BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The_Film_Cricket With two films, this one and 'In the Company of Men' director Neil LuBute seeks to uncover the truth about the lives of disaffected people who's selfish and brutal cruelty toward one another is brought out of selfishness.What I find so interesting about the characters in YFAN is how selfish they are. They all go for their own impulses without ever looking where they leap. Why are they so smug? Probably because they have no idea what a meaningful relationship is all about. Sex for these people is a weapon and they use it to their advantage We get Ben Stiller as a guy who can't have a relationship because he is too ignorant to notice when he is acting like a jerk. Amy Brennemen plays a jilted housewife who can't seem to escape being treated like an object. Aaron Eckhart is the most pathetic character, a man who is more interested then pleasuring himself then his wife. Nastasia Kinsky plays a woman who seems to drift back and forth between men and women. Catherine Keener is a bisexual woman who wants sex but would appreciate her lover would either leave or just shut up.My favorite performance in the movie is by Jason Patric (yes he can act) as a self-satifyed stud who's cruelty sets most of the action in motion. He has the movie's best moment in which he tells a story from his past that is so intriguing that my friends and I were discussing afterwards if it was really true or not.So why see this movie? For the same reason that 'In the Company of Men' was so intriguing. He presents people unvarnished and imagines what cruel things they do to one another. We are allowed to peer inside their lives. He hits hard at difficult subjects and doesn't back away by giving us a happy ending.

Seltzer Bad acting, bad writing, bad lighting, bad camera work, and lots of fake humping moments. Ugh! I think this is, perhaps, the worst film I've ever seen and that's saying a lot considering that I am a big Roddy McDowall fan which means that I have sat through a lot of schlock in my time waiting him to show up in the many, many bad movies he made during his later career. I wish McDowall had been in this film, at least I would have some excuse for having sat through it besides the fact that the dog was snoozing on my arm so I didn't like to disturb him by searching in the cushions of the couch for the remote control. Can you tell that I'm just typing away trying to get to the 10, (wait, spell it out, that's more characters) ten required lines for an IMDb review when I really said all I had to say about this film in the first two sentences of this review?

Antony-4 I must start by saying that, perhaps, this would have gotten better after the first 40 minutes, but I was saved from further suffering by a scratched DVD. Normally you can hit the chapter skip button and chance losing some continuity, but I don't think it would have mattered. Perhaps the outtakes could be funny, given the rotten, trite dialog. I'm glad I checked this out from the library, because this would have been a terrible date movie.The incredible creepiness of the male characters struck me as the worst aspect of the movie. I got the feeling that they might work up to physical violence. Hopefully not.Not that the women portrayed were much better people, although they did look good, so it was at least worth the second star for that.Needless to say, there wasn't anything funny in this "comedy". We didn't even smile, let alone laugh. Ben's "girlie" glasses were almost funny, but they didn't play it up.Anyway, if you want to see a sad, pathetic movie about sad pathetic people and pretend that it's a comedy, go ahead and borrow this from a library. Just about all libraries would have it, since anyone silly enough to have purchased this wreck would want to get rid of it somehow.

spinnicks If all our relationships are like the ones in this film, we might as well give up. In "Your Friends and Neighbors" we are introduced to a group of upwardly mobile urbanites who run around a lot but haven't learned how to play well with others. Frustrated desire and strained hopefulness shove the characters around as if some socio-sexual Grinch were gumming up their lives. Watching this movie, you may be tempted to ask if this is the way the world turns or if it is merely the way writer-director Neil LaBute likes to pretend it turns. Produced with an abundance of cool, the film strikes an odd balance between surface and structure. By using a naturalistic veneer, LaBute invites us to accept the characters as if they had been lifted straight from the apartment next door. "Wow," we might say, "So this is real life as it is lived by real people in today's world!" Beneath the surface, however, things look different. If you peel back the actors' performances, you may find yourself staring at some carefully skewed scaffolding. You may even conclude that this picture is more the product of the director's artful calculations than of keen observation into the way people live. Of course there's nothing wrong with a director's offering a vision. Most good directors do. And if you like LaBute's work, you probably won't notice him just off-screen, fussing with his blueprints. An example: an important clue to verisimilitude in fiction is the way characters speak. Here they are presented as intelligent young professionals, yet they turn out to be astonishingly inarticulate types who say things like "I just…I don't know what to say…I mean…it just makes me feel…even if you…because…" After a while this dialog comes off like an acting-class exercise, and while the fractured syntax may be central to LaBute's approach, it can get tedious. One exception stands out: Midway through the film, the stutter-speech is interrupted by a remarkable monologue delivered by Jason Patric. Except for this burst of eloquence, however, we find ourselves listening to people who struggle to express themselves as they stumble through days and nights trying and failing to connect with others who are similarly afflicted. (That's the whole point, you say? Well…I mean…it's just…yeah…right.) There are places in this movie where a certain amount of cuteness can be forgiven—as when a patch of dialog recurs several times in the mouths of different characters—and there are other clever touches here and there. But the best reason for watching "Your Friends and Neighbors" is not the director's vision (assuming he has one) but the performances. The six principal actors make the most of their roles, and it is fun to watch a frenetically unfulfilled Ben Stiller, a romantically perplexed Amy Brenneman, a terminally self-satisfied Jason Patric, a mad but sad Catherine Keener, a well-meaning but clueless Aaron Eckhart and an attractively vapid Nastassja Kinsky wander through a maze that—unfortunately for their characters—leads nowhere.