Friendship review: This twisted buddy-buddy movie is funny but not much fun
Director
:
Andrew DeYoung
Cert
:
15A
Starring
:
Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Rick Worthy, Whitmer Thomas, Daniel London, Eric Rahill
Running Time
:
1 hr 41 mins
Tim Robinson, star of the cult sketch show I Think You Should Leave, moves satisfactorily into cinema with a comedy that sits just outside the buddy-buddy mainstream. How do we thus place it on the map? Well, it begins with Tami and Craig (Robinson and Kate Mara), a suburban couple, at a counselling session where she addresses her recovery from cancer and expresses her difficulty in achieving orgasm.
Andrew DeYoung, in his debut as writer and director, is plainly skirting the realm of indie alienation. There is a suppressed fury in Robinson's performance – a whisper of bitter loneliness – that passes unexpected levels of stress on to the poor viewer. It's funny, but it's never exactly fun.
The story properly kicks off when Craig, who is trying to sell his house, returns a wrongly delivered package to a new neighbour up the street. This turns out to be Austin, a handsome TV weatherman in the form of the ageless Paul Rudd. The two get chatting and end up forming an initially successful friendship.
DeYoung's screenplay can't quite decide what we are to make of Austin. On their first night of boozing, he takes his neighbour on an illicit tour of an underground aqueduct that eventually leads them into the city hall. He plays in a punk band. The notion appears to be that he's an offbeat guy locked in a straightedge job. Yet the more the film goes on – and the more Craig takes on the persona of stalker – the less out-there Austin appears. Are we initially seeing the man that our anti-hero
thought
his neighbour to be?
READ MORE
At any rate, though loose in structure, Friendship offers a few minor masterpieces in the art of cringe. Robinson, like Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, gives some impression of how the classic saddo of broad comedy – the Jerry Lewis, the Norman Wisdom – might appear in something like the real world: scary, demented, potentially threatening. His wide, gap-toothed grin is that of the killer clown. His tight face seems always on the point of bursting open in a mess of bloody tendons. We (if we are men) are invited to laugh at him while worrying that we're laughing at the worst, most pathetic aspects of our own personalities. Not a cheery sort of hilarity.
In cinemas from July 18th
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
17 hours ago
- Irish Times
‘It takes a week to learn the rules of whatever office you're in. Some of the things, I was, like, what the f**k is this?'
Caitríona Daly originally wanted to be an actor but fell into playwriting at the age of 10 out of necessity – 'because even at that age,' she says, 'I knew there weren't good parts for women'. She first made waves in student theatre, with Sluts, a biting, fast-talking comedy about the labels women throw at each other and the double standards that let men off the hook. Its combination of righteous anger, whip-smart intellect, unexpected tenderness and lacerating humour has become Daly's trademark. The 37-year-old Dubliner has written for stage and screen, including a stint on the long-running BBC daytime drama Doctors, for which she won a Writers Guild of Ireland Zebbie Award. Soap, she says, taught her a huge amount about story and structure, and its role as a tool for public empathy and education deserves more respect. 'It's the most accessible art form we have,' she says. 'Its reach is huge. I remember the storyline about Todd being gay from Coronation Street in the early 2000s – that was huge. I don't think I ever really knew what being gay was before that. Similarly, with the teenage pregnancy, it can take a topic that is divisive in society and help society to understand it a little bit better.' READ MORE What unites all of Daly's work, whether on a BBC soundstage or in a black-box theatre, is her commitment to moral ambiguity, emotional nuance and sharp absurdity of modern life. In her breakout play, Duck Duck Goose , which ran at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2021, Daly tackled the social impact of sexual violence from a rarely seen angle: that of the bystander. Loosely inspired by the nine-week Belfast rape trial of 2018, it features a protagonist, Chris, who is neither accused nor accuser but a friend of the accused, slowly unravelling under the weight of what he knew, what he didn't and what he refused to see. 'I felt very strongly that if every story we see around rape culture is from a survivor's perspective, we begin to think it's the survivor's problem. And it's not,' Daly says. 'We have to be having the more difficult conversations.' The play became an international success, with acclaimed productions in Bulgaria, Australia and New Zealand. But at home the reception was more complicated. 'We were very well reviewed, which was great,' she says. 'But I found some of the reactions quite held back.' [ Duck Duck Goose: An uncomfortable, insightful portrayal of sexual violence's social impact Opens in new window ] Part of the unease, she suspects, came from its proximity to the real-life case – the four defendants were acquitted – and the discomfort of unspoken social truths. 'It brings in the question of doubt and the question of redemption, or whether you want to believe in it,' she says. 'I left the play ambiguous, because I wanted there to be space for conversation. If we're to take men on the journey with us, we need to have room for their voices in it too.' Daly's latest play, The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4, strikes a different tone – chaotic, comedic, full of noise – but the questions at its heart are no less urgent. Set at a bland corporate firm, it centres on three employees spending the company's social-responsibility budget. Their lunch hour becomes a warped gameshow of points, prizes, dress-up and one-upmanship. Water pistols are drawn, spinning wheels spun. Wrestling matches unfold on a boardroom table. The play quickly unfurls from office dramedy into a satire about power, survival and the rituals we invent to endure capitalism's grind. The absurdity is deliberate, but so is the recognition. Daly first seeded the play in 2010, during the economic crash. 'I was working in an office that was pretty much abandoned,' she says. 'It was on St Stephen's Green. This entire block of offices being used by the company I worked for. Such a desolate place. And I had this idea where a load of workers re-enact The Late Late Toy Show . 'It was about millennials and how we all grew up being told we could have anything, and we could do anything we wanted, because the world was such a rich, plush place in Ireland in the 2000s. And then the crash happened, and all those dreams of Barbie cars just went out the window.' Daly has always been drawn to that collision between expectation and reality, between the self and the system. Lunch Punch extends that, exploring coping mechanisms, language games and power plays that flourish when actual power is scarce. 'The play's really trying to explore the things we do to feel like we might have some power over something,' she says, 'even though most of us don't have much power over the structures in place.' The setting is Gresham Professional Services. It's entirely fictional but also a recognisable kind of nowhere, with rigid structure and absurd stakes. The rules, Daly says, are familiar to anyone who has temped or worked in an office. 'It takes you a week to learn the rules of whatever office you're in, and they're not the written ones. Like, you can't do this, or say that. Some of the things I had to do in offices, I was, like, what the f**k is this?' A receptionist named Jess becomes the audience's entry point. She's a smart, curious outsider with a PhD in anthropology and an interest in the individualistic construction of western identity, who is both underestimated by and quietly threatening to her colleagues. Daly, who has temped in countless offices over 15 years, brings a lived-in authority to Jess's role as observer. 'I love reception work. I've done it in so many places: doctors' offices, cement companies, law offices. The receptionist is always a silent observer, rarely noticed. I used to love going into new worlds and figuring out how people work together. The pettiness is incredible. Like, in one office, at least once a month a woman would come out and tell me there was poo in one of the toilets.' If Duck Duck Goose dealt in silence – what isn't said, what isn't acknowledged – Lunch Punch is awash with language: jargon, acronyms, appropriated anthropology, and pop culture. Daly took inspiration from the choreographed fights of professional wrestling and the conflict-heavy theatrics of reality TV. 'I worked with people who thought they were in a video game or in The Real Housewives ..., by how they spoke. You can feel someone doing a dramatic pause. Nobody knows how to do office culture naturally – it's performative. 'There's a line in the play where Jess asks about a no-uniform day, and they say, 'We don't have a uniform.' But of course they do. Office culture is performance: costumes and scripts.' The scripts extend beyond offices to modern life. 'The play's littered with references: The Real Housewives ..., Come Dine With Me, Father Ted, Arrested Development. They're not obvious. They're diluted, so you don't really know where they came from. But that's where we're at. TikTok is this stream of references. We're living in a Jenga tower of weird meta existence.' Despite its satire, Lunch Punch resists cynicism. 'I didn't want it to be cynical,' Daly says. 'The world is difficult enough. If you wanted to die by cynicism right now, you could. I want this to be semi-uplifting, while being truthful about the world we're living in.' The play shares thematic echoes with The Good Place , Mike Schur's TV series, which explored ethical complexity in a broken world. Daly welcomes the comparison. 'You've nailed it,' she says. 'What I wanted the end to feel like was the end of the first season of The Good Place. It's an empowering ending. They won't be shut down, you know?' [ Why we love 'The Good Place' and its star Kristen Bell Opens in new window ] That instinct for resistance, both political and emotional, pulses through Daly's work. She cites Ursula K Le Guin's idea of the artist's treason: that we've been taught that only pain can be intelligent, that joy is naive. 'I see joy and playfulness as everyday resistance. That's what I was trying to get across with Lunch Punch – just finding pockets full of joy. We're taught that happiness is stupid, and artists often deny us the banality of evil and the boredom of pain.' Resistance has limits, of course, especially in Dublin. Daly speaks frankly about the precarity of making art in Ireland: the economic hostility; the shrinking opportunities; the cultural ambivalence. The play touches on this and on the often-forgotten struggles of those outside the capital. 'I'm very seriously concerned about our country,' she says. 'Everything is entirely Dublin-focused. We've left most of the Midlands without an industry. With the closure of Bord na Móna's ESB plants, a lot of young people had no choice but to leave. I used to mention that to people in Dublin, and they'd say, 'Oh, did they? What's that?' We can be in a bubble – myself included.' What keeps her hopeful? Daly doesn't hesitate. 'We're very resilient. I'm hopeful for some kind of creative revolution. Bureaucracy is killing theatre. I'm looking for punks. I'm looking for some punk stuff to happen soon, because it's important.' She smiles, the conviction steady beneath the humour. 'The win is getting to do what you love,' she says. 'That's it. That's the whole thing.' In a world built on distraction, exhaustion, productivity and profit, choosing to keep making art and telling stories might just be radical. The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre , in Dublin, until Saturday, September 6th
Extra.ie
a day ago
- Extra.ie
Styled By Niamh: Naoimh Whelton on starring alongside Hollywood royalty in new blockbuster
Before she'd reached the age of ten, actress Naoimh Whelton was already something of a celebrity in her hometown. Growing up in the picturesque village of Kenmare in Co Kerry, Naoimh – now a rising Hollywood star – was gigging around the village alongside her music dad and uncle. 'From the age of about five or six I used to go with my dad and sing in the pubs around the town,' Naoimh told Styled. Now she is poised to grace the silver screen starring alongside Hollywood heavyweight Paul Rudd in Oscar-winning director John Carney's latest flick Power Ballad. 'My dad is a violinist and an accordion player, and I used to do an Irish dance, and I learned all the songs and I would sing along with my dad,' recalled Naoimh. This first taste of local fame was what led a young Naomi to pursue a career on stage and screen. 'So even as far back as then I got a taste and I had the 'gra'; I was like 'I love this'. 'We were doing three gigs a night.' Oui scuba jacket – €180 Macbees Boutique So no sooner had Naoimh finished her Leaving Cert than she was packing her bags and heading for the bright lights of Dublin and beyond. 'I was busting through those doors after my Leaving Cert,' she laughed. 'All of my classmates were off to Cork, to UCC, that was the cool college to go to at that time, but I was like 'no, I'm going to Dublin to be an actress'. 'I just needed to get out of there and I just moved straight away. I did some research and I found a course in the arts in Dublin so I was like 'right, that's where I'm going.' 'So I got a place in the Gaiety School of Acting.' But moving from a small town to the Big Smoke was by no means smooth sailing, as Naoimh recalls trekking to endless auditions in between college and her part-time job. 'You would get bit parts or tiny roles but they kept me going. So after a while I went to Bowe Street full time. P Joseph Ribkoff Polka Dot Pants- €249 sale: €125. Macbees Boutique 'I was there for two years and I absolutely adored that whole experience. It was during that time that I really fell in love with the craft of acting.' From Dublin Naoimh then decamped to London, where she finally began to slowly but surely break into the acting scene. 'After Dublin I moved to London and it was around that time that I got a role in Harry Wilde and then I got a part as a journalist in the series Borderline. 'That was my biggest part when I played Mary Farrell, a journalist in Borderline.' But her really big break was just around the corner when she was cast in the upcoming John Carney flick Power Ballad alongside Hollywood stars Paul Rudd, and Nick Jonas (of Jonas Brothers fame). Speaking of her part alongside Rudd, Naoimh said it was surreal. Carney, who directed the 2007 film Once – which won an Oscar for Best Original Song with Falling Slowly – and Sing Street, Whelton said the role came just at the right time. 'I had just returned from three months of travelling through Southeast Asia, so I was more than ready to get back working the creative muscle again and this project came at the perfect time' Naoimh has one pivotal scene in the film, in which she hopes her acting prowess will come to life on the big screen. 'My scene partner Marty Breen was an absolute blast to work with. We laughed a lot, and the whole shoot was honestly up there with one of the most fun ones I've been on. 'Our scene comes at a key turning point in the story. It was wonderful to be a part of.' 'Paul was really nice. And so that was really fun, just doing that. It was just one day on set, but it was that one day that kept me going, it gave me the buzz I needed.' Written by Carney and Peter McDonald, the film charts the story of a wedding singer (Rudd), a rock star (Nick Jonas), and the song that comes between them. Yellow Dress: Malina Calista Yellow Strappy Dress €100 – Macbees Boutique 'Paul was such a grounded, generous presence on set. He brings this quiet ease to his work that's honestly inspiring to witness up close. 'You don't feel like you're standing next to a 'movie star' – and I mean that in the best possible way.' The pair even had time between shoots for some chats about Ireland, with Paul revealing he's a fan of all things Irish – especially pints of stout. 'He loves Cobh [in Co Cork], but I had to tell him he still hadn't seen Kerry yet. We had a good laugh about that.' While she may have been enthralled with Paul Rudd's enigmatic presence she is hopelessly devoted to her real-life love. Hermes Mors a Jouets Chemise Twilly – Naoimh is smitten with her childhood sweetheart Josh, who she has been dating since they met in secondary school. 'So I am with Josh now over eleven years. We met when I was about 15,' she smiles. Josh, who's not involved in the entertainment industry, has moved to London with Naoimh as she follows her dreams. 'We live in London now and it can be tougher on him at times. But we are finding our feet. We've been together for years now and we are in lockstep with each other.' As for her acting career, the actress – who has also appeared with Jayne Seymour in detective series Harry Wild – said she hopes her years of hard work are finally coming to fruition. Boohoo Black Blazer – €33.50 'I believe hard work always pays off, but for me, the real goal is to be doing this full-time – to be a consistently working actor,' Whelton said. 'Until that becomes your everyday reality, it's important to embrace the journey: all the in-between moments, the quiet periods, the lessons you pick up from each job, your own life experiences. Sit with it all. Reflect on it. Try not to be so urgent. 'That time is valuable – it shapes who you are as an artist and adds depth to your work. An acting instructor once told me: 'We are human beings not human doings, so just be.' I think of that often, and any time I feel I'm getting ahead of myself in any part of my life. Presence is key and something that takes consistent work, for me anyway,' she said. She admits the idea of a 'big break' is tempting, but added: 'I try not to focus on that. 'For me, success looks like being in a creative space every day, collaborating, learning, and feeling a strong sense of purpose in what I do. That's the goal.' Naoimh's role alongside Rudd has given her confidence a reboot. 'Like everyone I have huge insecurities, I have doubts, but I know who I am, I don't wait for a situation to happen, I kind of try to make it happen. I have drive , I'm tenacious and I know where I am going, so I try to make the best out of every situation.' But she credits her parents with instilling her with self-belief and the ability to dust herself off and begin anew. Casual 3/4 Sleeve Knit Cardigan – Green – €19.98 – Shaws Department Store 'My mum instilled so much confidence in us ever since we were kids. She helped me , every time I would come she would help me build my confidence and develop other life skills. 'She taught me to dust myself off and get back out there if you've had a knock.' ELEVATE YOUR STYLE The classic court-style kitten heel is an undeniable fashion icon that will always be relevant for its ease-of-wear, versatility and feminine charm. As this distinctive shoe style steps once again into the spotlight, it has been refreshed with new silhouettes and details. Well-suited for the lifestyles of 21st century women, they make for fabulous everyday shoes. Whatever the occasion, kitten heels have become a fashion favourite as they promise all-day comfort and effortless style. The multi-layered appeal of kitten heels is unmatched. First and foremost, they offer undeniable style. Kitten heels often feature pointed toes that exude sleek elegance, adding a chic, feminine touch to any outfit. Moreover, unlike skyscraping , this style boost doesn't come at the expense of comfort. Typically no higher than 5 cm, kitten heels provide just the right amount of lift to accentuate your legs and due to their lower height. Steve Madden Low Bling Heel -Sale price €65.00 – Shaws Department Store there's minimal pressure on the balls of your feet, making them perfect for all-day every-day fabulous footwear. METALLICA While metallics may have one been aligned with gaudy shiny fabrics or ostentatious evening wear, metallics in fashion has made a seamless transitioned to uptown girl were and daytime style. Think 'metallic' and your mind may instantly start to gleaming golds, sparkly silvers, and glittering greens but metallics have been dimmed down to muted shades with can be incorporated into a multitude of looks. In fact metallic fashion has never been more wearable – and they can elevate an outfit in an instant. They can also be playful or sophisticated – or both – depending on how they're styled, making them a funky and versatile addition to your wardrobe. Style icon Anna Wintour has even leading the metallic fashion charge in her inimitable sophisticated manner choosing fabrics with a soft sheen, rather than a high shine. Photography by Evan Doherty Hair by Jessica Dowdall Makeup by Ciara O'Neill Shot on location at The Dunloe Hotel, Killarney.
RTÉ News
2 days ago
- RTÉ News
New vinyl factory opens in Clane, Co Kildare
A new vinyl factory has opened in Clane, Co Kildare, as the popularity of records continues to rise, particularly among younger listeners who are swapping their phones for the turntable. "It is taking up most of the space in record stores all over the world," said Chris Keena of the continuing rise in vinyl sales. Mr Keena is the Commercial Manager of Anthem Vinyl, Ireland's new and only vinyl factory. "It's the format that has survived everything. People will always go back to vinyl," he said. The factory will be pressing vinyl for a wide range of Irish musicians from 80s stalwarts Cry Before Dawn, who are making their first vinyl EP since 1989, to new Indie band Delush from Dublin, making their first ever vinyl. Factory founder Brian Kenny said they can now offer musicians the chance to curate and produce their work at scale. "Each machine will produce a record every 30 seconds, so in a standard week, we can produce 8,000 records pretty reliably." The band Delush visited the plant to see their EP 'Famous' coming off the pressing line in bright pink. "It's important to us and the consumer for the same reason. It's the connection, it's to physically hold the music, seeing it, the artwork and style that is unique to the band," said band co-founder Scott Leigh. "It's a piece of memorabilia that you can hold on to," said Mr Leigh, who has a turntable in his bedroom that helps him unwind in the evening without the distraction of the phone. "If you are on the phone listening to music, you're easily on Instagram or something else." Back in Dublin city, all generations are browsing row after row of vinyl at Spindizzy Records in the Market Arcade on George's Street. It started as a stall in 1996 and has now recently expanded to a shop with an impressive array of vinyl. "There has been a constant and enduring interest in vinyl," said shop manager Enda Gogarty. Vinyl collector Paul McDermott often visits on a Friday to pick up his pre-orders and browse the second-hand arrivals. "I think people like the physical copy ... I even see it with my own kids; they are suddenly taking an interest in dad's record collection, which hitherto they never would never had before!".
