davidehrlich’s review published on Letterboxd:
Miranda July’s “Me and You and Everyone We Know” premiered at Sundance in late January 2005, a few short weeks before YouTube went live on Valentine’s Day the following month. MySpace was in its infancy, Twitter hadn’t even been conceived, and Facebook was still new enough that most people just used it to “poke” strangers they didn’t have the courage to wave at in class.
You searched your own name to find all the other yous who’d secretly been out there the whole time, and wondered if any of them were having an easier time of being themselves. You accepted a friend request from the cute TA in your Physics for Poets class, hoping that full access to their profile would unlock the kind of intimacy you didn’t know how to ask for in real life, and then you rolled your eyes when you saw that their “favorite music” section just said “anything but country.” What a waste. Or maybe such uncurated sincerity was kind of brave in its own basic way? Even then you wondered how anyone could be so blithely un-desperate to be known.
While multiplex audiences were rubbernecking at Paul Haggis’ “Crash,” an ultra-analog tire fire that typified the kind of movies people were making about modern dislocation (read: self-absolving security blankets that wanted you to think a little irony would be enough to erase society’s oldest stains), the DIY “Me and You and Everyone We Know” gently poked its head into arthouse theaters with the prognosis to a problem that most of us hadn’t been able to put a finger on yet. July’s debut feature wasn’t the first movie about the internet (a sub-genre that had by that point already run the gamut from “World on a Wire” to “Hackers”), but it may have been the first movie to recognize how we’d express ourselves through it, and how the utopian promise of “social media” would so plainly reveal how scared we are of getting close to each other.