Summer is a good time of year to catch up on things you’ve let fall to the wayside. Maybe it’s a good book, or perhaps a fun game. Maybe you haven’t reviewed anything in nearly a month and want to get back on that horse! Well, now that I’m on vacation, I finally have some time to review some of the movies I haven’t had a chance to talk about yet, at least when I’m not doing other vacation stuff like watching TV and ordering takeout. Will this be a relaxing exercise in extolling the virtues of movies you should see for yourself, or will my time off be filled with bitter resentments at the films that wasted my precious free time? Let’s find out!!

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Friendship

Friendship is owned by A24

Directed by Andrew DeYoung

Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) seems to be living the suburban dream, but the arrival of a new neighbor who takes a shine to him causes him to realize that life can be so much more. Unfortunately, Craig is not what you’d call a suave individual or even that much of a cool dude, and when this new neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd) starts to distance himself from Craig, it leaves a hole in his life that starts to affect his job, his wife Tami (Kate Mara), and his son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer) as he tries to find new ways to recapture that feeling of true friendship in increasingly desperate and dangerous ways.

There were few movies I was looking forward to this year more than Tim Robbinson’s uncomfortable examination of male bonding, and there were many reasons for this, not the least of which being that Tim Robbinson is one of the best comedians working today. He understands Millennial anxiety like few others do, and it’s no surprise then that his first major film to follow the success of I Think You Should Leave wound up being one of the most personally affecting comedies of my generation, and certainly pulls the rug out from under everyone else who claims to know what’s wrong with men these days. It’s an issue that we’re constantly hearing about, but few movies have found as genuine a starting point to twenty-first-century malaise quite like this. There was a moment in the first Joker film where our protagonist imagines himself being seen by his favorite comedian, and it was one of the only moments in that allegedly serious-minded exploration of male loneliness and mental illness where I felt it was speaking to something profound and real. This movie is that scene for an hour and a half, only done by a guy who is genuinely funny, and beyond any other value it may have at lending an empathetic voice to the people who could really use a wake-up call, it is a fun film despite how uncomfortable it can be. Tim Robinson isn’t going for the same maniacal energy he does for his Netflix show, but even as a more subdued presence he still has a magnetic energy about him that compels you to pay attention and laugh out loud whenever the tension inevitably breaks, and he’s supported by a cast who understands the assignment and bounces off him in interesting ways. It’s fascinating to watch how everyone in his life treats him like a different person while all still coming to more or less the same conclusion about the guy, and it speaks not only how we present ourselves in different social contexts, but how much of our genuine selves still comes across even when we try to mask it. It’s not a movie that offers a lot of answers, but it gives an uncompromising examination of what’s wrong, which is frankly more than what a lot of people are offering to young men these days. The movie does lose a bit of steam in the second half as the narrative gets a bit unfocused with a couple of scenes that aren’t irrelevant, but do feel more like asides. The one that comes to mind is a sequence with drugs which makes sense as recreational use of drugs as a substitute for therapy is a thing a lot of guys are trying these days, no doubt encouraged by the likes of Joe Rogan, but it comes off as the type of indulgence you often see when sketch comedians, or those writing with them in mind, struggle to shake off when moving to a narrative feature. It also fails to stick the landing for me, which is a shame given how well the rest of the movie handles its subject matter. It’s not a bad ending borne out of incompetence as the film telegraphs its turn into ludicrousness well in advance, but it still feels disconnected from the tone we’ve established. It’s an escalation whose purpose is to give us a memorable ending, but the movie was plenty memorable up until that point and this feels needlessly excessive in a movie that simply didn’t need a big finale; completed with a character verbalizing the themes of the movie in case everything else had gone over your head. It’s a shame that the movie just couldn’t get over the finish line without losing confidence in its own conviction, but I guess a movie about disappointment having a disappointing ending is somewhat on brand.

Continue reading “Cinema Dispatch: Friendship & Another Simple Favor” →