Rid of Me (2011)

Really Surprised!

Instant Favorite.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

I love this movie...best movie I have seen ... last 5 years... just brilliant... epic black comedy masterpiece... highly recommend.... There are so many things I like about this movie... a young woman possible having Aspergers trying to figure out who she is... thinking she could find herself in her new marriage... realizing that marrying a beer drinking sports guy ... who hangs out with football playing friends he has had since childhood... along with the cheerleader girls... then she gets divorced and goes punk...and the contrast between going punk and the yuppies...just brilliant.... Go Punk USA !!! and how healing that is. If ever have major heartbreak from any relationship..the best medicine is to heal with music... best yet "Punk Music" !! Where everyone is just rebellious and having fun in the process. Music is the magic that heals ones broken heart to heal again... listening... singing... dancing... partying ... celebrating... to the music... be the music... be free....

The opening scene, as is mentioned in many reviews, is not the "hook" they intended, and you might click your Roku back to Menu, but give it a chance and this film will break your heart. It's so real and true, I've met all these people, I've even been some of them. The directing is subtle and jumps around like a mosaic, but I got it. And the awkwardness is well done. This is a terrible comparison, but think of the silent, awkward moments in The Office. Instead of being funny, these situations are so cruel but so real and familiar that you believe them. We've all encountered these things at some point, but here, no one steps in for the downtrodden protagonist. She's left out in the cold over and over again. It's one of those films you stay with until the end of the credits.

A grungy tale of post-divorce rebirth in which the cure looks about as unpleasant as the illness, James Westby's Rid of Me offers an acting showcase for "desperate" co-producer Katie O'Grady but sets her character in a thinly painted world with straw-man antagonists. Commercial potential is dim for its single-screen NYC booking. The pic's meant as a black comedy, but you'd have to read the press notes to know that. Most viewers will read it as a morose character study whose aspirations are closer to psychological horror than comedy, even if gestures in that direction -- portentous closeups, ominous musical cues -- aren't matched by other production values, like its flatly undramatic lighting and set design. O'Grady plays Meris, a devoted wife whose husband Mitch must return to his old hometown when a business venture fails. There he reconnects with a tight-knit circle of fratboyish bros and their Stepford wives, none of whom show any empathy for Maris's shyness -- and why would they, with Westby's scenario such a cartoon illustration of social anxiety disorder, littered with unbelievable gaffes? Maris travels through a goth-y heart of darkness after her divorce, acting out in some revolting ways best not described here. Though set in the Pacific Northwest and sporting a musician in the cast (Everclear's Art Alexakis shouldn't quit his day job), Rid of Me's take on riot-grrrl punk isn't nearly potent enough to justify the title's appropriation of PJ Harvey's landmark record: Neither its depiction of the world of squares nor its embrace of rule-flouting self-affirmation rings true, so the inevitable happy ending offers little joy.

Andrew Schenker of Slant Magazine says it best, and finally the plain truth. "In In his latest film, Rid of Me, writer/director/editor/producer James Westby trades in a lot of false assumptions: that by constantly zooming into a character's eyes, he can somehow get at essential truths about their nature; that showing the same object from three different angles in quick succession gives us a more complete picture of a given situation; and that almost everyone in the world (or at least everyone in small-town Oregon) is either a racist, narrow-minded, overgrown frat boy/sorority girl/rules-beholden or booze-soaked, vomit-prone goth. At once hopelessly amateurish and given to desperate assertions of "virtuosity," Westby's film seems as lost as its perpetually confused and gratingly childlike protagonist. Moving from Irvine, California to her husband's Pacific Northwest hometown, Meris Canfield (Katie O'Grady) finds life in her new community to be instantly and wholly oppressive. Although she tries to be a dutiful wife, her husband's friends, with whom she's constantly forced to socialize, are unbearably obnoxious; the men are given to boorish antics, the women to crude condescension. When her hubby ditches her for an old flame, Meris takes a job at a local candy store where she befriends goth-chick coworker Trudy (Orianna Herrman). Before long, she's attending punk shows (goth/punk, what's the difference?), guzzling whiskey straight out the bottle, and getting screwed by sleazy men. Will our heroine ever right the ship and find balance in her life? Of course she will, and apparently all it takes is the love of a good man, in this case a geeky record-shop clerk, a narrative device that becomes necessary because Meris is so childlike and barely there that she scarcely seems capable of any independent action. (Or when she does, it feels like the whim of the director rather than anything that arises organically from her amorphous character.) With both the straights and the Goths reduced to gross caricature, there's little for Meris to choose between. And yet, for all the ridicule heaped on the latter group, it's the black-clad crew that allows our girl to find herself, the excesses of their behavior (along with all the film's other problems) papered over and resolved in one neat tying-it-all-up montage. If there's one thing Westby loves to do it's to cut quickly and often (whether between past and present, between different views of a various object, or between ever closer glimpses of a character's face), so it's no surprise that he calls on his signature montage technique to bring together the messy, incoherent strands of his movie, though when he does, it's with no more purpose than any of his previous bouts of brain-exploding Final Cut Pro manipulations.