Quirky comedy, without question, but quirkiness these days is no scarcer than shark's teeth, and it becomes necessary to distinguish between the pointlessly quirky and the pointedly. The issue still teeters in the balance when, for instance, a scraggly, trashy-looking white male, kicked out of the house by his black wife, says goodbye to his two café-au-lait children by setting his hand on fire outside their bedroom window. It has irreversibly tipped to the good, however, by the time a female driver of an Elder Cab, squiring a shut-in oldster to the shoe store to purchase a pair of neon blue Nikes, spies a goldfish in a plastic bag forgotten atop the car in front of her, is thereupon overcome by sentiments of sadness and helplessness over the fish's inevitable fate, yet feels honor-bound to accompany it to the end. You know right then that you're in the presence of a hypersensitive, a highly individual, and yes, a quirky vision, at once acute and tender. The vision would be that of the multimedia performance artist and first-time feature filmmaker Miranda July, who is an object of vision, herself, in the pivotal role of the moonlighting cab driver and, incidentally, aspiring multimedia performance artist, a figure redolent of insecurity and determination, pain and perseverance. Character interest is spread democratically among an assortment of oddballs, but centers on the wary mating dance between this cabbie and the scraggly hand-burner (John Hawkes), a sadsack shoe salesman for whom she has unaccountably set her cap. The separateness, the strangeness, the unknownness of people are subjects close to the crosshairs of the filmmaker's vision. Even closer to dead-center are the fundamental elements of hope and improbability in any romantic overture. The quirkiness of the thing, though it feels as if drawn from reality and not imposed by force, is nevertheless a kind of tunnel vision. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd