Miranda July
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Connections, in both directions
However, unlike the population of Ocean’s Eleven (which is explicitly referenced at one point), she doesn’t engage in sophisticated or elaborate schemes.
She’s ordinary enough to be exhilarated by the idea of joining the family’s antics, which remind her of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise.
I can understand the potential appeal of a "heist" movie in which the thieves are lower-class small-timers, although Steven Soderbergh pulled that off in a much more convincing fashion a few years ago with Logan Lucky (another Soderbergh heist movie, Ocean's Eleven, is name-checked in Kajillionaire.)
The heist in its opening scene (which might as well be a low-key homage to Ocean’s Eleven) sees Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) diving and tumbling around to avoid the cameras as she collects the mail.
But Melanie eagerly asks to become part of the gang (she confuses their little scams with Ocean's Eleven -style heists), and knows a way they might take advantage of the elderly.
As her parents, the craggy ex-hippies personified by Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins, who shuffle about like anti-capitalist zombies, aren’t as strikingly defined, but the family dynamic is reminiscent of something like Running on Empty (1988), embodying the pronounced consequences of parents living outside the realm of the law, and how their choices eventually warp their children.
The similarities between Miranda July’s Kajillionaire and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite feel like they’re important enough to acknowledge.
July’s premise might remind some of recent Oscar winner Parasite , but whereas a destitute family of four created a dangerous co-dependency with a wealthy family in Bong Joon-ho’s instant classic, Kajillionaire finds a family of three knocking off cheap scams and tiny schemes, trying to scrape by from one theft to the next.
Like Hirokazu Koreeda’s delicate 2018 film Shoplifters and Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 masterpiece Parasite , Kajillionaire disregards the idea of the glamorous con and settles fully into the concept of scam as a daily grind.
At the age of 26, she has the sensibilities of a 14-year-old boy, wears a bright aqua blue jogging jacket that rivals that of Seth Rogen’s journo nerd in “Long Shot” (2019) and is possessor of bad dance moves reminiscent of Ben Affleck’s smooth wannabe in “Good Will Hunting” (1998).
Sebastian Wintero shot Kajillionaire with a Panavision anamorphic C-series lens, giving the story a wide image that curves the actor’s surroundings and backgrounds, foregrounding the idea that these four people are in an isolated world of their making—not unlike Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems , who sees the world through his own prism.
To quote Kate Winslet in The Holiday, “square peg, round hole”.
Although he was endearing in films like Me and You and Everyone We Know, if a sometimes surprising love interest, here his craggy features and thin, worn-out frame blend perfectly into the landscape; he’s a man ravaged by abuse, who’s been given one last shot at redemption.
I can understand the potential appeal of a "heist" movie in which the thieves are lower-class small-timers, although Steven Soderbergh pulled that off in a much more convincing fashion a few years ago with Logan Lucky (another Soderbergh heist movie, Ocean's Eleven, is name-checked in Kajillionaire.)
Secretary (2002)
Directed by Steven Shainberg
influenced Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Characters
July, who radiates the weirdly charismatic, geeked-out intensity of Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary, stars as an eccentric performance artist who becomes romantically obsessed with a loopy shoe salesman (John Hawkes) going through a painful separation from the mother of his two boys.
Eighth Grade (2018)
Directed by Bo Burnham
influenced by Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Themes
Recalling other films about fraught teen awakenings like Diary of a Teenage Girl and Me and You and Everyone We Know , Eighth Grade nevertheless charts its own course, sending Kayla down some potentially scary paths only to offer up a viable escape route at the end.
Former informer Alonzo Stevens (John Hawkes, HBO's "Deadwood," "Me and You and Everyone We Know") is a desperate man on the run and when his wife is killed by the ones who are chasing him he commits suicide right in front the vice partners.
Will the cracks in the idyll start to show, as they do for a comparable couple in Miranda July's corrosive The Future? Maybe, but not this week.
“Kajillionaire” falls into the off-the-grid genre and the know-it-all subgenre (such as “Captain Fantastic”), in which parents take children into isolation not merely for the purpose of survival but in pursuit of an ideal that differs drastically from any that children are likely to acquire from peers, school, or media.