This is a movie I really really wanted to like. I love Paul Rudd in just about everything, but Tim Robinson’s humor seems to only ever miss for me.
I tried to brute-force my way through “I think you should leave” on 3 separate occasions but it just isn’t for me. I know a lot of people that think it’s the best but it seems to pretty totally polarizing.
It’s painful. The trick is to be extremely not sober.
It’s humor through making you feel uncomfortable. Not everyone vibes with it
It’s the Curb Your Enthusiasm humour which gives me a major case of fremdschamen. I can’t watch comedy where people are the butt of the joke. Just makes me feel bad for them.
I did the same. And… nope.
It very much felt to me like the same joke just rehashed in different circumstances, as well as the obnoxious loud=funny pretty often.
I watched an interview with Paul Rudd where he described Robinson’s process and it really cleared things up for me. He said Robinson took the script and the first thing he did was “take all the jokes out”. He thinks the funniest moments in movies and TV are never the ones that are intentionally trying to be funny. So he builds insane characters and situations that are comedic but doesn’t actually make jokes. Obviously it doesn’t work for everyone but I will say the single hardest time I have laughed in a movie theater was this year, watching Friendship, and I was the only person in the theater laughing at the “joke”. I laughed so hard and long I caused cascading laugh reactions to me laughing so hard
I enjoy I Think You Should Leave, and this movie is basically the equivalent of taking a sketch from the show and stretching it into a full length movie. It had some good laughs, but it didn’t quite work for me as a film.
Yeah, I think it could have been really good as a 30 minute episode. But as a whole movie it was stretched really thin.
There’s a British film called All My Friends Hate Me from 2021 which covered a lot of the same themes but I think was more successful in terms of capturing the social anxiety of the main character. It’s incredibly funny but uses tropes from the horror genre to really emphasise the paranoia the main character is feeling.
Friendship felt very safe, for lack of a better word. It was cringe but had a soft edge to it like the US Office.
