YOU AGAIN

Yeah, it’s me, yeah, it’s grotty old theater seven, it’s that tray of unagi from Whole Foods, it’s fall, it’s Kristen Bell. But there is no you until there’s a you again, until the face of the excessive rises up streaked with tears and snot. I’m the over-excited type who can’t pour water from a pot to a mug or bowl without spilling half down the side and across the counter. The crisp, singular act is best traded for smudge, accretion, erosion, as this film suggests that the high-school self is never banished but persists one thin and easily-scratched layer beneath the city-self one has carefully fashioned and outfitted in good jeans. The real facebook movie, because now reinvention is impossible, because the past never looks away. Bell plays a super-successful P.R. exec in L.A. called home to discover her brother engaged to her high-school tormentor whose aunt/guardian Sigourney Weaver is a super-duper-successful hotelier and former high-school nemesis of Bell’s mom Jamie Lee Curtis. At some point someone says there are now seven billion people in the world—already? Uh oh.

Weaver and Curtis both look fabulous. The high school flashback is titled “2002” but I’d venture that the references—Hall and Oates, Queen, the lambada, Kris Kross—point to a writer coming of age c.1980-1992. You again. High-Weaver time, peak Curtis, some of us have the latter to thank for our provincial’s first encounter with intersex issues and ethics. Are we really going to start wearing our jeans backwards? No? Whew. Tony Curtis died this week—buried with percoset and an iPhone, I read—now that man could wear stockings, though Lemmon winds up more curious. “I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop,” i.e. the best of what both bits have to offer. Pull down your pants, pull up your skirt. “You again.” “Nobody’s perfect.”