With Friends Like These...

Let's talk about We Are Your Friends, a dance-music-fueled, millennial-targeted bro-movie that totally bombed at the box office when it was released last August. (For the record, it slowly recouped its costs and actually ended up making a small profit, but when it debuted the silence surrounding We Are Your Friends was deafening.)

Zac in a tank. He spends most of the movie in a tank.

First off, I don't think I understand Zac Efron movies. Now, I watch all of them (or at least most of them – I can find nothing to justify pressing play on Bad Grandpa), but I sort of fail to understand who the intended audience of these pictures actually is. First off, let's just say that I think Zac is a good enough actor, who does a decent job in all of his movies. He doesn't read as false to me, and I think he has great moments in all of his movies. But, who are these movies for? Efron is gorgeous, and he's nearly naked in like every movie, so I assume that these movies are for me or other gay men who want to look at Zac's body. I might think that they're for women (who one might want to assume want to look at Zac's body), but then the movies all appear to be aimed at young men. This movie, for example, is all about a young boy's dreams and all that, and is filled with topless strippers and bros in the San Fernando Valley doing drugs and playing chicken with topless young women in their pool. #squadgoals

...but this is what the movie is selling.

My point is that I am not sure that these films of Mr. Efron's have a target audience. I knew who was supposed to go see Charlie St. Cloud and New Year's Eve and The Lucky One and 17 Again. Even That Awkward Moment was clearly a romantic comedy where the three boys at its center learn to be in love and leave behind their silly singlehood. But for whom was We Are Your Friends made? Nerdy guys, I guess, who are supposed to want to be Zac Efron. I don't really think that's such a bad idea, I just don't think Efron's the right guy for that. He's just too... gorgeous.

Truth be told, We Are Your Friends isn't really that bad. And don't judge me too harshly. Even the Hollywood Reporter called it "surprisingly winning". Early on I thought Max Joseph was going to be doing something cool. There's a very fun sequence where Zac does PCP and hallucinates at an art gallery opening and the whole thing gets animated à la Richard Linklater's Waking Life. It's really fun.

But the film has two other little formal conventions that it does sporadically that both totally suck. Both are from YouTube. One involves putting the text of the film in giant capital letters onscreen as a character (in this case Jon Bernthal's version of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross) talks. It's designed like a lyric video to, say, Cee-Lo Green's "Fuck You". The other involves illustrating an educational sequence about the science of the desire to dance using tiny clips from stock footage to explain how, say, the heart beats and where the impulse to dance comes from, and how many beats per minute Reggae and House and Hardcore each has. Am I watching a movie or a YouTube video by ASAPscience?

The title We Are Your Friends, by the way, relates to one of the film's subplots, which is about the housing market crisis in the U.S. and the way that assholes come in and make money off of poor people who are trying to make their mortgage payments but who have gotten foreclosure notices. Zac works for a little while as a cold-caller, pretending to be peoples' friend in order to get them to sign over their houses to his slimeball boss (the aforementioned Bernthal).

Still, there's the EDM, and it's mostly all good. The film has great dance track after great dance track in it, and I enjoyed them all. The narrative is super conventional and totally predictable and not at all interesting, but the beats are good, and Zac is dynamic.

The message of the film, though, is pretty awful, and I can sum this up by describing a single sequence near the very end of the third act. Wes Bentley, who is Zac's mentor for the whole movie, has been telling Zac he needs to make electronic music organically, man (which is, like, soooo Los Angeles, but let's let that go). And Zac is beating himself up about the girl that he lost and the friend that he lost, and he's listening to little recordings he made of each of them on his phone and then he goes for a run in the Valley. Shot of Zac running while listening to his headphones. He runs past a place with a ton of electric wires. He runs past a house. He runs past a whole bunch of trees. Then his internet goes out (or something?) and he no longer has any music to listen to. Zac is mad. But now he runs back past the trees, past the house, past the electric wires. And now instead of dance music we hear birds in the trees, and the sound of a lawnmower. We hear electricity hum. We hear a wind chime hanging from the house's front porch. Some serious John Cage shit, right? If you stop listening to the music you start to hear the music that is actually around you all the time. And if you listen correctly this is music. So this is the message. Well, no, this is the first half of the message.

Zac's listening to his heart. What are YOU listening to?

What you do now, if you're Zac and you're in this movie, is that you take all of those things that you were ignoring, those real-world sounds that make up who you are and where you're from and what you bring to this world, and you record all of those sounds, and you mix them up, and you make them into a really badass dance track that other people love and will pay a lot of money to listen to. You transform those sounds from the real world back into music. Actually not so John Cage, after all. (All props to Pyramid, who did the songs, though. They are so good.) The message of the film – and someone literally says all of this at the end of the movie – is that the thing that we all need to do is figure out what it is that makes each of us into us and then share that with the world and hope that a lot of people like it. This is, in fact, the reality-television dream: I know I have something special to share with the world because I am special. I hope everyone will notice and give me lots of dollars. This is also quintessentially a story of capitalism as immanent. What everyone in this movie is really looking for is a way to transform themselves into something that can make a ton of money: I will actually have figured out who I am when whatever that is is loved by many people and making me a lot of cash. The lie of We Are Your Friends is that the way to do that is to "be true to yourself". This is the ostensible message of the film, but this is ideological bullshit. What the film really has to say is exactly the opposite: What We Are Your Friends firmly believes is that you can only finally know if you've been true to yourself... if people are throwing money at you.

Teddy Bears and Fantasies

Ted is an interesting little movie, although I think it is more interesting to talk about than it is to watch. I must confess to not liking Seth MacFarlane's debut film very much.

Now, I know Ted is a nostalgic fantasy movie that is more than a little preoccupied with the 1980s and what it means to have grown up in that decade, and I know that because of this I probably should have liked the movie, but the truth is, I just didn't believe it.

But there's a talking teddy bear that has come to life, you'll say, you'd have to be crazy to believe it. The thing, however, that I didn't believe is that Mila Kunis could ever have spent four years – and want to spend any more – with a guy like the main character in this movie (played, with his usual, admirable pluck, by Mark Wahlberg).

But honestly. This is a completely predictable movie about a grown man who refuses to be an adult. In case you've missed all of them, this is also the subject of each and every one of Judd Apatow's movies, and numerous other films – the Zac Efron vehicle 17 Again comes instantly to mind. The thing that is different about Ted is that instead of the usual bevy of friends who are bad influences (often played by Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, etc.) Wahlberg's John Bennett has only one bad-influence amigo and that's his childhood teddy bear, who has come magically to life, smokes a lot of pot, throws an amazing party, knows a ton of celebrities, and has sex with hookers.

What Ted is really about is the nostalgia that men in their thirties feel for having had to give up all of this fun in order to have a job, pay the rent, keep their girlfriends happy, and stay out of county lock-up. Ted traffics in the destruction of all of these societal rules. Instead of being the responsible adult his girlfriend wishes him to be, John screws up again and again, and all because of Teddy. Teddy (it's a little obvious, so forgive me) is a symbol for this inner adolescent that John's girlfriend is asking him to give up.

But that's not how Ted is framed. Instead, the filmmakers treat the image of a man giving up on adolescence as equivalent to a man being forced to give up his best friend. The girlfriend is asking him to do something that really ought not to be done. She is asking him to choose between his best friend and her. It's a win-lose situation, and in typical bros-before-hoes fashion, John chooses his friend (and his fun) over the girl he loves.

Ted is a romantic comedy, however, and of the most sentimental variety. So in the end, John gets both his friend and the girl. The girlfriend decides that actually she loves him because of his childishness, his indecision, and his lack of ambition and not in spite of those qualities. She decides she'd rather have him, warts and all, than be without him. And this is the part of the tale I just couldn't buy. It's fine for grown men to wax nostalgic about the childhoods they gave up when they got their day-jobs; it's fine for us to miss the good old days when we could sleep until eleven and then wake up and smoke pot and play video games for the rest of the day; I also think it's fine (admirable even) to attempt to relive those glory days of youth – be that by taking long vacations with lots of drinking or by quitting those day-jobs and going off to live a life off the grid.

But you can't also expect to get the girl.

To give John the girl at the end is a fantasy I just can't believe in the least. You can wish to relive your college years but you can't also wish to have a beautiful grown woman with a career on your arm while you do it. Pardon me, but grow up.

One last thing: Giovanni Ribisi is in this movie and he's great. The film thinks of him primarily as a kind of cartoon character, but Ribisi fleshes him out and makes him into a total weirdo. I loved him.

Nicholas Sparks & Zac Efron

I have, until last night, been able completely to avoid films based on Nicholas Sparks novels. This has become a miniature point of pride for me. Girls I know look at me aghast. You haven't seen The Notebook??? they yell, indignant. How is it possible that you haven't seen The Notebook? Well, I haven't. I have also skipped Message in a Bottle, Nights in Rodanthe, A Walk to Remember, The Last Song, and Dear John. I say No Thanks to Mr. Sparks' particular brand of heteronormative schmaltz and his refusal to call the books he writes "romance novels". Mr. Sparks writes what he calls "fiction", and we are allegedly fools for placing his work within so debased a genre as the romance novel, even though his books are just as formulaic as Jackie Collins'. In a much-quoted and ludicrous interview in USA Today he compared himself to Shakespeare, Austen, and Hemingway, and then called Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian "the most pulpy, overwrought, melodramatic cowboy vs. Indians story ever written".

Okay.

On the other hand...

I like Zac Efron. There. I said it. And I try to see all of his movies. Now, I mostly think these movies are awful, but I always like Zac in them. There is something unapologetically earnest about his work, the way he truly works at his acting without ever phoning it in (like, say, Orlando Bloom or Ashton Kutcher sometimes do). Aside from all this, I honestly think Zac is pretty good. He gets at something – a kind of bro-truth, perhaps – for which I think our society often aims. So far I've been charmed by Zac in High School Musical (1, 2 and 3), found him adorable in Hairspray, thought he acquitted himself well in Me and Orson Welles, and watched both of his Burr Steers movies (17 Again was cute and clever; Charlie St. Cloud was absurd and overly sentimental). I admit that I probably shouldn't have seen Charlie St. Cloud in the theatre, but, well, Zac is just so pretty. I know that's not really an excuse but it's all I've got. The boy is not my type at all, but he's beautiful.

Which leads me to the point where I rent The Lucky One, the new film by Scott Hicks (who you might remember made the Oscar-nominated Shine in 1996), which stars Zac Efron and is based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks.

And it is every single thing you think it is going to be. The Lucky One is exhaustingly formulaic, unabashedly heteronormative, filled with inane dialogue, excruciatingly white, and cloyingly sentimental.

And I sort of liked it. Zac is very good, as usual. The beautiful female lead, Taylor Schilling, is actually delightful and gives a fine performance. There's also Blythe Danner, who wears a knowing, clever smirk throughout the whole film. The actors are honestly doing good work.

That's all I can say for The Lucky One, though. The movie wants you to have feeling after feeling, and for some reason, it treats its audience as though we haven't seen this movie before. The Lucky One is a rehash of every romantic drama you've ever seen that behaves as though it's telling this story for the very first time.

True love. Meant to be. Fate. Blah blah blah. And mostly I just sat there, drank my gin and tonic, and bought it.

If You're Reading This...

...then you probably have no intention of seeing Charlie St. Cloud, the new film by Burr Steers (who also made the Zac Efron starrer 17 Again). And you're probably not going to see the movie for the same reason that I would (under normal circumstances) not have seen this movie, viz. that you are probably a moviegoer with some modicum of good taste.

I have to tell you, though, Zac Efron is just adorable, and I found the pull of Mr. Efron too difficult to resist as my little sister and I purchased tickets to a matinee of Charlie St. Cloud.

To be fair, the movie is awful. It's an exercise in feelings. Like, how many times can we try (and fail) to make our audience cry? It's a total Nicholas Sparks movie with a male central character instead of a female one. Charlie St. Cloud is a young man who has a lot of promise as a sailor but gives up his full ride to Stanford so that he can play catch with his dead brother every afternoon before the sun goes down. In this way he keeps his brother alive (the movie calls this kind of living "the in-between") and his brother really does play catch with him and stuff. So, Charlie isn't crazy, per se, the brother is really there.

Then, see, there's this girl who he falls in love with in about twenty minutes, and she pulls him away from the little boy ("he's dead, Charlie; you have to move on!") and so we have conflict. It's all very sweet.

There are some fun side characters. Augustus Prew is a sort of adorable townie who tries to get Charlie to cheer up. That might be it, actually. Ray Liotta is in the movie, as well, and he gives this bizarrely intense, Jesus-inflected performance that I simply did not understand.

I have to admit to kind of enjoying the movie, despite all of these failings. I mean, it's not good by any stretch of the imagination, but Zac Efron really does deliver on the beauty factor. He is gorgeous. There is no denying it; and the movie is harmless enough.

I want to mention one other thing, and then perhaps I should hide my shame and simply not discuss Charlie St. Cloud any further. There is this motif about geese in the movie that runs throughout the second and third acts. It is put in as a kind of comic device, a running joke. This weird little trope never pays off, and I was left wondering why no one did anything about these geese.

Let me end with this. Mostly because I know that asking a question about why a running joke never pays off in a movie like Charlie St. Cloud is just as intelligent as asking why I went to see the movie in the first place.