Tag Archives: Tim Robinson

Capsules

CAPSULE: FRIENDSHIP (2024)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

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)

Friendship [Blu-ray]

Friendship [Blu-ray]
  • Paul Rudd
  • Tim Robinson
  • Andrew DeYoung
  • 2025
  • A24
Check Price
Channel 366

CHANNEL 366: I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE WITH TIM ROBINSON (2019-2021)

1 Comment

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Alice Mathias, Akiva Schaffer, Zach Kanin, Mike Diva, Zachary Johnson, Jeffrey Max

FEATURING: Tim Robinson

PLOT: A series of characters confront a world that does not welcome their honesty, bluntness, or failure to comprehend simple-yet-unspoken rules of social interaction.

Still from "I Think You SHould Leave with Tim Robinson" (2021)

COMMENTS: It’s hard to imagine a sketch show opening with a more fully realized statement of purpose than the one that kicks off Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s smorgasbord of cringe comedy. Having completed what looks to be a successful job interview in a coffee shop, a man makes his exit. However, he mistakenly pulls on a door which clearly swings out. Desperate to save face, he continues to pull, in the face of gentle correction from his interviewer and the increasing stress and strain from the effort. Ultimately, the fear of humiliation gives him the strength to break the door’s hinges, forcing it to swing inward. It’s a huge relief. Anything, anything to not be wrong.

That combination of aggressive awkwardness and interpersonal incompetence struck a nerve. Season 1 of “I Think You Should Leave,” in particular, proved to be a goldmine for viral jokes, especially in an age when our leaders seemed similarly inclined to do whatever damage was necessary in order to not be thought a fool. Meme-able highlights include a woman who fails to comprehend the subtleties of Instagram snark, a dabbing old man who derails a car focus group with absurd complaints, and a man in a hot dog costume who steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any responsibility for the wreck of his encased-meat mobile. Combined with the binge-friendly 15-minute running time of each episode, Season 2 was almost certainly inevitable.

That season has arrived, and fans of the first set of episodes will be pleased to know that Robinson’s taste for the ridiculous and the bizarre has not abated. If anything, he’s doubled-down on the bad behaviors and convention-flouting characters that made an initial splash. To be sure, some formulas are repeated: a spot urging cable viewers to demand they carry a channel devoted primarily to a funeral blooper show evokes an earlier commercial for a personal injury law firm with a very specific area of expertise. A shirt with a built-in tugging rope pairs nicely with a new garment that sells for upwards of $2,000 based entirely on its garish and increasingly complex patterns. Robinson’s fellow Detroiter Sam Richardson even returns in a new twist on his “Baby of the Year” appearance, this time hosting a misguided corporate entertainment that invites executives at a management retreat to pick the champion “Little Buff Boy” from a selection of preening pre-teen boys in muscle suits.

But new twists abound, frequently revolving around men who have reached the limits of their ability to cope with a world they don’t understand. A video explaining ear-piercing to young girls is mashed-up with a gruff old man’s lifelong regrets. A diner customer seizes on a white lie as a chance to fictionalize a life where he collects multiple versions of the same car. A devoted husband is wrecked by the betrayal of joining in his friends’ sexist jokes about their wives. Robinson himself is overcome with ennui immediately upon donning ill-fitting old makeup for a prank show. If most of the show’s characters are scorned for their refusal to follow social convention, the ones who play by the rules don’t seem any happier.

The essential elements of “I Think You Should Leave” are all in place: People behave awfully, and then blame others. They flout the rules of convention, and then forcefully reject society’s disapproval by championing themselves as bastions of freedom and justice. How dare you ask Santa Claus about his holiday gig when he’s here to promote his new action-revenge thriller? Where do you get off firing a man just because he tries to eat a hot dog hidden away in his sleeve, denies doing so, and then chokes on the link and throws up on a co-worker’s luggage? Doesn’t the recipient of a multi-million dollar personal injury award deserve a place as one of the rough-and-tumble investors on a “Shark Tank”-style show as much as some by-their bootstraps entrepreneur? Even a child’s doll lies to deflect shame. “I Think You Should Leave”’s characters are consistently awful at the job of being decent human beings, and they absolutely blame you.

Nothing may typify Robinson’s comedy more than a sketch about a haunted house tour in which the guide unwittingly trumpets the adults-only hour and encourages the guests to “say whatever you want.” Robinson’s tourist, taking the instruction literally, seizes the opportunity to bellow off-color (and seemingly unrelated) references to horse anatomy. But while the joke may end there, the sketch continues as Robinson tries with increasing despair to get it right. Ultimately, and not surprisingly, he is booted from the tour, and he leaves to the tune of a sad piano, utterly perplexed at his fate. The show’s title may reflect to message we convey to those who don’t fit in, but Robinson offers pity to all those rejects, no matter how much carnage they leave in their wake.

“I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” streams on Netflix.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the enduring appeal of I Think You Should Leave doesn’t rest in the question of which sketches work and which don’t. It’s more about the way viewers get drawn into its bizarro universe. It’s a world plagued by comic magicians, imbalanced nacho-sharing, and an aggressive baby named Bart Harley Jarvis. In this vision of comedy, the most mundane social missteps are the principal causes of human anguish. In season 2, Robinson and Kanin stay that course, and the best bits are the ones that exploit a simple, weird concept in ways that play on the successes of the first season, but still find surprising elements.”–Brianna Zigler, Polygon (contemporaneous)