Friendship, 2024 - ★★★

thunt’s review published on Letterboxd: Finally, the last movie I watched on the plane, and maybe the best, maybe the worst, friendship, features Craig Robinson from the TV show. So you think you can leave with the fantastic coffin drop sketch and other sketches. His Mo, as in the TV show Detroiters, is to make you horribly, horribly, horribly uncomfortable. Paul Rudd costars as a nice guy in the neighborhood who unfortunately makes friends with Robinson, leading to a series of disasters that almost destroys his life. It's so painful to watch, but at the same time, there's something there when when Robinson hangs out with Rudd, Rudd is cool and charming. Shows and mushrooms in the fields. They're white and not poisonous. When he goes to the sewer for urban exploration, it's safe and ends up with a fun trip to City Hall and no trouble at all. Later in the film, Robinson attempts to recreate these events to make friends with other people. He's really bad at making friends. His attempts go horrible. He shows his son a golden mushroom, not a white one. Then he gets violently ill from the mushroom. He takes his wife down into the sewers for some urban exploration. Tragically losing her down there, the entire town has to go find her. And of course, they blame Robinson. There's another episode where he has some friends over to his house and attempts to imitate what Rudd did, singing a song, having feelings, playing the drum, none of it goes right, and the guys start making fun of him, to which he then, of course, loses it in a very Robin city way. In a way it's almost unbelievable. His character is so annoying and so inept and so disastrous. But in another way, he has this kind of sweet, sensitive side where he is trying to make a friend, and he's really horrible at it. The movie ends in some kind of violence, and the gang and a gun and all kinds of things happening, and Robinson gets taken off in the police car. But there's a moment where Rudd winks at him, and I think it's because during the last kind of angry battle that Robinson waged against kind hearted Rudd and his friends who were actually friendly with him, Rudd's hairpiece, spoiler alert, falls off again, and as a weather man on TV, he cannot be known that he has a hair piece at this point, I believe Robinson accelerates and holds them hostage. More threatens them, more screams and makes noises to distract from the friends so that Rudd can restore his hairpiece. In this way, he does actually make a friend with Rudd, although it does seem that Robinson is going to perhaps an insane asylum or a jail at the end of the show. Is it worth watching? It's so uncomfortable. Thing after thing gets you more and more uncomfortable as the film spirals upward and out of control. Still, it stays with you, and you think about that poor bastard trying to make friends in his desperation, and you wish that he just wouldn't say that thing, and he just wouldn't say that other thing, and he wouldn't do that thing, but he does, he always does. Maybe I probably will watch more of his comedy, but I'll probably feel more uncomfortable. So it goes. I. Transcribed by otter.ai