Recommendation: Friends With Kids

Friends With Kids:

Every now and again there's a rom-com in the When Harry Met Sally ilk, which takes it's subject seriously. This is one of them. Two best friends decide to have a kid together realising two things: 1) their friend's with kids have horrible marriages and love and children just might not go together and 2) if they have a kid now, they can continue to date people without the pressure of finding 'the one' before their biological clocks run out.

Almost no one's heard of this movie, but it's one of the nicest written, more tasteful and intelligent rom-coms I've ever seen. Heck, it is the nicest. The main characters are engaging and you're welcomed readily into their lives. The humour is fun and continuous through out, but never slaughters the drama. But best of all is that it's very generous with it's theme, delving deep into the nature of marriage and settling down, and what constitutes a good or bad relationship. 

The Bizarre and Interesting Structure of Judd Apatow's 'Funny People'

Funny People is a Judd Aptow movie about two comedian 'friends' at opposite sides of the career ladder: one just starting out, and one who's peaked and has had as much success as one could have. I don't want to spoil the movie, so I'll try not to, but I will talk about how the movie bookends. If you think that'll spoil, don't continue.

Here's what interesting about this movie: It has a really weird structure, I'm not even sure if it works, but either way, I appreciate it trying something new.

But before getting into that, it's worth noting that this film really plays with some of your expectations. You might go in thinking it was a story about the underdog (the non-famous comedian) and his journey, and how this antagonistic mentor helps him while also creating hilarious situations. But the movie is actually darker than this. It's about comedy and it uses the language of comedy, but it isn't particularly a comedy itself. It's also not a sweet 'buddy movie'. Nor is it even a coming of age story about the young comedian. It's a dark story about the older comedian (played awesomely by Adam Sandler), and his dismal life and his inability to escape that dismal life because of how much he hates himself and acts like a jerk.

You might then have your expectations played with further as you're set up to think that X will be the challenge he rises to, which gets him out of his rut. "OK, no it's not," you then realise. "Y will be the challenge that he rises to that gets him out of his rut, then!" Again it isn't. It's seemingly a movie about a jerk, who you sense is underneath it all a really nice guy, but won't stop f**king himself over by being a jerk, who never gets past it....

...BUT for two tiny scenes at the beginning and the end of the movie, which bookend the film and reveal (as endings and beginnings so often do) what the film is really about. In the first he's a young comedian having what appears to be an incredibly fun time prank calling with his friends. At the end, he approaches the younger comedian with some jokes he's written for him.

Everything in between those two minutes, separated by nearly two hours, has nothing to do with his  dissatisfaction with comedy, or how he's let his love for the craft go, or how he wants to help the kid. It's about completely different problems in his life. But it happens that at the end of the movie, when you see him helping the young comedian, you realise what he needed all along was not any of the things he's spent the movie thinking he needs, he just needs to get back to where he was at the start of the movie when he himself was still young and loved making jokes with people.

It's very rare for a movie that would be about comedy and star Adam Sandler to be thematically so subtle, and play the theme so close to its chest with regards to the structure. I think ultimately all this contributes to why it doesn't work and people largely don't like the movie. But still, that's a very interesting, ballsy way for Aptow to go about getting the movie's closure.

I'm going to give it a break and say 7 out if 10 stars for trying something and being pretty enjoyable to watch.    

Fun with theme and genre: Buffy's existential musical

Buffy essayist Marguerite Krause (yes, there are Buffy essayists) describes the show as using monsters as thin symbolism for the shows true focus: relationships--romantic, platonic, and familial--and how to maintain or ruin them. The common themes in her opinion being: "failure to communicate, lack of trust, [and the] inability to envision or create a viable future".  

Buffy is an unusually good piece of existentialist fiction because, monsters or not, it's actually fairly grounded in what life is like. It just uses a lot of metaphors to get there. And actually one of the funnest metaphors it uses to get there, from a writing perceptive, is the musical episode. 

Easily the most famous existentialist (Nietzshian) slogan is "God is dead," meaning religion is no longer capable of providing spiritual guidance in the modern world. It also works as a great sum up of what existentialism is all about, i.e. the idea that individuals create the meanings in their world, rather than them being defined for them by a deity, authority or so on.

MINOR SPOILERS ('minor' cause, the show *ended* ten years ago, and though a bit of a twist, it's never really played off as one/I don't think takes away any enjoyment from the episodes). For Buffy, 'god is dead' is shown in its own metaphor  Having recently died by throwing herself into a portal, and having her bodyless soul be absorbed into a heaven-like reality, Buffy fails to come to terms with the pains of being alive again. Life's problems are persistent, enduring, at times tedious and end abruptly only in death. In the words of Krause, Buffy's 'inability to envision or create a viable future' leaves her apathetic, struggling to find a sense of purpose. 

The musical episode introduces a new metaphor: having something to sing about. The spell cast over the town reduces its peoples to sing and dance when emotions run high, and ends in human combustion if emotions run too high, sating the evil demon.

Having something to sing about in this case represents whether or not Buffy can find some sort of purpose, her big number being called 'Something to Sing about'. This is the fun thing. Ironically she has a lot to sing about, but it's about how she has nothing to sing about, and we the audience watch as she draws to the bitter-sweet conclusion that, though feeling disconnected from life, for exactly that reason she's the embodiment of what is to be alive.

This is nice genre writing because there's a fun juxtaposition here between the 'everything's alright in the end' world view of the musical and the more gritty, existentialist 'there's no grand plan for your life, nothing really matters' world view. Even the very bittersweet, Les Miserables (which is heavy on the bitter) is ultimately a musical at heart, and relies on a grand, romanisation of its tragedies. Not that that's a criticism of Les Mis, per sa. But it is cool to have a musical by BTVS, that is so about something real and inappropriate for a musical to deal with, and have it get away with it because of the brilliant way in which the musical is meta. Although its fun as a musical, it is ultimately about how life is not a musical.