![\"theycame\"](\"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/theycame.jpg\")
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They Came Together<\/a> (2014) You don\u2019t need a review from me of They Came Together\u2014it\u2019s great, it\u2019s hilarious, go watch it. I saw it two nights ago and I plan to see it again pretty soon. It\u2019s just too damn good.<\/span><\/p>\n Surprisingly, it has a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes. I don\u2019t mean that I was expecting it to have a higher rating\u2014quite the opposite, since some of the cleverest and most subversive comedies of the last twenty years have very low ratings: Freddy Got Fingered<\/a>, MacGruber<\/a>, Hell Baby<\/a>, The Brothers Solomon<\/a>, The Goods<\/a>, The Wrong Guy<\/a>, Reno 911: Miami<\/a>, Nacho Libre<\/a>, even Step Brothers<\/a>. The list goes on\u2014those were just ones off the top of my head. Oh, and toss two of David Wain\u2019s previous films on that list too, while you\u2019re at it: Wet Hot American Summer<\/a> and The Ten<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n The culprit seems to be that most critics don\u2019t try and understand comedies like they do dramas. It doesn\u2019t occur to them that maybe the reason they\u2019re not laughing isn\u2019t because the jokes aren\u2019t funny, but because they don\u2019t get them. These hypocrites don\u2019t see their own sense of humor as a brain muscle in need of toning, whereas they\u2019ll spend their whole lives consciously strengthening their understanding of \u2018mise en sc\u00e9ne\u2019 or \u2018auteurship\u2019 or \u2018symoblism\u2019 or \u2018dialectics\u2019 or \u2018semiotics\u2019 or whatever.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Comedy is a genre like any other, with myriad rules and ways of breaking said rules in interesting and clever ways\u2014to dismiss it arbitrarily as best appreciated in a pass\/fail, knee-jerk way makes no sense. Yes, in the moment you either laugh or you don\u2019t laugh, but you can educate your comedic palate by, over time, exposing yourself to its many styles and approaches. But few critics do that\u2014and worse, they often see themselves as above the comedy they\u2019re judging, as though not liking it makes them superior.<\/span><\/p>\n Basically, these people don\u2019t realize how dumb they come off, trying to seem mature and smart.<\/span><\/p>\n Take, for instance, Christie Lemire of RogerEbert.com\u2019s review of They Came Together<\/a>. She clearly has no interest in understanding something she doesn\u2019t immediately understand\u2014if it\u2019s comedy, at least. (Who knows if she takes this same approach with all genres. I hope not.)<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThey Came Together\u201d means to make fun of romantic comedies the way “Airplane!” goofed on disaster movies and the “Naked Gun” films spoofed detective flicks. The result is actually more in line with Gus Van Sant<\/span><\/a>\u2019s ambitious but ill-advised shot-for-shot remake of “Psycho.” \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I\u2019ll let it slide that she doesn\u2019t understand that The Naked Gun<\/a> (and Police Squad!<\/a>, the show it was based on) is a spoof of police procedurals, not \u2018detective flicks\u2019. That\u2019s a nitpick that would only bug me.<\/span><\/p>\n What I can\u2019t let slide is her comparison to Van Sant\u2019s Psycho<\/a>, which makes no sense whatsoever\u2014They Came Together is not a shot-by-shot remake of a romantic comedy, nor is it a remake of one. I don\u2019t know why she didn\u2019t just compare it to Date Movie<\/a> or Meet the Spartans<\/a> or something, if she wanted to make fun of it. To choose Psycho just seems weird.<\/span><\/p>\n Director and co-writer David Wain<\/span><\/a> and his usual band of comic pals essentially have made a straight-up romantic comedy. Certainly this could not have been the plan.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Why<\/i> couldn\u2019t this have been the plan? Does she really think they up and made a film that functions as a romantic comedy by mistake?<\/i> It\u2019s clear they deliberately structured the film to hit all the rom-com beats they needed to hit, even peppering in genuine feel-good moments here and there, to give the experience depth. In other words, they made an actual movie. Why is this a bad thing?<\/span><\/p>\n I sort of get what she meant by her Psycho comparison now\u2014I guess she means that they set out to make fun of rom-coms, but accidentally made one instead? That\u2019s not true though, they did both\u2014the structure is that of a rom-com, and the content is full of jokes and self-referential bits and this that and the other. It\u2019s just not an accurate comparison.<\/span><\/p>\n Wain and co-writer Michael Showalter<\/span><\/a>, who gave teenage sex comedies similar (and superior) treatment in 2001\u2019s “Wet Hot American Summer<\/span><\/a>,” obviously intend to parody the clich\u00e9s and formulas that make so many films in the genre seem so interchangeable.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s got all the moments and beats you\u2019d expect\u2014the meet-cute, the instant hatred that turns to flirtation, the perky montage of trying on clothes, the contrived misunderstanding that keeps the couple apart and finally\u2014mercifully\u2014the mad dash to a wedding for some very public, last-minute I-love-yous. But simply recreating what we know to be hackneyed and safe doesn\u2019t suddenly make it hilarious and surprising. There has to be a spin to it; there has to be some innovation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There is<\/i> a spin to it, there is<\/i> innovation. Almost every line in this movie is a joke of some sort, and lots of interesting and unique things are done. I can’t name one film quite like it, even another spoof movie. It’s a snowflake, whether she wants to admit it or not.<\/span><\/p>\n Anyone who has seen a movie starring Julia Roberts<\/span><\/a>, Jennifer Aniston<\/span><\/a> or Kate Hudson<\/span><\/a> can recognize what\u2019s going on and find a chuckle here and there. But mostly, the results are shockingly unfunny and sadly lifeless, especially given the wealth of comic talent involved.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n What the fuck does \u2018shockingly unfunny\u2019 mean? If something is shockingly unfunny, isn\u2019t it then kinda funny in its shocking unfunniness? Why would she assume a shockingly unfunny joke is simply a mistake left in the film by the filmmakers out of laziness, rather than a deliberate joke about the shocking unfunniness of the line?<\/span><\/p>\n Paul Rudd<\/a><\/span> and Amy Poehler<\/span><\/a> star as the Tom Hanks<\/span><\/a>\/Meg Ryan<\/span><\/a> types at the film\u2019s center, recounting how they met and fell in love over dinner with an underused Bill Hader<\/span><\/a> and Ellie Kemper<\/span><\/a>. The latter couple is meant to serve as our stand-ins, trying to remain politely charmed by the increasingly inane details they\u2019re hearing in extended flashbacks.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Underused? They\u2019re in the entire movie, and they have many funny moments. Also, they\u2019re only slightly meant to be our stand-ins\u2014mostly, they deviate from that, and have their own personalities and things to add. Clearly she forgot those moments, or wasn\u2019t paying attention to them.<\/span><\/p>\n The core of the plot plays like a knowingly cutesy version of “You\u2019ve Got Mail,” but “They Came Together” also features recognizable rom-com nuggets ranging from “Pillow Talk” to “When Harry Met Sally…” Rudd\u2019s Joel works for a giant, soulless candy corporation. Poehler\u2019s Molly owns a neighborhood candy shop that\u2019s “charming and adorable and impossible not to like,” as she puts it. But wouldn\u2019t you know? Joel\u2019s company is trying to run Molly\u2019s store out of business. Can their affection withstand such stress?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Why are you being sarcastic about a plot the film is equally sarcastic about? Who are you showing yourself to be above here? You\u2019re on the same team as this movie, chill out.<\/span><\/p>\n And so we watch as they show up for a Halloween party dressed in the same costume and immediately clash. (This is also where the film takes a painful, extended detour for a discussion of whether Christopher Meloni<\/span><\/a> soiled himself in his superhero outfit. Spoiler alert: He did.)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Kind of a dick move to spoil a gag not featured in a trailer or anything.<\/span><\/p>\n We watch them fall for each other over books and coffee in an idyllic version of New York City\u2014which is like a character itself in their relationship, we\u2019re told repeatedly, when such a convention should be clear.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u2018Should\u2019? That\u2019s the joke. The joke is in telling us repeatedly\u2014it\u2019s a verbal version of rom-coms going overboard with telling the audience it visually.<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout this familiar process, the jokes are either annoyingly repetitive or overly spelled out for us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Again\u2014that\u2019s the joke.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s obvious what they\u2019re parodying\u2014the rom-com is an incredibly common type of clich\u00e9d film; its tropes are well-known and well-worn. Still, it\u2019s not enough for Molly to be adorably klutzy; the dialogue has to inform us that she\u2019s adorably klutzy in addition to showing her knocking over a bunch of her belongings in her bedroom before tumbling down a flight of stairs on the way to work.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Yep. Funny. Joke. Comedy goes overboard here and there\u2014sometimes even as a commentary on comedy going overboard.<\/p>\n Joel can\u2019t just be commitment-phobic; he has to talk about how commitment-phobic he is with his regular basketball buddies (Ken Marino<\/span><\/a>, Jack McBrayer<\/span><\/a>, Kenan Thompson<\/span><\/a> and Jason Mantzoukas<\/span><\/a>). And those guys can\u2019t just obviously represent different points of view on the matter, they have to articulate the fact that they represent different points of view on the matter.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Is she really not seeing a theme here? An overarching idea that is humorous, of things being spelled out? Wain and Showalter deliberately breaking the old screenwriting adage of \u2018show don\u2019t tell\u2019 in a funny and clever and surreal way?<\/span><\/p>\n One joke went on for so long I thought something was wrong with the film\u2014like it was stuck or something. I won\u2019t bore you with the details here, but it has to do with a bartender uttering the phrases “Tell me about it” and “You can say that again” over and over as Joel drowns his sorrows.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n She\u2019s misremembering this joke in such a way that I wonder if she only half-watched the movie. The parameters of the joke are so specific that I really can\u2019t see how someone could misremember it if they were actually paying attention to the movie\u2014even if you hated the joke, it will stick in your head perfectly.<\/span><\/p>\n “They Came Together” clicks sporadically, though, when it takes a chance on totally absurd flights of fancy\u2014a weird date Molly has with her priggish accountant (Ed Helms<\/span><\/a>), for example, or an awkwardly close moment between Joel and his grandma (Lynn Cohen<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There are absurd flights of fancy throughout the entire movie\u2014hell, every scene. The fact that she zeroed in on these two examples is bizarre to me, especially since that \u201cweird date\u201d doesn\u2019t even stick out to me as weird\u2014especially not in the context of the rest of the film. It\u2019s as though she just liked that scene, but couldn\u2019t figure out a reason why, so decided to just arbitrarily call it weird\u2014just like she arbitrarily calls Ed Helms\u2019 character priggish. Pretty sure she only used that word to sound smart, because it doesn\u2019t even describe his character accurately.<\/span><\/p>\n Even at 83 minutes, “They Came Together” feels like its conceit has been stretched thin. But a lot of these folks (Wain, Showalter, Marino, Erinn Haynes) are also involved with the series “Children\u2019s Hospital” on the Cartoon Network\u2019s Adult Swim lineup, which sharply parodies the soapy doctor drama. Those episodes last just 15 minutes\u2014which is probably just the right amount of time for such scattered, sketch-based laughs.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Earlier in the review, she says the film is bad because the filmmakers accidentally made a film that is a \u201cstraight-up romantic comedy\u201d. That\u2019s an acknowledgment that it does work as a movie, structurally\u2014so much so that it\u2019s to a fault, in her eyes. But now, in her conclusion, she says it doesn\u2019t work, because it\u2019s too sketchy and scattered. Which is it? They\u2019re polar opposite complaints. Either it\u2019s well structured or it’s not well structured\u2014it can\u2019t be both.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s the end of her review. She gave the film 1 1\/2 stars. If this review had been for a deep, serious film, people would be calling her out for not doing her job, and not at least trying to engage with the film and understand it. But, because it\u2019s a comedy, she will get a pass.<\/span><\/p>\n I used to think that porn was the whipping boy genre of film, but now I\u2019m starting to think comedy is as well. Step your game up, critics\u2014you can and should do better. I mean aren\u2019t you supposed to like,\u00a0like<\/i> film, and want to explore all that it has to offer? It\u2019s not like I\u2019m asking you to watch XXX films by the great Mario Salieri and study his ingenious compositions and cuts\u2014I know you\u2019re too immature\u00a0to be able to do that. I\u2019m merely asking you to try and understand a comedic filmmaker\u2019s perspective and auteurship who isn\u2019t Keaton or Chaplin or Woody Allen or W.C. Fields or The Marx Brothers. David Wain is probably the best we\u2019ve got right now, and it\u2019d be shame if you only started to allow yourself to realize that 30 years from now.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They Came Together<\/a> (2014) You don\u2019t need a review from me of They Came Together\u2014it\u2019s great, it\u2019s hilarious, go watch it. I saw it two nights ago and I plan to see it again pretty soon. It\u2019s just too damn good.<\/span><\/p>\n Surprisingly, it has a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes. I don\u2019t mean that I was expecting it to have a higher rating\u2014quite the opposite, since some of the cleverest and most subversive comedies of the last twenty years have very low ratings: Freddy Got Fingered<\/a>, MacGruber<\/a>, Hell Baby<\/a>, The Brothers Solomon<\/a>, The Goods<\/a>, The Wrong Guy<\/a>, Reno 911: Miami<\/a>, Nacho Libre<\/a>, even Step Brothers<\/a>. The list goes on\u2014those were just ones off the top of my head. Oh, and toss two of David Wain\u2019s previous films on that list too, while you\u2019re at it: Wet Hot American Summer<\/a> and The Ten<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n The culprit seems to be that most critics don\u2019t try and understand comedies like they do dramas. It doesn\u2019t occur to them that maybe the reason they\u2019re not laughing isn\u2019t because the jokes aren\u2019t funny, but because they don\u2019t get them. These hypocrites don\u2019t see their own sense of humor as a brain muscle in need of toning, whereas they\u2019ll spend their whole lives consciously strengthening their understanding of \u2018mise en sc\u00e9ne\u2019 or \u2018auteurship\u2019 or \u2018symoblism\u2019 or \u2018dialectics\u2019 or \u2018semiotics\u2019 or whatever.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-codysreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5358"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5366,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5358\/revisions\/5366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/b>Directed by David Wain
\nWritten by David Wain & Michael Showalter
\n83 min.<\/p>\n\n
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<\/p>\n
\n<\/b>Directed by David Wain
\nWritten by David Wain & Michael Showalter
\n83 min.<\/p>\n