KCUR Arts Reporter Steve Walker shares his top movie picks of the week.By Steve Walker
Kansas City, MO – Miranda July is a performance artist who periodically makes movies. Five years ago, she wrote and directed the too eccentric comedy Me and You and Everyone We Know, and is back with a much better and smarter film. She and Hamish Linklater play a married couple in their mid-thirties who look alike and toil at equally uninteresting dead-end jobs. They decide to commit to something a little more complicated - an injured cat - and the film covers the 30 day period they have to wait out while the cat's on the mend. When I heard that part of the film was narrated by the cat (using July's voice altered into a squeaky rasp), I was expecting to despise this movie - not because of a hatred for cats but rather an aversion to peculiar, sometimes idiotic narrative tricks like that; they seldom pay off. But July has an interesting, idiosyncratic energy and her fine script, as enigmatic as it is, reaches for and often grasps profound ideas about relationships, intimacy and aging. And there's a rhythm to the film that is weirdly comforting, like something Phillip Glass might compose.