It was slim pickings at the theater this week, leaving me choosing between Kajillionaire and a documentary about BTS. In retrospect, I made a poor choice and may been closer to the target audience for a movie about Korean pop music than this pile of pretentious nonsense. Writer/director Miranda July is a darling of the Sundance crowd, which means that her films appeal to a diverse audience ranging from New Yorker columnists to NYU film professors. This is no exception, as most highbrow film critics have been quick to call it powerful and whimsical and a contemporary commentary on the power of love. One reviewer commented that this is probably one of her favorite of Miranda July’s films, which is an odd thing to say since this is only her third movie. I’m here to call bullshit on all of them.
Kajillionaire is basically a character study about people that clearly don’t exist in the real world and behave like this is their first day on the planet, because that is apparently supposed to make them compelling. It revolves around a family of small-time con artists, consisting of two parents and their daughter named Old Dolio (she was named after a hobo that won the lottery in hopes that the guy would leave her money when he dies; it didn’t work). And when I say small-time, I mean they live in a former office attached to a bubble factory (is a bubble factory a real thing? I’m not sure, but why would that be a thing?) and spend their days trying to con their way to their whopping $500 per month rent. They befriend a young girl named Melanie for reasons that I don’t really understand and, well, that’s about it really. There is some illogical drama about how the parents don’t really love Old Dolio and an emerging romance between the two girls. None of this amounts to anything I would call a plot.
I’m only calling this a comedy because the internet is telling me it’s a comedy. You could tell me that this is a horror film and I would be equally baffled by the classification. For anybody that finds this funny, can you please tell me why? I’m not even trying to be a dick, just tell me one specific scene that made you laugh. I want to understand. I didn’t count one single joke in the entire goddamn movie. Being quirky without any semblance of actual human character doesn’t make something funny. I guess I would classify it as a drama, except it isn’t really all that dramatic either. It is sadly emblematic of the modern indie movie scene, in which following weird people around with no particular direction or story arc is considered the height of brilliance. It isn’t. It isn’t funny, it isn’t interesting. It’s a waste of my fucking time and I’m goddamn tired of it.
Nobody in this movie ever behaves like a real person and nothing happens with any sense of logic. The parents are just creepy weirdos and Old Dolio looks like Cliff Burton on his way to audition for Metallica while sounding like the world’s saddest surfer. The most confounding is Melanie (played by Gina Rodriquez, who deserves better), a person that exists only for thematic purposes. She seems fairly normal (compared to everyone else), but puts her life completely on hold when she meets these creepy fucks. Why? Who the hell knows. I was thinking that she was a homeless small-time con scraping her way through life, but, no, we later see her apartment and she seems to be doing just fine. This builds to a scene where Old Dolio’s parents try to have sex with her and she is shocked and we, as the audience, are supposed to be shocked and horrified. I can see why. I mean, you’re a smoking-hot girl in your twenties and you attached yourself (for no reason) to a pair of elderly, scumbag criminals and then you went hot tub shopping with them and then you went back to their dingy apartment to spend the night, so how could you know that they would want to have sex with you? It would take the hard-nosed street smarts of a Harvard professor to see that shit coming. Seriously, who the fuck writes characters like this? And why am I supposed to be invested in this?
I read that director Miranda July is really more of a performing artist than a pure filmmaker. If you understand what the fuck that means, then you will probably enjoy this more than I did. Here is another test of your potential enjoyment of Kajillionaire: late in the film, there is a scene in a gas station bathroom and the power goes out during an earthquake. The screen remains dark as the characters discuss the meaning of life and love and how one can’t fear death when they have nothing to hold dear to them. As this conversation carries on, the darkness of the screen transforms into a star-filled view of the universe and inspires us to ponder what it really means to value life. Sound pretty deep, huh? Makes you want to rethink some things? I imagine that people throughout cafes in Brooklyn will explode in their pants as they write haikus about this scene. Me? I would open the fucking door and get out of the goddamn gas station bathroom. It’s light outside, you asshats, you don’t have to stand there in the dark.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajillionaire#/media/File:Kajillionaire_poster.jpeg
