Something ironic in me seeing a movie called Friendship completely alone in a totally empty theater at 11:30am on a Saturday morning.

Mileage for this one varies entirely based on how much appreciation and/or tolerance you have for Tim Robinson’s whole thing. Thankfully for me, I’ve got a deep appreciation there, so this was the funniest thing I’ve seen in years. The laughs per minute quota is through the roof, via both more elaborate, prolonged gags like Robinson shoving a…

“You gotta live for yourself, cause you gotta live with yourself.”

Watched the director’s cut of this.

This movie really just opens with like a prolonged recap of the entirety of Rocky III haha. Not even just the final fight like the last two started with, it’s just walking through the entire movie.

I’ve been loving going through the Rocky franchise this week, and I’ve been a huge fan of the first four movies, but I think this one is…

“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how…

Sigh. I’ve been really loving going through the Rocky movies. Having only seen the first one previously, I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve appreciated the sequels. Through those first four movies, it’s been one of the most consistently emotional and exciting franchises I’ve ever seen. So, despite knowing its reputation, I was fully prepared to come into Rocky V and be a rare defender of it. But this thing is not good.

This is like a whole movie about…

Listen, I don’t disagree with anything this movie is saying about the commodification of women’s bodies and how that intersects with ageism (both internalized and externalized) and the nature of fame in the industry. But I think it’s got a Ruben Östlund level shallowness, lack of curiosity and insistence on punishing its audience with the same tepid observations slammed in your face like concrete over and over again into oblivion.

This is somehow 2 hours and 20 minutes of movie…

Alright, listen. This movie....

I’ll say for the first half I was like, okay whatever this is fine. Sure, it’s all artifice with no depth or dimension to it. There’s no attempt at characterization beyond “woa how evil!” or “aw damn they’re so haunted.” Who are these people? What do they care about? What do they feel? Doesn’t matter because “oooo creepy and dark.” It’s just generic procedural hokum, moving through the motions without any momentum or spark of creativity.…