They Came Together (2014)
Directed by David Wain
Written by David Wain & Michael Showalter
83 min.
You don’t need a review from me of They Came Together—it’s great, it’s hilarious, go watch it. I saw it two nights ago and I plan to see it again pretty soon. It’s just too damn good.
Surprisingly, it has a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes. I don’t mean that I was expecting it to have a higher rating—quite the opposite, since some of the cleverest and most subversive comedies of the last twenty years have very low ratings: Freddy Got Fingered, MacGruber, Hell Baby, The Brothers Solomon, The Goods, The Wrong Guy, Reno 911: Miami, Nacho Libre, even Step Brothers. The list goes on—those were just ones off the top of my head. Oh, and toss two of David Wain’s previous films on that list too, while you’re at it: Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten.
The culprit seems to be that most critics don’t try and understand comedies like they do dramas. It doesn’t occur to them that maybe the reason they’re not laughing isn’t because the jokes aren’t funny, but because they don’t get them. These hypocrites don’t see their own sense of humor as a brain muscle in need of toning, whereas they’ll spend their whole lives consciously strengthening their understanding of ‘mise en scéne’ or ‘auteurship’ or ‘symoblism’ or ‘dialectics’ or ‘semiotics’ or whatever.
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