In this episode, Tyler and David discuss movies about friendship as well as the Brendan Fraser Renaissance.
August 22, 2021 • 4 comments
Episode 753: Movies About Friendship
I assume David is still watching movies per the sequences he makes for himself, and thus hasn’t gotten to the one about female friendship I recommended. A story about the friendship between two men going sour is “Mikey & Nicky”, and now at the end of the podcast I can’t remember if you mentioned it earlier.
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There’s a cult movie called Miami Connection. It’s about a Tae Kwan Do school/ rock band and their conflict with drug dealing biker/ninjas. It is the most 80s movie to be made in the 1980s.
The most endearing quality of the film is the way it portrays the friendship between the men in the film. You get the impression that these guys are so comfortable around one another they are not self conscious about how they appear. The soundtrack even has a very ear-wormy song about friendship.
It is this quality which is mirrored in the filmmaking. Some films are awkward out of incompetence. But Miami Connection is the kind of awkward you get from being around friends and are not self-conscious about how you appear.
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The way Luke and Han wordlessly part company, and Threepio and Artoo wordfully and beepfully do the same, in the pre-battle Hoth scenes in The Empire Strikes Back fit the Moments of Deep Friendship classification pretty well.
Midnight Run is about a sitcom-ish badly started friendship that becomes, by the end, a real, genuinely warm one. I loved hearing that Cher was originally set to play the Grodin role, and after he swapped in, the script wasn’t changed.
In fact, there’s a quality I find rare which is present in some of Martin Brest’s pictures, also a couple of Jean Renoir’s and many of Miyazaki’s movies. It’s not enemies, and not personality mismatches, but specifically people who meet as opponents who develop into credibly real friends, and the presentation of that development coming not through plot or dialogue stating the change, but character and performance. There is usually a point where an after the fact realization occurs, “Hey! These people are real friends now. How did I not catch that?” akin to the kinds we can have in real life, when it occurs to us of someone, “Huh. I think we’re friends now! I wonder when that happened.” In both cases, even if we can’t pinpoint a specific moment, we still experienced the transition.
My short list for this distinctive segment of the enemies to friends form would be:
Porco Rosso
Rules of the Game
Midnight Run
Howl’s Moving Castle
Princess Mononoke
Beverly Hills Cop
Spirited Away
La Grande Illusion
I don’t see many other examples where this important development is so entrusted to subtleties.
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The Pope of Greenwich Village
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