Just Friends
I guess for many people, the holidays are a time to dread family get-togethers, revive sibling rivalry, and generally be reminded of who they once were (and maybe are still, behind the self-fooling veneer of adulthood).
Chris Brander has spent the past decade rebuilding his life from the adolescent rubble. An overweight, retainer-ridden teen, his final experience of high school was the humiliation of having his heartfelt “let’s-be-more-than-friends� yearbook entry for his widely popular best friend, Jamie, read to a crowd of rather typical juvenile buzzards, circling the soon-to-be-dead.
Ten years have done a lot for Chris—now a fit, hip chick-magnet in the music business, he directs his adolescent angst over being relegated to “The Friend Zone� to use women for his own ego boosts.
But ten years have passed since that fateful humiliating graduation party, and by chance he runs into his old Best Friend (and secret heartthrob) Jamie, at a bar in their old hometown.
Has he learned anything?
Well, in a word, no. Rather than picking up with Jamie where he left off, Chris launches into full-blown name-dropping impress-the-girl mode, which does nothing to endear him to the young woman sitting in front of him. Crossed wires and miscommunications rule, and Chris makes a good show of the jerk that he has become.
The movie begs us to ask ourselves a few questions: first, why does the past often have such a tenacious hold on us, despite the pain and debasement often involved? How can we move on from those experiences without sacrificing the core of who we are? And the final question that begs to be answered: why do the holidays represent some magic time where all these questions can be miraculously answered between November 24 and December 25?
As I said, the movie truly begs us to ask ourselves these questions, but does very little (if anything) to answer them. Through a rapid-fire onslaught of lewd sexuality, raunchy language, and Home Alone-style pratfalls and pranks, Just Friends begs us more to relive the pains and horrors of our collective adolescence than grow into some semblance of mature, if a little tattered, adulthood.
But why choose the holiday season as the setting for all this mayhem? I think the makers of Just Friends needed the abundance of relational hope generally applied to the holidays as extra fuel for the hope that Jamie will finally come around and see Chris as a man freed from The Friend Zone. However, the pretense of the holidays and the prevailing tension and negativity they provoke serve more to feed the pessimism than inspire any true romance.
Just Friends offers the audience the chance to review its own passage from high school until now, regardless of the length of time passed. It also urges us to ask important questions about what the holidays truly mean to us, rather than what we want them to mean, or what we try to make them mean in spite of ourselves.
In the end, the best advice offered here is sung tunelessly by Chris’s somewhat vapid mother: Be yourself, be yourself, be yourself.
And maybe, as trite as it sounds, that’s the best way to embrace the past and still move forward into becoming someone better—as long as you insist on trying to do that without divine help..
Chris Brander has spent the past decade rebuilding his life from the adolescent rubble. An overweight, retainer-ridden teen, his final experience of high school was the humiliation of having his heartfelt “let’s-be-more-than-friends� yearbook entry for his widely popular best friend, Jamie, read to a crowd of rather typical juvenile buzzards, circling the soon-to-be-dead.
Ten years have done a lot for Chris—now a fit, hip chick-magnet in the music business, he directs his adolescent angst over being relegated to “The Friend Zone� to use women for his own ego boosts.
But ten years have passed since that fateful humiliating graduation party, and by chance he runs into his old Best Friend (and secret heartthrob) Jamie, at a bar in their old hometown.
Has he learned anything?
Well, in a word, no. Rather than picking up with Jamie where he left off, Chris launches into full-blown name-dropping impress-the-girl mode, which does nothing to endear him to the young woman sitting in front of him. Crossed wires and miscommunications rule, and Chris makes a good show of the jerk that he has become.
The movie begs us to ask ourselves a few questions: first, why does the past often have such a tenacious hold on us, despite the pain and debasement often involved? How can we move on from those experiences without sacrificing the core of who we are? And the final question that begs to be answered: why do the holidays represent some magic time where all these questions can be miraculously answered between November 24 and December 25?
As I said, the movie truly begs us to ask ourselves these questions, but does very little (if anything) to answer them. Through a rapid-fire onslaught of lewd sexuality, raunchy language, and Home Alone-style pratfalls and pranks, Just Friends begs us more to relive the pains and horrors of our collective adolescence than grow into some semblance of mature, if a little tattered, adulthood.
But why choose the holiday season as the setting for all this mayhem? I think the makers of Just Friends needed the abundance of relational hope generally applied to the holidays as extra fuel for the hope that Jamie will finally come around and see Chris as a man freed from The Friend Zone. However, the pretense of the holidays and the prevailing tension and negativity they provoke serve more to feed the pessimism than inspire any true romance.
Just Friends offers the audience the chance to review its own passage from high school until now, regardless of the length of time passed. It also urges us to ask important questions about what the holidays truly mean to us, rather than what we want them to mean, or what we try to make them mean in spite of ourselves.
In the end, the best advice offered here is sung tunelessly by Chris’s somewhat vapid mother: Be yourself, be yourself, be yourself.
And maybe, as trite as it sounds, that’s the best way to embrace the past and still move forward into becoming someone better—as long as you insist on trying to do that without divine help..
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