Kulcha

I was bouncing around on IMDB one day adding movies to my “seen this” and “gotta see this” lists. Somehow I got to Nurse Betty (seen this) and Neil LaBute (director) and his two early films. Both “In The Company of Men” and “Your Friends and Neighbors” (not seen this) sounded at the time like cynical cultural portraits that I just didn’t need to see. Maybe I was projecting. Maybe I was living it already. Whatever. The late ’90s had so much else going on - and it felt good to dismiss them, I love feeling superior to filmmakers. They can be so wrong in such a big way. And I’m just a guy without an audience sitting in his pajamas, typing on his blog, wondering what to have for breakfast.

So anyway, then I followed a link in their list of reviews for “Your Friends” and got to a rather lengthy (500 words?) review by Roger Ebert. And I just wanted to post a little bit of that for you here… This is the kind of review I like, full of analysis, context and humor.

This first quote sums up the review…  “The other day I spent a long time looking at the penguins in the Shedd Aquarium. Every once in a while two of them would square off into a squawking fit over which rock they were entitled to stand on. Big deal. Meanwhile, they’re helpless captives inside a system that has cut them off from their full natures, and they don’t even know it. Same thing in this movie.”

But eventually Roger goes to work: “LaBute, who writes and directs, is an intriguing new talent. His emphasis is on writing: As a director, he is functional, straightforward and uncluttered. As a writer, he composes dialogue that can be funny, heartless and satirical, all at once…” And more, “LaBute deliberately isolates these characters from identification with any particular city, so we can’t categorize them and distance ourselves  … It’s the kind of date movie that makes you want to go home alone. ”

Yeah!