Your Friends & Neighbors (1998)

Did you people see the same film I saw?

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

There are just so many films just like this, that I can't really say much for Your Friends & Neighbors, mainly because it offers very little to make in memorable or distinguishable in any way. A group of people in their 30's spend the film talking about their unsatisfying relationships and sex lives and cheating on each other with each other; it has all the markings of a 90's theater play, and everything it takes to be an indie darling, including a cast of some of the more popular indie-film stars of the time (this at a time when Ben Stiller was still known more for Reality Bites than for comedies like Zoolander). The acting is indeed good - Jason Patric and Catherine Keener especially, and the film does have a few good scenes, wittily written and well delivered. But in the end, the characters are all completely unlikable and forgettable - they're all characterized solely by their insecurities, shallowness, selfishness, delusions and sexual quirks, and there's nothing there to make the viewer care at all about any of them or about anything that happens to them - and not much happens, at that. The film is the very definition of mediocrity and forgettability.

In the first minutes of this film one of the main characters played by Ben Stiller explain to his audience, a class of students: " Its all about f-( censored )". And unfortunately the hole film is build on this simple and stupid sentence. If there is nothing else in a relationship then this no wonder the characters are so disappointed and unhappy. Dear Writer / director, believe me, there is much more in the world then this. Open your eyes and your heart and you'll find it everywhere!I bought this film because of his excellent cast. Catherine Keener, Jason Patric, Amy Brenneman, and many others I have seen in other movies. But, even a great cast can not help.

SPOILERS THROUGH: I first saw this movie after a friend recommended it to me. She knew I dug movies like "Closer" & "American Beauty" and told me this was a similar type of film. While I still think the other two are superior I did like this and found it to be a somber, provocative, performance driven multi character study and very interesting to watch.The six main characters were all played with excellence but sometimes in a film, there is one performer who walks away with the movie and in this case it is Jason Patrick. I must say this performance ranks up there as one that should have been awarded with an Aacademy Award but wasn't. Although all the characters are interesting, when Patrick is on screen he is just riveting. I first saw him, like so many movie buffs have, in "Lost Boys" and through the years have admired his performances in movies like "Rush" & "After Dark My Sweet". This is however, hands down, my favorite of his performances and I'm not sure I'd still be giving this film an 8 if he hadn't been in it.This movie is of coarse, about dysfunctional relationships and each performer brings something unique to the role their playing. I found the casting in general to be excellent and though most of the characters are dislikeable, their also interesting and one thing the movie does is get one's attention and keep it. The movie is extremely dialog driven and though it can drag at times, for the most part it stays extremely compelling to watch.Your friends & Neighbors reminded me of such movies as "Closer", "Sex,lies & Videotape" & "American Beauty", all of which I thought were superb. It also reminded me of the not superb but still intriguing "We don't live here anymore". And it even reminded me a bit of this year's "Friends With Money" which I liked a smidgen more then this. Although I did not think this was superb, it was well above average and very very good. If one likes any or all of the above mentioned movies chances are they will probably like this.The reason I did not think this was superb was because of a few things. One was the incomplete feeling I had about this film which I did not have about the above mentioned films I DID think were superb. For example,we, the audience, are not told a heck of a lot about any of these people and though we are exposed to their quirks and dysfunctional aspects, not much detail about them other then these aspects are provided. In some of these other films, I really did not have that feeling to the same degree. Also, The ending in my opinion, was weak when compared to the rest of the film although Brenneman's character ending up with Patrick's came out of left Field And genuinely surprised me.(I had thought at first Keener's character would wind up with him since she seemed to hate vulnerability in anyone she was romantically involved with.) I would have liked this movie to supply me with more detail on the characters of these people because there were to many loose ends and to strong an incomplete feeling at the end. I really had a difficult time with that and feel this should have been longer and a bit more structured.As far as the characters' themselves....well Keener's character was so dislikeable it was difficult to feel much toward her other then annoyance. Yet if the movie had shown more of her life other then telling her lovers to be quiet during sex, I doubt I'd have felt that way. Brenneman's character starts off dislike able but she gradually is developed as a lonely and perhaps depressed woman underneath the vivacity and Brenneman does a really good job with the part. (I think her performance is my second favorite.) Aeron Eckert is an amazing actor who's superb no matter what one sees him in and here he's no different. Stiller of whom I'm really not all that much of a fan, was very very good in a dramatic role and should be doing more dramatic material rather then playing almost the same role in in so many comedies. Natasha Kinski has not gotten as much recognition for her role but she should as her character was probably the most likable and had a sweetness and vulnerability that the others lacked, or perhaps wanted people to think they lacked. I actually though she came off as the most stable.I think in spite of the flaws, this was a really good movie with excellent Performances and my vote would be: see it, see it, see it! Although it's very dark, not very enjoyable at times and may leave one feeling a bit gloomy(or more then a bit) it's story and it's look at the darker aspects of relationships, is really really interesting and makes for kind of the anti sunny Rom com. Not romantic, not sunny, and definitely more then a little disturbing Your Friends & Neighbors is definitely not your typical movie. My vote's 8 of 10.

If all our relationships are like the ones in this film, we might as well give up. In "Your Friends and Neighbors" we are introduced to a group of upwardly mobile urbanites who run around a lot but haven't learned how to play well with others. Frustrated desire and strained hopefulness shove the characters around as if some socio-sexual Grinch were gumming up their lives. Watching this movie, you may be tempted to ask if this is the way the world turns or if it is merely the way writer-director Neil LaBute likes to pretend it turns. Produced with an abundance of cool, the film strikes an odd balance between surface and structure. By using a naturalistic veneer, LaBute invites us to accept the characters as if they had been lifted straight from the apartment next door. "Wow," we might say, "So this is real life as it is lived by real people in today's world!" Beneath the surface, however, things look different. If you peel back the actors' performances, you may find yourself staring at some carefully skewed scaffolding. You may even conclude that this picture is more the product of the director's artful calculations than of keen observation into the way people live. Of course there's nothing wrong with a director's offering a vision. Most good directors do. And if you like LaBute's work, you probably won't notice him just off-screen, fussing with his blueprints. An example: an important clue to verisimilitude in fiction is the way characters speak. Here they are presented as intelligent young professionals, yet they turn out to be astonishingly inarticulate types who say things like "I just…I don't know what to say…I mean…it just makes me feel…even if you…because…" After a while this dialog comes off like an acting-class exercise, and while the fractured syntax may be central to LaBute's approach, it can get tedious. One exception stands out: Midway through the film, the stutter-speech is interrupted by a remarkable monologue delivered by Jason Patric. Except for this burst of eloquence, however, we find ourselves listening to people who struggle to express themselves as they stumble through days and nights trying and failing to connect with others who are similarly afflicted. (That's the whole point, you say? Well…I mean…it's just…yeah…right.) There are places in this movie where a certain amount of cuteness can be forgiven—as when a patch of dialog recurs several times in the mouths of different characters—and there are other clever touches here and there. But the best reason for watching "Your Friends and Neighbors" is not the director's vision (assuming he has one) but the performances. The six principal actors make the most of their roles, and it is fun to watch a frenetically unfulfilled Ben Stiller, a romantically perplexed Amy Brenneman, a terminally self-satisfied Jason Patric, a mad but sad Catherine Keener, a well-meaning but clueless Aaron Eckhart and an attractively vapid Nastassja Kinsky wander through a maze that—unfortunately for their characters—leads nowhere.