The Future
I very much enjoyed writer/director/performance artist Miranda July's smart 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know. I also very much enjoy cats, and rarely a day passes when I don't narrate something as my own kitty. So don't think The Future gained its place on this list simply because it features cloying feline narration (voiced by July), although it did confirm my hunch that imagining cat conversation, like clipping one's nails, is best not done in public. The film's two youngish Angelenos, Jason (Hamish Linklater), who does tech support on the phone, and dance teacher Sophie (July), are so aimless that their decision to adopt Paw Paw, a stray recovering from an accident, is a huge event, a life changer. In the month before they are to take the cat home, Sophie debases herself with a lover outside her hipster class, while Jason quits his job and makes friends with an eccentric elderly man. Presumably we're meant to find this infantile couple representative of a generation adrift, because otherwise, what's the point? Yet July holds them at such an ironic remove that they seem like cardboard cutouts. July positions herself as a provocateur, but she's more of a scab picker, and the wounds she's toying with here are minor.