A genre film that goes above expectations - Me & Earl

Despite a few missteps there's something very sweet and winning about Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (from novel of same title, a YA book maybe?). Yes it's about the millionth senior-year-lovesick-screwing up while preparing to leave home movie, but it brings something new and fresh to the shopworn genre: the 3 lead characters are very winning and actually quite funny, the relationship between the main character/narrator and the dying girl is quite beautifully handled, not nearly as maudlin as you'd imagine, and quite unpredictable over the course of the movie, the ending is a well-earned emotional high, the occasional use of animation or really I guess it's claymation is funny and unobtrusive (the cutesy supertitles less so), bravo for Connie Britton taking on a less-glam role with glasses and no makeup, and the films that the narrator and Earl make over the years, send-ups of various film classics e.g., 2:48 Cowboy, Death in Tennis, The Seven Seals - are very funny, a successful bon mot to the filmmaker's desired audience. Ok, sure, there are some wild inconsistencies in the handling of the high-school scenes: Narrator Greg talks about being an outsider unnoticed by anyone etc though when we see him in school he seems almost like he's running for president of the student council (I realize his self-image differs from the image others have of him), they make a point that the dying girl is part of a Jewish girl clique but the casting does not support that inference in any way, the adult male characters are weird and confusing (the hip teacher - how does he fit in?; same w/ the annoying intellectual father - they both seem as if they'd wandered in from a different, worse movie), and the characters sometimes talk in ways that no teenage kid ever speaks outside of a Wes Anderson movie. But all that said it's a good story with likable and mostly credible central characters, with some laughs along the way - not a ground-breaking film exactly but a little more ambitious than most in the genre and mostly successful.