'Together Together' Brings New Life to the Rom-Com Genre
#131: "Together Together," "Army of the Dead," "48 Hrs.," "Friends: The Reunion"
Edition 131:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: One of my favorites from Sundance came out this week, and you’re not going to want to miss it. But feel free to skip Zack Snyder’s new Netflix joint, Bill Simmons’ all-time favorite movie, and the “Friends” reunion special. This week’s “Trailer Watch” has me as hyped for any movie that’s going to come out this year.
Together Together
(Available premium on-demand, for $7 on Apple, Amazon or wherever you rent digital movies)
It’s 2021, and by now everyone who’s going to see Together Together is going to know all the tropes of the romantic comedy genre by heart. The meet cute, the comedic best friend, the romantic speech. We’ve seen them dozens of times. At this point we think we’ve seen it all.
But let me ask you this, have you ever seen a platonic rom-com? There have been movies where protagonists choose friends over romance, sure, but I can’t think of one where the primary relationship is focused on two people coming together…as friends.
Such is the case here, when a man approaching middle age feels he’s ready to take on parenthood even though he doesn’t have a significant other. So he hires a total stranger as his surrogate, and their two messy lives get tangled up. It’s sort of like Knocked Up, except with a lot more heart and maturity.
It speaks to how engrained those rom-com tropes are in us that I was expecting, even rooting for these people to fall in love, despite the fact that it made no sense (age gap, nothing in common, different life goals) and actually would’ve ruined the movie. But I still l wanted it!
That desire speaks to the incredible chemistry between the two perfectly cast leads. Nobody plays a wholesome, naive middle aged man better than Ed Helms, though his character here is quite a bit more sincere than Andy from “The Office.” He just totally clicks on screen with surrogate Patti Harrison, a hilarious newcomer who has the kind of presence and timing that indicates a long career in comedy is forthcoming.
Harrison was one of the breakout stars of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where I first saw this movie. To the best of my or anyone’s knowledge, she’s the first transgender actor to play a completely cis-gender lead in a romantic comedy (and if you didn’t know, as I didn’t when I first saw the movie, you wouldn’t be able to tell). She gives a great performance and was making everyone crack up in all of the panel discussions she was on. In my post-Sudance recap I said I’d “eat my laptop” if she wasn’t the star of a studio comedy in the next 5 years.
The movie goes out of its way to confront each of those rom-com tropes from different angles, some parallel (Julio Torres plays a best friend whose interactions with Harrison will have you cracking up), some obliquely (the “break up” is painfully but for different reasons) and some head on (a big speech that’s not professing love).
It’s rare that any rom-com is willing to present the imperfect, jagged edges of life in a raw, unfiltered way and also embrace the corny, sentimental moments that arise in any transformative emotional experience.
The movie is silly, it’s sweet, and it’s deeply human. It fulfills the perfect stereotype of a “Sundance movie,” the type of thing that comes out a festival with high praise and then gets buried beneath the budgets of weekly studio releases. Very few people see them.
Don’t let that happen to you! The movie is available now to rent for a couple bucks, and will at the very least warm your heart. Who doesn’t want that!
Something New
Army of the Dead (Netflix): In a recent YouTube video, the Honest Trailers team made a keen observation about Zack Snyder: he makes feature-length movie trailers. Think about it. Exaggerated lighting, frequent slow motion, over dramatizing every single moment? Yep, it checks out. So I didn’t hate the idea of Synder loosening up and applying his style to a knowingly ridiculous premise like this one — Las Vegas has been overrun by zombies and walled off, but a team of misfits has to break in and steal $200 million from a casino vault before the government drops a nuke on the town.
The problem here is that Synder is apparently incapable of making a smirking, wink-at-the-audience action comedy. So he ends up taking this insane concept as seriously as those damn "mother boxes” from Justice League. He presents, in all seriousness, a tearjerker father-daughter plotline, a zombie boyfriend-girlfriend element, a police brutality angle, and a nature preservation thing into a movie that we all just clicked on to see some headshots (don’t worry, there are plenty of headshots).
In classic Synder fashion, the movie is unnecessarily long (two and a half hours!), but thankfully this time he spared us from the black and white and 4:3 ratio. And listen, it’s not his fault that he had to digitally erase one member of the cast who (rightly) got “cancelled” during post-production, then green screen in an entirely different actor, but wow is it painfully obvious. Still, a big dumb zombie movie on Netflix? What are you waiting for.
Something Old
48 Hrs. (1982, Amazon Prime): It’s hard to think of a movie that has aged more poorly since its release than this cops-n-robbers two-hander starring pre-gravel-voice Nick Nolte and a 20-year-old Eddie Murphy. Most of its intended comedy and drama comes as a result of racism, sexism and police brutality presented so casually it’s shocking for a movie that came out less than 40 years ago (or I guess it’s not that shocking, which is sad).
It’s been on my radar for years because sportswriter-turned-shockjock Bill Simmons says its his favorite movie ever, which I now find to be an…interesting choice. What’s even more apparent is that this movie is a time capsule of an era before audiences (and filmmakers) had really been educated on hours and hours of movies, TV shows and true crime docs about police and criminal procedure, so you could get away with some truly terrible police work (and even more idiotic criminal behavior). Young Eddie Murphy is electric, but you can find a handful of better choices to watch if that’s what you’re looking for.
Something to Stream
Friends: The Reunion (HBO Max): To me, the mega hit sitcom “Friends” is a lot like popcorn. It’s just empty calories, a snackable indulgence you consume without needing to pay much attention to and receive moderate enjoyment from (I’ve never met anyone whose FAVORITE food is popcorn, and I used to live in Indiana). I’d argue that you’d become attached to ANY set of characters if you watched 236 episodes about their lives, but if you’re one of those people who would take a bullet for Ross, Rachel and the gang then you probably already know about the two-hour reunion special that just dropped on HBO Max. It features interviews, table reads of classic moments, trivia, Lady Gaga at one point singing that Phoebe song about the cat, and whatever other nostalgia they can conjure up to maintain what has quite literally become a $1 billion per year ecosystem. That should be (emphasis on should) enough money to pay for all the face pulls and botox I’m seeing from the aging cast members.
Trailer Watch: Last Night in Soho
It doesn’t matter how many movie trailers I’ve seen in my life, I still get that electric shock of excitement when a really good one drops. This one did it for me, another of those highly anticipated movies held on the shelf for the past year. With an October release date it’s clear the team behind it has serious awards ambitions, and I’m expecting mass commercial appeal as well in that Halloween window.
Director Edgar Wright is known as one of the most reliably entertaining filmmakers working today — Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead — but here it looks like he’s mixing in horror, suspense, noir and psychological elements set against an absolutely stunning, neon-lit cityscape. Anya Taylor-Joy continues her unstoppable ascent to A-list status leading this relatively unknown cast, and whoever did the lighting and set design here needs to begin polishing up their acceptance speech now.