By Design

A delight to finally get to see this again after catching it for Sundance Online last year, now on a big (or at least medium sized) screen in a sold out crowd. I was actually thinking about another Sundance online film we just saw this year called The Musical where, in one scene, the protagonist asks someone why he was passed over for a writing fellowship and is told something like “you didn’t write a play; you wrote a treatise on plays” and Amanda Kramer’s screenplays often feel overly academic like that to me. But I see that as a positive!!! Here she manages to have so many ideas about gender and bodies and relationships and love and I guess I sorta get why people would find that obnoxious or pretentious or ‘un-grounded’ but when it’s paired with such an incredible visual language and these amazing and hilarious performances, just like…idk! whatever if you don’t vibe with it because I vibe with it! Why am I yelling at you? I don’t know, I’m sorry.