haircuts, something genuinely odd is going on here. After Jason and Sophie fail to find fulfilment in their new way of life, the film takes on a more surreal tone: Paw Paw performs philosophical monologues, Jason sparks up a conversation with the moon, and in one arresting scene, Sophie is consumed by a yellow t-shirt and dances around the bedroom almost hypnotised.For the most part, the film's stranger features seem designed to satisfy a hipster audience that will lap up pretty much anything that appears vaguely artsy. However, its ability to mystify rather than offer blatant symbolism is something to be applauded. All too often indie films wrap up as neatly as Hollywood blockbusters, yet here July has crafted a genuinely perplexing and open-ended work.At times, July in fact appears to mock her audience, as Sophie and Jason are in many ways a comic send-up of the sort of empty-headed lefty scenesters who worship the ground her vintage brogues walk on. For instance, when Sophie quizzes Jason as to why he cares so much about environmentalism, given that he spends most of his time indoors on his MacBook, he replies that he likes to know nature would still be there if he ever chose to venture outside. Moments like this bring some self- awareness to the film, and give you a little more license to enjoy The Future despite its apparent pretension.In many ways, Miranda July is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with indie cinema. Yet, The Future is, if nothing else, a different kind of filmic experience, and that's something that most independent productions fail to provide.

silvi1990-363-392439 Controversial The Future is a 2011 film that tells the story of an eccentric couple in their mid 30s who lives in a Los Angeles tiny and bohemian flat. Narrated by Paw-Paw, the injured stray kitten that they have adopted, the film tells how Sophie (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater)'s lives change dramatically during the month that they have to wait for taking the cat home. Its initial naiveté ends up being blurred by the shadows provoked by the protagonists' decision to break with their daily routine to fight for their own dreams as if they have been told they have only four weeks to live. Soon the adventure is over and in their blind and desperate search of their paths their steps grow more and more away.Heartbreaking, absurd, surrealistic, twee and bizarre at the same time, The Future is a piece of independent cinema that cannot be overlooked just because of the presence of disturbing elements such as the talking cat (whose high-pitched, childish voice rumbling in the dark is a powerful beginning by the way). Miranda July, director, writer and star of the film, is not just "being weird for the sake of being weird", but uses fantastic and bizarre images and situations to talk about our biggest taboos: the frailty of love, the futility of dreams, the anxiety about the passage of time and…the fear of death.With their scruffy curls and their apathetic attitude towards life, Sophie and Jason seem to be the perfect couple. By seeing them lied down on the couch with their feet entangled, the spectator realizes that they felt really comfortable being together. The image of Jason peacefully sleeping over Sophie's chest (sweet for some, twee for others) is also a very faithful representation of true love, as well as Jason's attempt to stop time forever reflects very well how heartbreak feels. Miranda July said in an interview that she intended to describe: "the bittersweet vertigo of true love". Despite the audience does not doubt in the sincerity and profundity of the feelings of the couple, it is forced to see how circumstances and human weakness makes their love begin falling apart. Firstly, to understand why they (as us ourselves) start panicking when the words "a 5 years commitment" are brought up, it is necessary to come back to the kitten wounded in her paw. Like Paw-Paw, who patiently waits for the couple to start his real life (she's even counting the days), we are always waiting for something good to happen, for the real beginning of our lives. And when we reach the thirties, we start to question ourselves if that beginning is not already gone, get depressed for having wasted the first half of our life and look at the future even more anxiously than before. This is more or less what happens to Sophie and Jason, whom the idea of looking after a kitten -requiring a total care- for the next five years of their lives, make them think of their (scary) future: "We're 35 now ... by the time the cat dies, we'll be 40 ... and 40 might as well be 50 ... and after that, spare change." "Spare change?" "Less than a dollar-- not enough to get anything you want …" Jason's words reflect our anxiety about the passage of time as we cannot help feeling frustrated when the years pass by without us having reached the milestones we set for ourselves. Nonetheless in the film July, who said of life "I rush through it, like I'm being chased", warns us about the dangers that this feeling of "being always late" (late to live?) provokes. The Future not only make us consider how useless is to be always projecting into when it's going to be "better", but also make us question the importance of our lifetime dreams. It kind of helps us to get rid of the endless frustration caused by the contrast between our high expectations and our day-to-day reality. Like Sophie and Jason, everyone suffers from the Cervantine conflict, that is to say, the conflict between the world as we have imagined it and the world as it is. The story of Sophie and Jason somehow questions the futility of dreams, often unattainable and absurd (remembering Jason's: "I always thought I'd be a world leader").How is it possible we cannot live happily just because we have not achieved some pretentious (generally childish) life goals? The Future, although has not the answer to the question, teaches us to open our eyes to our own limitations and stop feeling as if we deserved something better in life so as to start really enjoying ours. Life is not about waiting things to happen, but making things happen, as July said in No One Belongs Here More Than You: "Don't wait to be sure. Move, move, move" July says that she intended to describe "the bittersweet vertigo of true love". Here an intense fear (vertigo) is intimately linked to an intense love, as imagining spending a whole life with someone is scary because from the beginning everyone already knows how the story ends, one dying in the arms of the other. Hence marriage makes you inevitably realize your own mortality and finiteness. Some optimism is hidden, nevertheless, behind the pessimistic tone of the film. No matter what happens we always have to remember the enigmatic words of Joe Putterlik played by Joe Putterlik himself, an eccentric old man who Miranda met in a street market. This old man who participated in the film shortly before dying, tell us with his example that until you are dead, never is too late to live. So remember: "This is just the beginning"."Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning to dance in the rain"Anonymous