I can’t claim to be a Miranda July fan; I’m not that familiar with her work. She was a Renew Media Fellow, so I’ve heard her name a few times in the course of my work there, and consequently added her film, Me and You and Everyone We Know to my Netflix queue. I have to admit to being beautifully blown away by the film.

Sure, different films hit you in certain ways depending on where you are in your own life. The first time I saw The Piano, I was so grossed out by the sight of Harvey Keitel naked, that the entire film was lost on me. Fast forward a few lonely years later, and the movie hit me like a ton of bricks (in a good way).

There’s a lot of blog press these days with The New Talkies: Generation DIY opening this week in New York. Besides making interesting films, the “mumblecore” filmmakers are a charismatic group so it isn’t hard to support them and talk about the cultural vein they have tapped into (read Matt Dentler’s First Person at indieWIRE). Their work touches on similar themes found in July’s 2005 film.

I am a bit late in posting about it, but I had the chance to see Tara Wray’s doc at Anthology Film Archives’ New Filmmakers Series a couple of weeks back and was really moved by her effort.

The story revolves around Tara’s relationship with her mother and their reunion in her Kansas hometown after many years apart. Their relationship is one fraught with high expectations on both sides, and as is usually the case with mothers and daughters, their expectations are rarely met.

Her mother is a woman who lives in a world all her own, and it is an alternate reality to the one that Tara and probably the majority of viewers live in. To Evie Wray, Tara and those of us like her, are wound too tightly. We bind ourselves with, dare I say, expectations, whereas Evie prefers to take life as it comes, without an eye toward the future or the past. She speaks as though she were in a perpetual dream, but when I listened closely to her and Tara trying to communicate, it was so obvious that they are living on different planes. Evie wants Tara to accept her as she is and Tara needs for her mother to come down to the earthly plane once in a while to check in, to let her know that she is safe and happy. Tara’s personality requires roots while her mother has only wings.

The mock doc is alive and well in flyover country - a film by Baylor U. professor and fellow blogger Chris Hansen. The film is now available on DVD via Customflix.