Your Friends & Neighbors (1998)

Best movie of this year hands down!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Review: I quite enjoyed this simple but witty movie about a group of friends who are unhappy with there sex lives. It's very well written and all of the performances are great by the all star cast. The director made it entertaining by intertwining each characters stories with each other. You really don't know what is going to happen from one scene to the next, which made it unpredictable and interesting. It really does show that you don't need a massive budget to make a good movie. Watchable!Round-Up: It amazes me how much people can change with a load of money. Ben Stiller has obviously had a severe teeth job and Aaron Eckhart looks much better without that terrible moustache. Jason Patric has disappeared from the limelight since that terrible Speed 2 movie which was such a disappointment. Catherine Keener looked extremely young and her career had been going from strength to strength with movies like Captain Phillips and the Croods. Anyway, the movie has something for everyone, even though it's really old.I recommend this movie to people who are into there comedy/romance/dramas about a group of friends trying to improve there sex lives. 5/10

This is one of those movies that wallows in the ordinary unhappiness and dysfunction of real life. Sometimes those stories can be entertaining, but this film is undone by pretension, an inability to figure out the most interesting elements of its own story and the inclusion of a character who belongs in a completely different movie.Amy Brennerman and Aaron Eckhart play a married couple. They're friends with Catherine Keener and Ben Stiller, who play a couple who live together. Jason Patric plays Eckhart's and Stiller's bachelor friend and Nastassja Kinski plays a museum assistant they all come into contact with. Brennerman's character is what people used to call "frigid", greatly frustrating her and her husband. Stiller's guy is an emotionally immature chatterbox who somehow ended up with Keener's angry woman that pushes away real intimacy because she's afraid of losing her individuality. Patric plays a narcissistic sociopath who turns into a human cartoon after a bizarre sauna confession that doesn't fit anything else in this movie. Eckhart is, I guess, supposed to be the relatively normal guy the audience can identify with but becomes strangely passive just when a normal person would start to get angry at the miserable things that happen to him. Kinski plays, well, just a needy lesbian.The pretension of this movie is pretty unmistakable. None of the characters are named throughout the film, but then in the credits they all have similar sounding names (Cary, Terri, Jerry, etc). Eckhart, Keener, Patric and Stiller all play the same exact scene with Kinski at different points. This is very much a film that wants to be thought of as clever, but you usually need to be clever to have people think that.The second problem is that the movie is largely focused on its men, when the most interesting characters are Brennerman and Keener. Brennerman is a basically decent woman who can't have a satisfying sexual experience and feels incomplete without it. You can see how the lack inhibits her and how the need energizes her. Keener is a woman who wants to be in a relationship but is desperate to not be part of a "couple". You can see it in how she keeps Stiller at a distance but is heartbroken when she learns of his unfaithfulness and you can see her repeating the same pattern with Kinski, wanting to be together but not wanting to be close. But the story doesn't spend enough time with them and both characters end up being not much more than their emotional problems.And even when the film focuses on its male characters, it gives short shrift to the most compelling facet of their relationships. The dynamic of Stiller and Eckhart living vicariously through Patric's sexual adventures and of Stiller playing the junior partner to the more masculine Eckhart and Patric is only alluded to. We don't get enough of the three of them together and too much of Patric and Stiller on their own.Patric's performance is also wildly misplaced. The movie imagines itself to be about what could be happening with the people who live next door but Patric is like the serial killer who lives down the block. He's hard and cold and sharp and looks like he was teleported in from an alternate dimension compared to the other characters.Keener and Brennerman are quite good and if Your Friends and Neighbors had been more about them, it might have been a worthwhile film. As it stands, I can only recommend it if you can't comprehend how Neil LaBute could go from making In The Company of Men to doing a remake of The Wicker Man. Your Friends and Neighbors might have convinced LaBute and Hollywood that his creative shtick really had nowhere else to go.

In the first minutes of this film one of the main characters played by Ben Stiller explain to his audience, a class of students: " Its all about f-( censored )". And unfortunately the hole film is build on this simple and stupid sentence. If there is nothing else in a relationship then this no wonder the characters are so disappointed and unhappy. Dear Writer / director, believe me, there is much more in the world then this. Open your eyes and your heart and you'll find it everywhere!I bought this film because of his excellent cast. Catherine Keener, Jason Patric, Amy Brenneman, and many others I have seen in other movies. But, even a great cast can not help.

SPOILERS THROUGH: I first saw this movie after a friend recommended it to me. She knew I dug movies like "Closer" & "American Beauty" and told me this was a similar type of film. While I still think the other two are superior I did like this and found it to be a somber, provocative, performance driven multi character study and very interesting to watch.The six main characters were all played with excellence but sometimes in a film, there is one performer who walks away with the movie and in this case it is Jason Patrick. I must say this performance ranks up there as one that should have been awarded with an Aacademy Award but wasn't. Although all the characters are interesting, when Patrick is on screen he is just riveting. I first saw him, like so many movie buffs have, in "Lost Boys" and through the years have admired his performances in movies like "Rush" & "After Dark My Sweet". This is however, hands down, my favorite of his performances and I'm not sure I'd still be giving this film an 8 if he hadn't been in it.This movie is of coarse, about dysfunctional relationships and each performer brings something unique to the role their playing. I found the casting in general to be excellent and though most of the characters are dislikeable, their also interesting and one thing the movie does is get one's attention and keep it. The movie is extremely dialog driven and though it can drag at times, for the most part it stays extremely compelling to watch.Your friends & Neighbors reminded me of such movies as "Closer", "Sex,lies & Videotape" & "American Beauty", all of which I thought were superb. It also reminded me of the not superb but still intriguing "We don't live here anymore". And it even reminded me a bit of this year's "Friends With Money" which I liked a smidgen more then this. Although I did not think this was superb, it was well above average and very very good. If one likes any or all of the above mentioned movies chances are they will probably like this.The reason I did not think this was superb was because of a few things. One was the incomplete feeling I had about this film which I did not have about the above mentioned films I DID think were superb. For example,we, the audience, are not told a heck of a lot about any of these people and though we are exposed to their quirks and dysfunctional aspects, not much detail about them other then these aspects are provided. In some of these other films, I really did not have that feeling to the same degree. Also, The ending in my opinion, was weak when compared to the rest of the film although Brenneman's character ending up with Patrick's came out of left Field And genuinely surprised me.(I had thought at first Keener's character would wind up with him since she seemed to hate vulnerability in anyone she was romantically involved with.) I would have liked this movie to supply me with more detail on the characters of these people because there were to many loose ends and to strong an incomplete feeling at the end. I really had a difficult time with that and feel this should have been longer and a bit more structured.As far as the characters' themselves....well Keener's character was so dislikeable it was difficult to feel much toward her other then annoyance. Yet if the movie had shown more of her life other then telling her lovers to be quiet during sex, I doubt I'd have felt that way. Brenneman's character starts off dislike able but she gradually is developed as a lonely and perhaps depressed woman underneath the vivacity and Brenneman does a really good job with the part. (I think her performance is my second favorite.) Aeron Eckert is an amazing actor who's superb no matter what one sees him in and here he's no different. Stiller of whom I'm really not all that much of a fan, was very very good in a dramatic role and should be doing more dramatic material rather then playing almost the same role in in so many comedies. Natasha Kinski has not gotten as much recognition for her role but she should as her character was probably the most likable and had a sweetness and vulnerability that the others lacked, or perhaps wanted people to think they lacked. I actually though she came off as the most stable.I think in spite of the flaws, this was a really good movie with excellent Performances and my vote would be: see it, see it, see it! Although it's very dark, not very enjoyable at times and may leave one feeling a bit gloomy(or more then a bit) it's story and it's look at the darker aspects of relationships, is really really interesting and makes for kind of the anti sunny Rom com. Not romantic, not sunny, and definitely more then a little disturbing Your Friends & Neighbors is definitely not your typical movie. My vote's 8 of 10.