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CAPSULE: FRIENDSHIP (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Andrew DeYoung

FEATURING: Tim Robinson, , Kate Mara

PLOT: A middle-class family man develops a bro-crush on his new neighbor; after a series of faux pas drive a wedge between them, he undertakes increasingly desperate measures to get his friend back.

Still from FRIENDSHIP (2024)

COMMENTS: Tim Robinson’s comedy speaks to that part of the brain that worries about the men’s room faucet malfunctioning and splashing your pants so it looks like you wet yourself right before you have to deliver a speech in an important business meeting, so you draw attention to it and try to make light of the situation, only to have the joke bomb as you stand there in a silent room in wet slacks. In a way, he’s the perfect guy to take on the trending topic of “male loneliness.”  But then again, if you are interested in a cathartic take on this troubling phenomenon, Tim Robinson is precisely the wrong guy to look to.

Robinson’s Craig seems relatively normal at first, if a bit boring and nerdy, but grows increasingly deranged as the pic progresses. The object of his Platonic affections is a grown-up “cool guy”; new neighbor Austin, a TV weatherman who plays guitar in a rock band on the weekends, knows a secret entrance to City Hall that runs through the sewers, and sports a great head of hair and a mean mustache. Before meeting Austin while dropping off a misdelivered package, Craig seems content to work his corporate gig designing ultra-addictive apps and to stay home in the evenings reading the paper. But there are hints of discontent: his wife, a cancer survivor, confesses to their support group that she hasn’t had an orgasm in months, and she’s constantly ditching Craig to hang out with her ex. (Craig is also disconcerted that his teenage son still kisses mom on the mouth). Craig initially doesn’t think he needs Austin in his life, but he’s almost immediately smitten after hanging out a few times. But when Austin tries to incorporate him into his wider circle of friends, Craig screws things up, and then his behavior grows increasingly deranged as he becomes obsessed with winning his friend back: breaking and entering, literally abandoning his wife, toad-licking. You know, guy stuff.

Friendship sits in a liminal space between mainstream comedy and an absurdist comedy. There is enough structure to ground audiences, but it gets shaggier as it goes along . It’s biggest asset is its unpredictability, but that is also its biggest failure. Craig doesn’t seem real, or like a comic exaggeration of a real person: he’s too biopolar, pathetic and mopey one minute, manic the next as he lashes out in misdirected anger at a big client after being upstaged at a pitch meeting. That inconsistency gives the project the feeling of a bunch of sketches strung together—sketches that might have worked better as isolated bits on Robinson’s Netflix show. Robinson’s persona seems like it would be perfect for a supporting role as the quirky best friend of a film’s protagonist, but he makes for an uncomfortable anti-heroic central presence—which I suppose is the point.

Friendship ultimately has little to say about male friendship; read literally, the movie suggests that men are better off without male friends. Although Craig’s downfall begins with humiliating gaffes—e.g. walking into a patio window—he gradually becomes the victim of his own pride. He becomes less goofy and more narcissistic—he’s not so much upset at missing out on Austin’s companionship as he is offended at being rejected. Rather than being a lament on the pitfalls of male friendship, Friendship becomes more of a character study of a selfish, shallow jerk whose family suffers while he obsessively pursues a pal as the status symbol he thinks he needs to add to his pile of job, wife, son, and house. At first, Craig screws up his chances by missing the proper social cues, but he increasingly turns to perverse self-sabotage. He goes through a lot of pain and disgrace, but ultimately deserves it all. And this is a less interesting direction than what the premise originally promised. When a despairing Craig anxiously decides to take a psychedelic trip, he’s promised an awe-inspiring death and rebirth, but the actual experience is rather a letdown. That’s not quite a metaphor, it’s just a laugh—and that’s the best way to take Friendship. It’s an odd comedy coming from a skewed perspective, but not a particularly incisive or game-changing one. But the laughter in the theater proves that the right audience will want to hang out with it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…he truly odd thing about ‘Friendship’ is that while we may think, at first, that we’re watching a comedy about a sad-sack geek who’s drawn out of his shell, the film always makes sure that Craig, as inhabited by Robinson, is a notch weirder and more off-putting than we expect… the movie, after a while, starts to feel like it’s for Tim Robinson cultists only. Robinson’s brand of middle-class psycho surrealism works perfectly in bite-size sketch-comedy doses. Stretched out to feature length, a character like Craig simply stops making sense.”–Owen Gleiberman, Variety (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE SHAPE OF THINGS (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Neil LaBute

FEATURING: , , , Frederick Weller

PLOT: A nerdy security guard falls for an anarchic art student; she encourages him to change his appearance and dress, increasing his self-confidence—but is she really good for him?

Still from The Shape of Things (2003)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Neil LaBute’s pitch black adaptation of his own play falls into the category of “outside-the-box indie drama” rather than “weird.”

COMMENTS: On the surface, The Shape of Things appears to be about the lengths someone will go to change themselves to gain someone else’s approval. Evelyn transforms Adam from schlub to stud, but the changes to his body inevitably effect his mentality. But although the erotically-motivated malleability of the less confident romantic partner is one of the work’s themes, Shape reveals a different, more controversial, focus in the third act. The ending twist is easy to guess, particularly to anyone who has seen LaBute’s debut film (the venomous dissection of masculine manipulation In the Company of Men). But I was willing to forgive the obviousness, because I think that LaBute’s fundamental point—an attack on attitudes and platitudes prevalent in the postmodern art scene (Evelyn, the film’s antagonist, is the kind of artist who believes in spray painting classical sculptures as a “statement”)—needed to be said.

The Shape of Things‘s origins as a stage play are obvious—each transition might as well be preceded by intertitles of the format “Act 2, Scene 3”—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What it really means that this is an actor’s and writer’s movie; everything is built around dialogue, which is often very sharp, with only a couple of set changes. Each of the four characters gets at least one big scene with the other three: Adam and Evelyn, obviously, spend the most time together, but the male lead must also defend himself from a “you’ve changed, man” speech from bro Phillip and navigate a moment of awkwardness with his best friend’s girl, while Evelyn gets to argue with douchey Phillip about the nature of art and to confront Jenny about her supposed attraction to the new and improved Adam. The fact that each of the actors had played these characters on stage for a year beforehand inevitably helps their chemistry—the characters are a artificial, written as types to support a thesis, but the young foursome does everything possible to make them feel like real people.

LaBute is often accused of being misanthropic (or even misogynistic), but, like all satirists, he’s actually humanistic. It shocks me that so many critics and viewers come to the exact opposite conclusion—I guess they conclude that no writer could pen scenes of emotional sadism so convincingly without being a psychopath themselves. It seems obvious to me that LaBute shows us extreme cruelty not to titillate us, but to arouse our disgust—to encourage us to try to be better people. And, to encourage his peers to become better, more morally focused artists.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This version of Neil LaBute’s ongoing project is crisp and aggressive, occasionally alienating or annoying, that is, effectively unlike other movies.”–Cynthia Fuchs, Pop Matters (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “noa.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Shape of Things

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Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

EAKER VS EAKER AT THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS (BONUS COVERAGE): ANT-MAN (2015)

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Eaker vs. Eaker is the latest “send Alfred to the summer blockbuster movies so that he can curmudgeonly complain” event, but with a twist, cinema fans and friends! For the first time (without even knowing it), you voted to send Alfred and his wife, Aja, to the flicks and have them duke it out, publicly, about each so-called-blockbuster. Everybody here knows all about Alfred’s cinematic savvy, and his cranky-old-dog approach to film critique. Now, you get 2-for-1: Aja is Alfred’s beloved clinical and counseling psychologist partner, who loves to counter just about every cinematic point Alfred makes. You didn’t choose to send us to Ant-Man (2015), but we went nevertheless.

Aja and Alfred 366Alfred:

How much of the script for Ant-Man (2015) was written on a chalkboard? I imagine a bunch of executives sitting round the table, outlining the plot for its six writers: “To be successful, we have to follow the Marvel formula, have archetypes, etc.”

“Well, we can do it like Iron Man.  Have the hero in and Ant-Man suit and a villain in a rival insect suit.”

“Ok, but Ant-Man is little. So what other movies are there about shrunken people.”

“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”

“Ok, good. What else?”

“The Incredible Shrinking Man.”

“Well, maybe, but that’s kind old, isn’t it?”

Still from Ant-Man (2015)“Hey, it is about ants, so what about the Ants move?”

“Good thinking. Let’s look at Ants too. We need to give him a mentor, some comedy relief, and a femme fatale babe.”

“Ok, good, but we gotta give Ant-Man something to fight for. Audiences love little girls. Let’s give him a daughter.”

“Yeah, and the villain goes after her like that Octopus guy went after Spiderman’s aunt.”

“Or Lex Luthor when he went after Lois Lane.”

“We can even have a bald villain, like Luthor.”

“Let’s develop all that and up the ante. Make Ant-Man a divorcee—kind of a loser. He only gets to see his daughter on weekends.”

“Yeah, and his ex-wife is married to a jerk.”

“Right, and after learning her biological dad is Ant-Man, the daughter learns what a true hero he really is.”

“Now, we’re rolling. What else?”

“Let’s use the corporate bad guy plot, you know like making the big business guys trying to get the secrets of the suit, so they can sell it Continue reading EAKER VS EAKER AT THE SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS (BONUS COVERAGE): ANT-MAN (2015) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE TEN (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: David Wain

FEATURING: , Winona Ryder, , Famke Janssen, , A.D. Miles,

PLOT: A series of short comedic stories, each inspired by one of the Ten Commandments.

Still from The Ten (2007)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It has a few bizarre moments, but The Ten is nowhere near consistently weird enough to number among the 366.

COMMENTS: It’s both easy and difficult to review an anthology movie like The Ten. There are ten mini-movies, so going in you realize that there are inevitably going to be hits and misses, and that spread over ninety minutes the quality is likely to average out. Actually watching the movie is just a matter of confirming that there’s neither exceptional brilliance or exceptional incompetence at work here, and that the whole does indeed converge towards the predicted mean. Although the segments span some stylistic territory, including one obscenely animated Commandment, there are more similarities than differences. Scripted by two of the co-creators of the MTV sketch comedy show “The State,” the pieces here don’t have a “short film” feel so much as a “TV sketch” sensibility, only with mild blasphemy, cuss words and (way too many) jokes about prison rape added to take advantage of the fact there are no advertisers to alienate. The sketches all begin with an absurd premise—a woman is erotically obsessed with a ventriloquist’s dummy, Jesus has returned for the Second Coming but is procrastinating about starting the rapture, a clueless doctor has a dimwitted excuse for killing one of his patients—and then develops it for seven to nine minutes before moving on to the next segment. Two of the ten stories are done in a radically different style. One is a spot-on parody of a -style scene involving urbane ex-lovers meeting on a Manhattan street. Then there’s the weirdest bit, an X-rated animated sequence (recalling Fritz the Cat) involving depraved anthropomorphic animals, including a heroin-dealing rhino who inexplicably poops flowers, ending in an interspecies orgy. The framing device involves a narrator whose domestic problems keep spilling over into his introductions, and the movie ends with the entire cast singing a musical recap (“I introduced each story, there were ten, you couldn’t have missed ’em/I was surrounded by gigantic prop tablets, but I didn’t heed their wisdom…”) To make The Ten seem less disjointed, some of the main characters from one tale play a supporting role in other stories. All of the sketches are irreverent, but there isn’t a consistent satirical outlook across the entire movie, and so the “Ten Commandments” hook never becomes more than a gimmick. The connection between the gag and the illustrative Commandment is often stretched; for example, “thou shalt have no God before me” inspires a silly spoof on celebrity worship. The writers managed to draw major talent to the project: Wynona Ryder features prominently in two of the stories, the late Ron Silver shows up in an actor’s dream vengeance role as a talent agent, Jessica Alba appears as a bimbo, and Oliver Platt gets the movie’s best bit as an impressionist who specializes in doing a mediocre Arnold Schwarzenegger (although it’s better than his Eddie Murphy). But despite the infusion of name-value movie stars, The Ten remains televisionesque; it’s missing that extra “oomph” needed to justify feature film status. Basically The Decalogue re-imagined as a grossout sketch comedy series, The Ten is sporadically amusing, but non-essential viewing.

Written by David Wain and Ken Marino, alumni from MTV’s minor cult hit “The State,” and featuring many of that series’ regulars, The Ten might have been banking on “State” fans showing up a decade after cancellation for what almost amounted to an uncensored reunion show. That didn’t happen, as the film debuted to tepid reviews and went on to recoup less than a million dollars of its $5.2 million budget at the box office.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a series of stone-tablet-based short films — from the gross to the surreal to the certifiably nuts… A ‘Decalogue’ for special-ed students, ‘The Ten’ leans too often toward the bizarre and the bewildering.”–Jeanette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Kallisti, who conceded it “might not be the weird you’re looking for but it’s worth watching.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)