jrose8524 I have seen both of this film maker's movies. I enjoyed the first one, Film Geek and The Auteur was festive, if a mess at times.I made it 21 minutes into this flick before giving up. I cannot speak of the rest of the film, but by this point I wanted to take an Uzi to the entire production. I found none of the characters well drawn or compelling. The use of racist language was so off-putting that I gave up.I hated Meris. I hated that she loved her stupid, pathetic husband. I loathed and despised his so-called friends. Everyone was creepy and poorly written and pathetically shot and hideously performed/directed. It looked like something they wrote in a fit and thought it was somehow interesting or compelling. I've seen pornography that was better written.Stilted, dialogue, stupid lighting choices, it isn't worth my time. I hope, if you enjoyed it, that it was worth yours.

psaygin You know what usually happens when you watch an indie movie with divided 1 star/5 star reviews on netflix... 90% of the time you watch it, it's a solid 2 star (rarely a 3) out of 5 and you don't even think about it again. The rest of the time it's something "interesting" - not necessarily great. Last night we watched "Rid of Me" a 2011 indie movie. I can't stop thinking about it all last night and today. It totally touched me (mostly by creeping me out). The film is about Meris, a socially awkward, shy young woman who is in love and moves with her all American jock boy type husband to his home town in Oregon where a group of his frat bro buddies and their wives await. The friends are annoying and crass, and she has some mental conditions (depression, social anxiety). Things don't go well in terms of Meris fitting in. When an old flame of the husband moves back to town, the marriage is soon on the rocks. She goes through some difficult stuff and then the movie is about "finding yourself". Cheap movie and production is pretty bad and throughout the first half at least I felt incredibly uncomfortable, but this is the intention and possibly even the point of the film. First it was interesting that the movie was about a woman and her journey. This woman was not presented as classically attractive, nor is she the life of the party by any means. It's rare to have this kind of character focused on. At the same time, the focus on this character is what makes the movie both uncomfortable and poignant. Personally, I could not relate to the title character, the meek Meris. How can someone be so hapless and direction-less? It seemed she had no autonomy as she was being carried into further and further horrific situations that gave her no respite from herself or from the mean people she dealt with. I realise she was not meant to be a realistic character but the way the film is shot you are following her all the time and you feel like shaking her up throughout the first half of the movie. Meris, how can you not protect yourself from going to those places? Don't you grow a backbone girl?? I just found my mind in a logical bind that a person would let themselves get into situations like that. Perhaps I am forgetting how you can be so naive when you're in stupid young love and at that point in life when you have not yet understood that people are weak and disappointing and you should always protect your back.And the backbone, she does indeed grow in her own way and with a lot of mess on the way, as we all do - well maybe a bit messier than average. We see Meris develop all the way to the act of extreme defiance she carries out in the opening scene of the movie, which where she walks up to a plastic blonde woman in a supermarket and does something shocking and defiant. (Side note: This act is probably one that is extremely feminine in some ways, but it struck me as a very male scene to write - I don't know if I am going to be able to explain this, it's just a subtle thing, almost like a man envisioned what Meris would do). The finding yourself part, the main theme of the film, is not all blood. There is comic relief, plus some high school regression, friendship, 90s style girl power, smoking, aging goth characters ; and all that stuff works in the end and you have weird friends and you laugh and you learn to accept yourself and not to let a man have control over who you can and cannot be.I find it a hard movie to recommend in an unqualified way because the movie is uncomfortable but if you want to try something different, it's worth checking this out.

aronnie46 Okay, so here it comes in all its stupid glory, from the master filmmaker's own blow-hard announcement: "here is the epic behind-the-scenes video of RID OF ME, which comes out this March on DVD". Well we can't wait. Now maybe we'll get a mini-masterclass glimpse into why this absolute "dog of movie", to coin the words of a responsible critic, is as woefully awful as it is. Rid of Me, together with the inanely amateur films of Todd E. Freeman, (where do they get the money for all this junk?) are all that Portland has to offer? We think not. Absolutely in love with Portland, Oregon, but not her filmmakers. But then I'm not alone judging by the reviews. Okay, maybe I just want my money back from the Living Room Theater for being duped into buying a ticket.

aparkspdx Andrew Schenker of Slant Magazine says it best, and finally the plain truth. "In In his latest film, Rid of Me, writer/director/editor/producer James Westby trades in a lot of false assumptions: that by constantly zooming into a character's eyes, he can somehow get at essential truths about their nature; that showing the same object from three different angles in quick succession gives us a more complete picture of a given situation; and that almost everyone in the world (or at least everyone in small-town Oregon) is either a racist, narrow-minded, overgrown frat boy/sorority girl/rules-beholden or booze-soaked, vomit-prone goth. At once hopelessly amateurish and given to desperate assertions of "virtuosity," Westby's film seems as lost as its perpetually confused and gratingly childlike protagonist. Moving from Irvine, California to her husband's Pacific Northwest hometown, Meris Canfield (Katie O'Grady) finds life in her new community to be instantly and wholly oppressive. Although she tries to be a dutiful wife, her husband's friends, with whom she's constantly forced to socialize, are unbearably obnoxious; the men are given to boorish antics, the women to crude condescension. When her hubby ditches her for an old flame, Meris takes a job at a local candy store where she befriends goth-chick coworker Trudy (Orianna Herrman). Before long, she's attending punk shows (goth/punk, what's the difference?), guzzling whiskey straight out the bottle, and getting screwed by sleazy men. Will our heroine ever right the ship and find balance in her life? Of course she will, and apparently all it takes is the love of a good man, in this case a geeky record-shop clerk, a narrative device that becomes necessary because Meris is so childlike and barely there that she scarcely seems capable of any independent action. (Or when she does, it feels like the whim of the director rather than anything that arises organically from her amorphous character.) With both the straights and the Goths reduced to gross caricature, there's little for Meris to choose between. And yet, for all the ridicule heaped on the latter group, it's the black-clad crew that allows our girl to find herself, the excesses of their behavior (along with all the film's other problems) papered over and resolved in one neat tying-it-all-up montage. If there's one thing Westby loves to do it's to cut quickly and often (whether between past and present, between different views of a various object, or between ever closer glimpses of a character's face), so it's no surprise that he calls on his signature montage technique to bring together the messy, incoherent strands of his movie, though when he does, it's with no more purpose than any of his previous bouts of brain-exploding Final Cut Pro manipulations.