This weekend: I hung out with Jackie, did shopping and exchanged gifts and ate good food on Saturday, and on Sunday I did a makeup shift at the Craft Center and got some yarn spinning done.

I also watched Unicorn Store, which is an interesting movie featuring Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson. However, this premise isn’t going to be for everyone and some things about it are twee and will probably annoy the shit out of more acerbic people. I am an acerbic person, but I also like rainbows and unicorns, so I was into this. If you are not, then don’t watch it.

“We’re going to paint our dreams.”
”People don’t like it when I do that.” -Kit’s parents and Kit.

Brie’s character Kit is probably supposed to be around age 20 or 22 or something (Brie is 29 and looks about that age so you kind of have to ignore that) and she’s just failed out of law school for doing rainbow-colored art that the professors don’t approve of. Her parents do some kind of soul-searching quests as a business and try to fix her up with/compare her to their employee Kevin. Her parents would like her to just get off the couch and find a job already. Kit watches some hilarious commercials on television, the best one being a guy advertising about women’s periods.

“Kit, you are being weird on purpose.” -Kit’s mom.

After she sees a commercial about temping, Kit caves in and signs up with a temp agency. She ditches her rainbows, wears a traditonally ugly business suit of her mom’s, and forces herself to drink coffee, which she hates. (I HEAR YA, KIT.)

“No, that was just old Kit, and she didn’t try hard enough to like things that are disgusting.”

At her new temp job, Kit is IMMEDIATELY sexually harassed by the boss, Gary, the second he sees her. (Of course he’s one of those guys who always gloms on to the new girl, as it turns out.) She’s supposed to care about “Mystic Vac” vacuums. Gary hints about giving her a permanent job and letting her do a presentation, presumably in a “sure, if you let me fuck you” sort of way. Kit, however, is fairly clueless about this sort of thing (again, something valid if she’s 20-22 because it took me a long time to figure that shit out when it wasn’t as blatant).

However, Kit gets a mysterious invitation to “The Store,” which offers to sell you what you need. When she goes to the ... interesting... address, she finds Samuel L. Jackson in very interesting, mostly pink suits, big poofy hair with something hanging out of it, and glitter, calling himself “The Salesman” and offering to get Kit a unicorn and telling her it is legit possible. He doesn’t actually give her a price, he just tells her she needs to do things to get ready for the unicorn, like create a place to keep it in and the place should be stable and make sure she has a loving home (I assume that means “work shit out with your parents”).

In order to work on the unicorn home, i.e. fixing up her old playhouse, Kit meets a guy named Virgil who works at a hardware store and enlists him in building it up. They have a cute relationship but obviously Virgil has a fine line to walk between “I like you,” “I think you’re probably being swindled with this whole unicorn thing,” and “um, is she nuts?” once she tells him about the unicorn thing.

Working on the whole stability thing, Kit has to come up with a presentation on vacuums.

“I’m really nervous about this presentation because I keep trying to draw vaccums,and every time I do, I just want to draw rainbow kittens.” -Kit DON’T WE ALL, KIT.

The presentation is goddamned hilarious. After the previous presentation is entirely “Look, here is a sexy lady wearing short clothes and carrying a baby and a vacuum,” and all the boring business people liking it, Kit comes in wearing a blingy SUPER FRINGY outfit (“oh, this is just my clothes”), throws shit tons of glitter and confetti about and then vacuums it up with Bedazzled vacuums with the other people she got to do the presentation with her. Oh, the faces on the business people who continue to be all “I want a sexy woman.’ Oh, the face of Gary as he loses his boner.

Anyway, after she gets fired, Kit finally tells Virgil about the unicorn thing, they can’t find The Store when he comes along or at least it’s been cleared out, and we go on to the inevitable “was I crazy/swindled” sort of thing. However, Virgil, along with her parents, manage to decorate the playhouse to look just like her soul, and I like that. (I also desperately want her pajamas in this movie.)

“If you were a building, this is what you’d look like.” -Virgil.

I’m going to spoil the movie here, so if you want to stay innocent, stop reading and I’ll put some spoiler space:

SPOILER SPACE
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Kit gets called by The Salesman, saying the unicorn is here, do you want it or not, because another lady’s on the waiting list. Kit goes down there because if she doesn’t, she’d always wonder.

THE UNICORN IS....

legit. It’s actually there, she gets to hug it, there is a unicorn. Yesssssssss.

However... Kit decides that she’s actually fine with not having a unicorn because she’s already had one in her imagination or whatever and she’s okay now, and after having a one-sided conversation with the unicorn (“Steve”), decides it should go to the other lady. Who is waiting outside when they leave and is anxious about it. Kit presumably will be fine from now on and with Virgil because at least some people in her life are appreciating her now.

I don’t quite know what to make of this movie. I vastly appreciate a girl who still wants to be unicorn-y with rainbow art and glitter because I am that person. I want her pajamas so goddamned bad. I like that she actually did get one.

I don’t so much like that out of the blue she passes up on actually getting to keep a unicorn, which wasn’t exactly anything foreshadowed early on, seemed like it came out of nowhere, and COME ON, WOULDN’T YOU KEEP A UNICORN IF YOU GOT ONE? Her giving up on a unicorn was too “adult” and no fun for me and a buzzkill. Also, where the heck all of this is coming from is never explained--not that I really expected it to be, but it’s nice when that happens.

I’m just saying: share the unicorn!

I liked this quote from NPR:

”This is not a movie for everyone. Kit is what a Manic Pixie Dream Girl would be like if the story were actually about her, if her quirks and energy and flights of fancy mostly affected her life, not someone else's. Her style, for sure, is what a lot of people would refer to as "twee," and that's if they felt generous. It's the kind of thing, particularly from an adult woman, that can carry the stink of affectation, of a persona adopted to seek attention with whimsy. It is Larson's performance and Samantha McIntyre's script that make it clear that no, this is really Kit. This is really her heart, and this is what makes her happy. For a unicorn, she's precisely the right sort of girl. So why does she feel like she needs to change?”

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