The Friend: The best one imaginable

The Friend (2024) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.6.25

How do you explain death to a dog?

 

Writer/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have done a rare thing, in adapting Sigrid Nunez’s award-winning 2018 novel. They’ve retained the book’s heart, while making the story more accessible to a general audience.

 

Iris (Naomi Watts) reluctantly realizes that her massive canine companion likely won't
be able to handle a revolving door.

It’s immediately obvious that this film celebrates authors and the written word; the central character’s stream-of-consciousness narration is laden with epigrams, quotes from famous novels (and movies), philosophical musings and sardonic bon mots. All help paint an increasingly layered portrait of a soul in crisis.

Iris (Naomi Watts), a successful author, lives in a 500-square-foot, rent-controlled, upper-floor Manhattan apartment that she “inherited” when her father died. She teaches creative writing at a nearby college, silently enduring her students’ efforts to critique each others’ efforts; she seems not to pay attention, but misses nothing.

 

Her best friend and longtime mentor, Walter (Bill Murray), is an elder statesman in New York’s literary scene. We meet him during a lively dinner party, where he regales everybody with the saga of how — while jogging one morning — he glanced up a park hill and was transfixed by a “magnificent beast.”

 

Then, abruptly, he’s gone.

 

The subsequent funeral is well-attended by numerous friends, along with ex-wife No. 1 (Carla Gugino, as Elaine), ex-wife No. 2 (Constance Wu, as Tuesday) and his current widow (Noma Dumezweni, as Barbara). Elaine and Iris were college mates, back in the day, and Walter was their professor: an unapologetic, old-school womanizer.

 

His only child is a twentysomething daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon), fathered with yet another woman.

 

Despite the serial philandering, and a tendency toward condescension, Iris adored him. His absence worsens the writer’s block that has long delayed her next project: a collaborative effort with Val, to comb through Walter’s voluminous correspondence, in order to produce a book of essays. That project was suggested by Walter, as a means to take Iris’ mind off her long-unfinished next novel.

 

Iris goes through the motions, during the next few days, grief etched on her face. Then she’s summoned by Barbara, who has a “delicate matter” to deal with: getting rid of Walter’s dog, Apollo.

 

“You were his contingency plan,” she tells the genuinely surprised Iris, who knew nothing of this.

 

But the request is impossible. Iris has no pets, and if she did, it would be a cat. More crucially, her apartment building doesn’t allow dogs.

Hustlers: Don't be conned

Hustlers (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for nudity, pervasive sexual content, profanity and drug use
By Derrick Bang

Sometimes the elements simply don’t gel.

The whole winds up less than the sum of its parts. And in the case of Hustlers, the parts aren’t that engaging to begin with.

Having fleeced hundreds of thousands of dollars from drugged marks, the gals — from
left, Annabelle (Lili Reinhart), Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and
Destiny (Constance Wu) — treat themselves to some party time.

Director/scripter Lorene Scafaria’s lurid little drama is “inspired by” Jessica Pressler’s lengthy December 2015 feature article in New York magazine. Scafaria actually strip-mined Pressler’s piece quite extensively; in terms of detail, the resulting film is much more authentic to its source than most claiming to be “based on actual events.”

But that’s far from satisfying. The major problem is that both Pressler and Scafaria have hitched their respective narratives to highly unreliable narrators. Pressler wisely adopted a clinical journalist’s approach, putting more faith in details subsequently verified by police investigations.

Scafaria, in contrast, constructed a story inhabited by characters who — if not sympathetic — would at least be interesting.

In this, alas, she failed. 

More than anything else, Hustlers — with its quartet of scheming escorts — is boring. Extremely boring. It also falls into a trap common to films that attempt to illuminate exploitative behavior: It becomes relentlessly exploitative.

On top of which, it’s difficult to ignore the cynicism of this film’s creation. It’s clearly a vanity project for Jennifer Lopez, who — in her parallel role as producer — ensures that Jennifer Lopez (as star) gets plenty of exposure. That descriptor is deliberate; there’s no question that Lopez wants us to be impressed by her 50-year-old body, much the way Demi Moore strutted her stuff in the 1996 adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s Striptease.

So, okay, yes: Lopez is in phenomenal shape. Truly stunning. No argument.

But therein lies another problem: Her presence overwhelms this tawdry saga. It’s always Jennifer Lopez, walking, talking and stalking. At no time does she transcend her own self in order to become Ramona, ringleader of a coterie of cuties who graduate from pole twirling and lap dancing to the unpalatably larcenous — and, for a time, highly successful — fleecing of wealthy Wall Street jerks.

Crazy Rich Asians: Rom-com by way of wretched excess

Crazy Rich Asians (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for suggestive content and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.17.18

Cross-cultural interpersonal friction has terrific potential in film comedies; the challenge is to ensure that the humor is warm and genuinely funny, without being demeaning or racist.

Rachel (Constance Wu, far right) is charmed when her boyfriend Nick (Henry Golding)
introduces her to his grandmother, Ah Ma (Lisa Lu, center), while other members of
his wealthy and privileged family watch warily.

My Big, Fat Greek Wedding successfully walked that delicate line, back in 2002; director Jon M. Chu has navigated the same potentially treacherous waters with equal care, in his adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s 2013 best-seller, Crazy Rich Asians.

This is even more impressive, given Chu’s résumé, which up to now has focused on the Step Up dance franchise and bombastic popcorn flicks such as G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Now You See Me 2. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of the prudent handling required by this droll rom-com.

He and scripters Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim also give generous screen time to an impressive roster of supporting characters, all of whom get numerous opportunities to shine. That reflects good directing and writing; far too many ensemble projects focus exclusively on the name stars, shamefully leaving equally (if not more) intriguing co-stars twisting in the wind.

Chiarelli and Lim have done an equally impressive job of compressing the novel’s multiple points of view — the story is told, in alternating chapters, by five key characters — into a single narrative. Chu then transformed the saga into a strongly visual experience, particularly with respect to travel maps and inventive displays of chat-by-text: clever touches that obviously couldn’t have been done in print.

All this said, I’m not sure Kwan’s fans will approve. Although the key elements of boorish behavior have been retained — Chu deftly blends hilarious bits with moments that are quite painful — the film is a much kinder, gentler handling of the core plot, which (in the novel) is far more vicious and brutal.

Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), a professor of economics at New York University, is delighted when longtime boyfriend Nick Young (Henry Golding) invites her to tag along for his best friend’s wedding in Singapore. Unfortunately, Nick has neglected to mention that he’s the scion of one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful families; perhaps even worse, back home he’s a sought-after bachelor still regarded as “fair game” by the aristocratic young women who mingle in his family’s refined social circle.

All of whom regard lower-middle-class Rachel as an insignificant threat, to be quickly disposed of.

(In Nick’s defense, as he later explains, he found it refreshing that Rachel fell in love with him without knowing his privileged background ... and he simply never got around to ’fessing up.)