For an independently produced comedy that mostly revolves around adults talking to each other — sometimes with child accessories — in varying degrees of inebriation, Friends with Kids is finding a modest amount of success. It’s not perfect, but somehow it manages to be funny without any accidental drug trips, grandmas shooting guns at the dinner table, or Tom Cruise rescuing Cameron Diaz from a crashing plane. Writer-director-co-star Jennifer Westfeldt has returned us a bit to the days of comedies of manners, instead of the awful dichotomy between shrill “romantic” comedy and Apatovian gross-out comedy where Hollywood seems stuck these days. In that spirit, here are four lessons future adult comedies should take from Friends with Kids.
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Stephanie Zacharek's review pretty much confirmed this, but! For the record, Dear Consumer: "The advertisements emphasize the Bridesmaids pseudo-reunion, making it look like it's a rollicking comedic romp with Kristen Wiig, Jon Hamm, Maya Rudolph, and Chris O'Dowd all just giggling and making silly faces. [...] Those four, the Bridesmaids folk, they really don't have much to do other than pop in every 20 minutes or so to comment on the action, a sort of Greek chorus surrounding our two heroes. It's also worth noting that none of them is actually funny, by design. You know that scene you've seen the commercial where Wiig and Hamm sneak out of the restaurant bathroom, post coitus? That's in the first five minutes of the movie, right before a 'Four Years Later' insert. Wiig spends the rest of the film crying into various glasses of wine while Hamm yells at her. It's a real laugh riot." [Deadspin]
Jennifer Westfeldt's sort-of romantic comedy Friends with Kids is on to something, even if in the end it suffers from a failure of nerve. This is actor and screenwriter Westfeldt's directorial debut (she co-wrote and starred in the 2001 feature Kissing Jessica Stein), and it's polished to the point of shallow glossiness -- it could benefit from being a little rougher, a little messier.
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It's that time again -- time for actors and filmmakers to cross their fingers, for studios and distributors to get out their checkbooks, for bleary-eyed audiences to get their running shoes on, and for all of them to meet up north for the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. As always, their confluence will yield a handful of big-screen surprises, some bitter disappointments, and the usual all-night wheeling and dealing for the best of the fall crop premiering in the week ahead.* Per annual TIFF custom, let's have a browse through the catalog (and a listen to the buzz) at five particular titles you should expect to hear about early and often.
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