Movies That My Upstairs Neighbor and I Might Be In Right Now
A romantic comedy that involves a meet-cute when I go upstairs to borrow some vegetable oil and happen to mention the fact that she constantly plays the same Spoon album over and over, which she responds to by mentioning my frequent playing of Robyn, Rihanna, and Cher Lloyd and asks whether I have a boyfriend.
A thriller in which my upstairs neighbor is a serial killer who likes to discourse on the merits of Spoon while wrapping his victims in plastic—like American Psycho but with a better soundtrack.
A drama in which my neighbor’s husband was listening to Spoon the day he died in a car accident, and she can’t bear to take the CD out of the player. I accompany her to a grief group (mild comic relief when I have to pretend that I’m there because my cat died), and in the last scene, she finally takes Spoon out and replaces it with a Joni Mitchell CD. She weeps, and we embrace.
A foreign film, which would explain a lot for the people who have always told me that I talk like someone whose native Portuguese is being poorly dubbed.
A kids’ film about a precocious eight-year-old boy named Quincy who’s a Spoon fanatic, and who I help to start a blog that becomes wildly successful. The trailer includes scenes of the two of us disastrously trying to bake cookies, me looking terrified behind the wheel of a go-kart, and Lena Dunham sharing her cigarette with Quincy backstage at Jimmy Fallon. In the last scene, Quincy finally meets Britt Daniel, who—playing himself in a cameo appearance—turns out to be a complete asshole.
A sci-fi film where the title Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga turns out to be a coded message from alien invaders. In the last scene, I finally confront Britt Daniel, who—playing himself in a cameo appearance—tears his face off, V-style.
An experimental film titled The Same Spoon Album Every Day for a Year. It’s just a static shot of Miranda July’s face, with Cher Lloyd occasionally heard being played in the downstairs apartment.
A documentary about two neighbors who never meet, but are vaguely annoyed by the fact that they have to listen to each other play the same music day in and day out. Directed by Werner Herzog and filmed in IMAX 3D, it’s billed as a simple but profound meditation on the minutiae that fill our lives every day until finally, inevitably, we die grumpy and alone.