Quick Synopsis: A drunken hook-up leads to a lifelong friendship between Debbie and Peter. Twenty years later, Debbie is a single mother who is overly cautious regarding her son, and Peter is working hard at a New York job making dough but it makes him blue. They both end up crying a lot so they decide to move…….to each other’s houses for a few weeks.
So, a few years ago I transitioned this site from “occasional reviews/musings once a week” to “REVIEW EVERYTHING! (new)” where I mention everything I see at the cinema, as well as notable streaming releases. But therein lies the issue, how do we define a “notable” streaming release? There’s a lot of shit put on Netflix etc, so I need some form of internal quality control before adding it to the to-watch list. This isn’t a policy based on external reviews or budget or stars, it’s almost entirely on “Does this interest me?”. Sometimes what interests me is the plot, sometimes it’s a sequel to a film I loved, and sometimes it’s just because a lot of people have spoken about it and I feel I need to check it out.
Your Place Or Mine (or YPOM, pronounced Yup-pomb) was none of those things, it was led by two performers (Reece Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher) who I feel ambivalent towards, the plot is a generic rom-com, and it’s received bad-to-middling reviews. So why did I watch this? Like all things in life, it’s because of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. That’s one of my favourite sitcoms of all time, and yes a lot of that is down to Rachel Bloom, but it is also down to the co-creator, Aline Brosh McKenna. This is her feature directorial debut, and I was curious as to how it would be.
So, how is it? Well, the fact that I went on that long opening tangent gives a good indication as to whether I loved it or not. I wanted to like it, I really did. Despite my apparent dismissiveness of romantic comedies earlier, I do love a well-written one (my issue with the genre is that a lot of them AREN’T well-written and are just a bucket of cliches).
YPOM is doomed by its concept. The two characters engage in a quick house swap for a short while. It’s a good way to show the differences (and similarities) between the two characters, and provides some decent “fish out of water” moments, as well as allowing them to kind of explore each other’s personalities. But do you what it means we don’t get? The two interacting with each other face-to-face. With the exception of the opening 2 minutes, and the closing 5 or so, they only speak to each other via phone calls or through a third party. A romantic comedy depends on good chemistry between the actors, and this doesn’t allow us to see if they have any. This kind of approach (where you purposely keep them apart so that the audience is waiting for them to meet) can work. It’s the concept of the absolutely SUBLIME television series Love Soup. But it takes a lot of talent from everybody for it to work, it also needs a bit more time than this film gives it. If YPOM was a television series it might have worked, but tackling it one go makes the whole thing slightly unsatisfying. YPOM starts with a split-screen conversation between the two, and I would have LOVED it if THAT was the film. If the whole film was split-screen and we see both characters going through an individual story at the same time, then the closing is the split disappearing and the two appear together. It would have been incredibly difficult to write and perform (both characters would have to spend time “doing nothing” but making it look believable), but it would have been interesting and would have given the film a hook.
I’m not sure it’s helped by the performances, Witherspoon and Kutcher just don’t come off as a natural couple, and their presence together makes it feel weirdly dated. This is not the best work from either of them, with both performances feeling slightly phoned in. Witherspoon, in particular, gives a performance which isn’t bad but is painfully generic and not good enough for someone with the background and career she has.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to like in this. The way it shoots phone calls is a creative way of showing how in sync the two characters are. The argument at the end taking place while the characters are on two opposing moving walkways provides a lot of creative and fun visuals, plus adds a weird physical dynamic nature to it. There are also moments where it seems to spoof generic romantic comedies, making fun of the tropes and conventions. The best example of this is the ending, where we see the following text:
“they lived happily ever after. Just kidding, marriage is hard, but they had a good life”.
It takes guts to end a romantic comedy like that, and moments like that show the potential this film had if it was let off the leash. But it’s too often trapped in the net of its own conventions.
So in summary, an ambitious attempt, but one that doesn’t quite work.
Probably the most intense and thrilling film of the year, and not one shot is fired and not one car is chased, it never goes beyond people just talking (and screaming). Set in three real-time acts spread across the 1970s-1990s, this film gets to the heart of Steve Jobs the man/the character (he was quite a dick it turns out), and the heart of what it means to be innovative and push the boundary of what technology can be for people. Thrilling, heartstopping, emotional, and surprisingly beautiful to look at, Steve Jobs is a breath of fresh airconditioned air for the Biopic genre…and the fact it made less that jObs is just depressing.
lifetime mess, but director Tom McCarthy made the wise choice of keeping everything restrained, realistic, and beautifully drab (never has a cast of A-listers looked so normal), all so the facts can speak for themselves, and they scream.
Already talked about this in our 2015 Film Awards, where it was one of the films awarded with best picture, but I’ll talk briefly about it here. It’s a funny and heartfelt road movie that meditates on fame, creativity, and loneliness, through the indepth and witty conversations of its protagonists. Whether you know David Foster Wallace’s work or not, this is an accessible and great film.
Follow a mesmerizing Reese Witherspoon on a thousand mile hike as she flashes back to the different traumatizing points in her life that led her to the hike. It’s a compelling character film of the purist nature, and with a combination of a great soundtrack, editing, and sound-editing, is the best film I have ever seen capture the feeling of fleeting thought.
The second Nick Hornby script on this list (the first was Wild), and it just shows you the versatility of his writing. In 1950’s an Irish immigrant moves to Brooklyn (go figure) where she finds love, life, and a future, but then finds herself torn between the life she wants in America and the life everyone else wants for her back in Ireland. Much more a classic Hollywood romance (in all the right ways) and less the love triangle bollocks the trailers made it look to be, this is really a beautiful film about striving to achieve your own happiness, and who you’re willing to hurt to keep it.
Troubled Productions 