Strange festival this has been. While Harmony Korine has been doing his best Malick impersonation, tone poem style, Michel Gondry does his best Korine impersonation rebooting KIds for the twenty-first century. The story consists of a Brooklyn bus ride on the last day of school as characters come on and off and wrestle with the dilemma of being a We or an I along the way. I would not of thought this goofy guy from France had this caliber of Brooklyn-verite in him, but damn if he doesn't pull it off. There are Gondryesque flourishes, mostly in the reimaginings of anecdotes told on the bus, and there are a lot of laughs along the way, and a retro feel courtesy…

Review from Next Projection

Being as it is in essence a road movie, traditionally a quintessentially American genre, it’s interesting to have The We and the I helmed by a Frenchman. But then Michel Gondry is no stranger to American genre filmmaking, his attempts at romantic comedy and superhero movies—though decidedly disparate in the levels of their success—attesting both his formal versatility and acute outsider perspective on American issues. With this new film, set on a bus as it inches slowly closer to the homes of its thirty-something classmates through the Brooklyn traffic on the last day of school, he offers us a view of American youth culture few natives could manage to muster.

Workshopped over a three year period…

The We and the I is definitely a flawed film -- however, its ambition, originality, and topicality give me no choice other than to give it a mild "thumbs up." In fact, I would be even more eager to recommend it were it not for the final chapter ("The I") where the whole thing takes a bit of a nosedive and becomes too obvious and heavy-handed. I have no problem with the content of the final chapter, on the contrary, it is the section that really defines the film's thesis -- it's very much, in fact, the heart of the film. However, I wish that this thesis (the psychology of the individual being directly in opposition to the psychology of…

Pretty great. Easily Gondry's best since Eternal Sunshine (not counting Block Party). A bit surprising to find out after it ends that it's only 100 minutes long. It feels much longer, probably because it's real time in essentially one room (the bus).

There are occasional flashback/fantasy sequences that use Gondry's DIY effects, such as one kid imagining setting his art teacher on fire, and we see it as a stop motion of the teacher being covered up by red origami papers cut into flame shapes. There are also moments where we see flashbacks outside the bus windows, and it's pretty obvious that Gondry just set up a fake bus side in the room where they shot the flashback instead of…

As a huge Gondry fan, I was concerned when his mainstream success found him marred after the unfocused but sometimes interesting superhero flop The Green Hornet, and had some skepticism about his retreat with what looked liked a token urban youth indie exploration. But it turns out that this is Gondry returning to his extravagantly youthful roots, with a new taste via his "Dave Chappelle's Block Party" inspired Brooklyn travelogue. As if to ease my mind, the opening sequence already proves that Gondry and the ghetto can find common ground as he parallels the key bus setting to that of a moving mixtape, and keeps us engaged with studies of characters, interactions, and revelations, some brief while some are long,…

I'm really starting to hate Michel Gondry. He's so fascinated by extra-Manhattan urban communities that he forgets that any movie concerning them still has to be, you know... good and stuff. For this one, he assembled a group of about two dozen non-professional teen actors to essentially play themselves, little noticing or caring that almost none of them have any facility with acting or improvisation (though there are a few notable exceptions: the cheated-on gay boy and most of the "bullies" come to mind). Aggravating the problem is the awful sound mixing, which often makes it difficult to hear the dialogue and thus follow the roughly dozen or so plots going on. Gondry tries to dress it all up with…