"This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a tweet..."

Your Friends Close (2012)
Directed by Jocelyn Kelvin
Written by Brock Wilbur
Starring Jocelyn Kelvin, Brock Wilbur, Kovar McClure, Heather Wood, Laura Nicole Harrison, Blake Silver, Rob Ondarza, Ricky House, Michael Eliopolous, Lisa Renee Foiles, Ramsay Robinson and Yahtzee Croshaw [as well as many others]

[Disclaimer: I know Brock, Jocelyn and some of the other cast members from college. I also read an early draft of the script and served as an extra in a scene or two. That being said, I do not profit from this film, except the sense of pride someone gets from knowing about an awesome thing before other people and knowing the people involved in it]

Video game movies are pretty common at this point. Good video game movies are very very rare. Even rarer are movies that eschew adapting a video game to focusing on the people that make and play video games. Your Friends Close is not Super Mario Brothers or House of the Dead or Tomb Raider. It's not even Tron. It's more like The Bad and the Beautiful or Contempt. It's about awful, backstabbing people who somehow create something, for better or worse. As always, the question is whether that something is worth it.

Becca (Jocelyn Kelvin) and Jason (Brock Wilbur) are two up-and-coming game designers who happen to be married. They've just created a revolutionary new video game called "Your Friends Close" that basically turns the Turing Test into a multi-player strategy game. Users are put into a chatroom and must discover who is a real person and who is a computer. The winner could win anything from a rain forest named for them to a night with a porn star, depending on who the sponsor of the competition is.

Thing is, the game still needs to be developed and tested and Becca and Jason are about to fly to France to work on it. They're throwing a going away party the night before they leave, and they've invited their  best friends (a mix of family, friends, professional rivals, exes, current lovers and colleagues).

And the normal tension, regret and bitterness that crop up at any party are exacerbated by the fact that, just after the party starts, Randall Sconce (Michael Eliopolous), owner of the video game company developing YFC, wants Jason to stay in San Francisco to develop a tie-in TV show for YFC. Which means there's now a slot open for someone to fly to Paris with Becca and develop the game. It's the chance of a life-time, and Jason announces that the attendees are contestants who must convince him to give them the job.

Needless to say, this night will prove to be the end of relationships, maybe even Becca and Jason's.

The first thing to note is that Your Friends Close really understands that what makes a movie (or any story) interesting are interesting and complex characters. The script balances exposition and video game theory with the establishing of relationships and characterization while never breaking a sweat. This movie is extraordinarily quotable (there's a joke about Miles Davis and Secret of Monkey Island that cracks me up each time I think of it), but all the cleverness is in service of the characters and the story. The characters are mostly overly-intellectual nerds who delight in showing off their knowledge and their verbiage, and as the night drags on, it becomes apparent that even they cannot fend off disappointment, fear and despair with clever quips.

The direction by Jocelyn Kelvin (aided by DP Chad Nagel) is lively and restless, following the party from one corner of the house to another in extended Steadicam shots that impart a video game quality to the action. However, Kelvin knows when to pause on a moment, allowing us a tension-filled long take worthy of Rohmer when the story calls for it. Two long conversations between Becca and Kaylee (Jenni Melear), Jason's assistant and possibly his lover, unwind slowly and hypnotically, teasing us with violent resolution of the rivalry at any moment.

Of course, all of the technical skill would be for naught if the actors in front of the camera weren't equally skilled. Brock and Jocelyn each prove a match for their parts, with Brock slowly drawing out the childishness and fear underlying his manipulative ways and Jocelyn possessing a enigmatic and intelligent quality that reminds me of Lena Headey or Anna Karina. The rest of the cast is just as talented, with Blake Silver drawing out the nuances of a beta male trying to will himself into alpha male status, and Heather Anne Wood, as Jason's sister, slowly stripping away the disguise of a good girl with a secret life.  Finally, Yahtzee Croshaw deserves special notice for his voice acting on the titular video game, crafting a mix of charm and malevolence that is utterly entertaining and chilling.

At one point in the movie, Jason talks about how big a jump movies made between the 1920s and the 1930s, from chase scenes and pie fights to meaning and romance, before saying that video games are about to make a similar jump. I can't speak to video games, but I can say that Your Friends Close shows that movies can still develop and advance even in the video game age.

"The men are dressed like children; the kids are dressed like superheroes": GREENBERG

Finally saw GREENBERG last night at one of the last theaters playing it in Chicago. It was a well-done movie, that really mined the awkwardness of situations and the problems of the characters for laughs. It might make you hate people for a little afterwards, however. I wonder how Noah Baumbach can still be so misanthropic after having married a woman like Jennifer Jason Leigh. But considering she is credited on the story, maybe it's like that 30 Rock episode where Tina Fey and a popular, handsome guy who asks her out find they share the same withering misanthropy for the human race (genders reversed, in this case, I assume).*

Tim Brayton (whose wonderful Antagony & Ecstasy I have already added to my blogroll) does a much better dissection of the film qua film than I could. So I'll use this post to address a few points he raises in his review.

Tim doubts that we can really like Ben Stiller's title character, that we can really only feel sorry for him. And yes, I mostly agree. Roger Greenberg is excellent at sucker-punching everyone when they let their guard down. There's a rather brilliant moment where, one second after he finally says something nice to his best (perhaps only) friend (played by Rhys Ifans)**, he asks for Ifans to tell him every criticism he's heard about Roger.

The thing is, I had a hard time not feeling empathy (which is a little deeper than pity) for Roger at a few moments. One of them was when his brother starts ripping him apart over the phone because the dog got sick  while Roger is house-sitting. His brother lays into him in such a way to suggest a person pissed off at an incredibly bad employee, not your flesh-and-blood. His brother laments the fact that his dog is sick and he can't be there because he's on vacation. He's not concerned about Roger, who was just released from a mental institution and has been abandoned in an empty house while his family is a country away... by their OWN CHOICE! Which might be an understandable reaction to Roger, but still, to feel less loved than your family dog would really, truly suck.

The other moment was towards the end, when Ifan's character calls Roger on all his shit, including ruining their band's one shot at a career. And Roger says that he knows he screwed it all up, but he never thought the whole band was going to make the call based on HIS decision. He made a really bad decision, that he didn't know the scope of when he was just out of college, and he's been carrying around the blame for that ever since.

As for what GREENBERG's about,  I think it's as much a state of the union and/or eulogy for Generation X as a character study. The casting of Ben Stiller certainly plays into this, given his own significant role as filmic stand-in for Gen Xers (Reality Bites, the Ben Stiller Show, etc.). Greenberg's attitudes towards authenticity & irony, his use of comedy to tear apart other people, his own self-seriousness in contrast to his mocking views of everyone else, all seem very specific (though not exclusive) to Generation X. He's even lived out the rejectionist ethos that Chuck Klosterman identified in his essay on Empire Strikes Back, which he suggests represented every X-ers' desire to not become their parents. Unfortunately, living that life out sucks.

And notice his fear of kids and young adults throughout the films, especially his epic monologue at the party his step-niece throws, about how kids today are better-adjusted and well-trained and that makes them vicious to people like him. And given the way his step-niece and her peers treat him like some sort of amusing pet, who they overindulge unhealthily as much as they do the dog, only to get annoyed at the consequences, it's hard not to sympathize with Greenberg's point-of-view at least a little. Of course, a human should have more agency than a dog, but... well... Baumbach's not really interested in the "should'ves".

I know that doesn't quite say what Noah's message is, but there is something a little more than character study here. How else to explain the apocalyptic/epiphanic tones of Greenberg, walking in darkness after seeing laughing, impressed young adults fishing the drowned rat/skunk (?) out of the pool...

*Do not take that as a dig at Noah Baumbach. I just have an extremely high opinion of Jennifer Jason Leigh.
** If there is a character who symbolizes for this movie what people should be like, it's probably Ifans' character, who is subjected to so much hurt, but never glories in it the way Greenberg does. He's a better friend than most of us deserve, but he's able to stand up for himself when he realizes things aren't going to change. This might not be any kind of ideal, but he's probably the only person in the movie you'd want to hang around with in real life for any extended period of time.