What to Make of Friendship When It’s Between Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd

May 9, 2025

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

sinking or swimming? (CREDIT: A24)

Starring: Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Josh Segarra, Billy Bryk, Jason Veasey, Jon Glaser, Eric Rahill, Connor O’Malley, Carmen Christopher, Craig Frank, Omar Torres, Jacob Ming-Trent, Daniel London, Whitmer Thomas, Raphael Sbarge, Ivy Wolk, Meredith Garretson

Director: Andrew DeYoung

Running Time: 97 Minutes

Rating: R for Questionable Language and Some Strange Trips

Release Date: May 9, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) doesn’t have many close friends. Or any friends at all really. He does at least have his wife Tami (Kate Mara) and teenage son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer) to keep him company, although they’re usually busy doing their own thing each night while he just sits around and stares at his phone. But then one day, Tami encourages him to go hang out with their new neighbor, local weatherman Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), and it’s like a new portal of transcendent male bonding has been opened. Everything is going just sublimely, that is, until Craig meets Austin’s other friends and makes an absurdly terrible impression on them. Austin quickly insists that the friendship is now terminated, but once you’ve connected with Craig, that impression doesn’t go away so easily. As Craig does his bizarre best to hold on, his entire life threatens to spiral apart completely.

What Made an Impression?: What To Do If You Think You Should Leave: If you’re most familiar with Tim Robinson via his demented Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave, then you should definitely know that Friendship is essentially a feature-length ITYSL routine. Which leads us to quite the existential conundrum: what is the base level of unhinged in this reality? Craig is unsurprisingly more divergent than anyone else, but it’s not as if Austin is as put-together as he always presents himself. And what are we to make of Craig’s family’s casual acceptance of his eccentricities? Is he the same man that Tami married all those years ago? Does Steven see this as normal (or at least semi-normal) behavior because he’s simply never had any other dad? They occasionally express frustration when he goes too far, but in general they’re on his side. Or at least, they’re much more on his side than you might expect. And honestly, that’s kind of sweet. But also concerning. But also weirdly heartwarming considering the context.
A Fair Warning, Though: Counterpoint to that last paragraph: Craig does act illegally on multiple occasions, mostly in the form of trespassing. He also has a major meltdown in front of a big client at his marketing gig. Quite frankly, it’s a wonder he’s managed to hold on to a job or maintain any place in society for as long as he has. But also, this is a world where people keep saying “this new Marvel” or “that new Marvel” instead of specifying the actual title of the movie they’re talking about, so who knows what’s what?
Where Are We?: One of the key plot drivers of Friendship is a series of packages addressed to Austin mistakenly ending up in the Waterman driveway. The camera lets us see the labels, revealing that this town is “Clovis, USA” – no state provided. So where is Clovis, you might ask? (I certainly did.) Well, it appears that there are Clovises in California and New Mexico, but the zip code on the label is 06437, which puts us in Connecticut. But I wasn’t getting Constitution State vibes from this movie. Although, I wasn’t getting Opposite of Connecticut vibes either. Instead, I was mostly getting Nowheresville Purgatory vibes.
What? A Trip?: At one point, Craig licks a venomous toad to go on a hallucinogenic journey. And he does in fact take off to another plane of existence, but it’s pretty mundane and bogus, although also strangely amusing. That bluntly quirky Interruptus sums up the whole package.

Friendship is Recommended If You Like: Questioning everything

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Marvels

‘Hell of a Summer’ is a Low-Key Doodle of a Slasher

April 3, 2025

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

What the hell (of a summer)?! (CREDIT: NEON)

Starring: Fred Hechinger, Abby Quinn, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Billy Bryk, Finn Wolfhard, Pardis Saremi, Krista Nazaire, Matthew Finlan, Julia LaLonde, Daniel Gravelle, Julia Doyle, Rosebud Baker, Adam Pally

Directors: Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk

Running Time: 88 Minutes

Rating: R for Bloody Shenanigans and a Conversation About Getting Busy During a Movie

Release Date: April 4, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Veteran Pineway Camp counselor Jason (Fred Hechinger) had an embarrassingly tearful goodbye at the end of last summer, which he thought was going to be his last at Pineway. And it probably should have been. He is aging out of the gig, after all, and it doesn’t exactly pay like a full-time job. But the owners needed the extra help this year, or at least that’s what he keeps saying. But he really should’ve reconsidered, considering that … there’s a serial killer on the loose! Will Jason turn hero and save all his fellow counselors, or will everyone just die sad, unremarkably gruesome deaths?

What Made an Impression?: Two-for-One Deal: Hell of a Summer is written and directed by a pair of youngsters (Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk, who both also star), but despite their youth, they’ve assembled a throwback to the slashers of yore, particularly two that loom menacingly large over the rest of the genre. You’ve got the camp setting and ugly relentlessness of Friday the 13th, but with a little bit more personality than Jason Voorhees’ adventures. That’s crossed with the Scream-style setup of friends playing detective against each other, except that in this case most of them are a little dopier and a lot more superficial than Woodsboro’s residents. They’re not so infuriating that you’re begging for them to get sliced up, but you might just want them to go through some terrible trauma so that they’ll actually grow up.
Where is Everyone?: There’s one big unanswered question throughout Hell of a Summer: where are all the kids?! Or is this just an “Oops All Counselors” type of amp? Now, of course, the most likely answer is that the young attendees are scheduled to arrive at least one day after all the counselors, so they’re not supposed to be there at this point anyway. But the counselors never seem to behave as if anyone else is on the way! To be fair, that isn’t exactly unbelievable behavior from teenagers and young twentysomethings, but I nevertheless couldn’t help but be deeply affected by the lack of explanatory context.

Hell of a Summer is Recommended If You: Wish that Wet Hot American Summer had fewer laughs and more blood

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Decapitations

‘Saturday Night’ Seeks to Capture the Prelude to One of the Biggest Seventh Days of the Week of All Time

September 26, 2024

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I’m not Chevy Chase, and they’re not (CREDIT: Hopper Stone/Columbia Pictures)

Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Nicholas Braun, Cooper Hoffman, Kaia Gerber, Andrew Barth Feldman, Tommy Dewey, Willem Dafoe, Matthew Rhys, J.K. Simmons, Jon Batiste, Naomi McPherson, Taylor Gray, Mcabe Gregg, Nicholas Podany, Billy Bryk, Ellen Boscov, Joe Chrest, Catherine Curtin, Leander Suleiman, Paul Rust, Robert Wuhl, Corinne Britti, Kirsty Woodward, Josh Brener, Brad Garrett

Director: Jason Reitman

Running Time: 109 Minutes

Rating: R for General Crudeness and Casual Backstage Drug Use, and One Unsolicited Private Release

Release Date: September 27, 2024 (Limited Theaters)/Expands October 4 and October 11

What’s It About?: As the prophet declared, “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready, it goes on because it’s 11:30.” While that is a widely accepted maxim in 2024, a few decades ago it was met by the masses with an outpouring of skepticism. According to Saturday Night director Jason Reitman and his co-writer Gil Kenan’s telling, things were so touch-and-go that the first episode of Lorne Michaels’ brainchild barely made it to air in one piece. While the hour-and-a-half that began on the National Broadcasting Company at 11:30 PM Eastern on October 11, 1975 has since been immortalized, the hour-and-a-half that immediately preceded it was also apparently quite the transformative odyssey. And so, Saturday Night‘s log line is quite simple: the real-time chaos that led right up to the birth of one of the most famous TV shows of all time.

What Made an Impression?: Would You Accept a Wolverine in Place of the Truth?: Saturday Night is filled with an unending series of too-perfect coincidences that I don’t really have any interest in fact-checking (at least not in terms of whether or not they make for a worthwhile movie). Like, did John Belushi really refuse to sign his contract until approximately 15 minutes before the cameras started rolling? Surely that must have been sorted out days, if not weeks, earlier? I suppose it’s dramatically true enough, as Belushi was certainly known for being erratic. Some of these stunningly on-the-nose moments are kind of funny, like when Lorne has a sarcastic back-and-forth with a building employee who supposedly thinks that he’s producing Saturday night the night, as opposed to Saturday Night the TV show. But then there are similar incidents that I found myself groaning at, like Milton Berle lecturning everyone he encounters about the way that showbiz really works (although J.K. Simmons does play Uncle Miltie with the just right flavor of stunningly pompous).
Inescapable Iconography: It’s hard to imagine that Saturday Night will be anyone’s introduction to SNL. Even if you don’t watch every new episode like clockwork, you’ve surely encountered some of it through cultural osmosis. But save for a couple of semi-unavoidable bits, the movie mostly avoids the pitfall of simply recreating memes and catchphrases. Nevertheless, it isn’t like this is a completely untold story. The behind-the-scenes foibles have been recounted in numerous outlets on numerous occasions, and the characters are based on quite famous real people, many of whom are still alive. So it’s no surprise that some of these performances are mostly glorified impressions. To be fair, some of them are quite good impressions. Dylan O’Brien in particular captures the singularly rat-a-tat patter of Dan Aykroyd. Others have room to go a little deeper, especially Gabriel LaBelle in the lead, as he effectively captures the harried arrogance and earnestness of attempting to spark a revolution through television. But as good as LaBelle is, I can’t help but look at him and go, “That’s not Lorne Michaels.” It’s close, but not quite. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it is uncanny.
It’s Saturday Night, and You’re Not: I kind of wish that Saturday Night had gone the Weird biopic route, by maintaining some semblance of reality while obviously comedically exaggerating everything else. It certainly would have been in the spirit of a sketch show that has aired plenty of memorable parodies in its own right. Of course, it would be unfair to review it for not being something that it’s not trying to be. But it’s still fun to wonder, “What if?” As it is, we’ve got something that feels like cosplay populated by body snatchers. It’s energetic and loving cosplay, but the thrills are mostly theoretical rather than visceral.

Saturday Night is Recommended If You Like: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Really sticking it to the censors, Bricks

Grade: 3 out of 5 Affiliates