12/15/2023 0 Comments Im not your friend pulp fiction![]() ![]() The interiors are modern homes, restaurants, exercise clubs, offices, bedrooms, book stores. LaBute deliberately isolates these characters from identification with any particular city, so we can't categorize them and distance ourselves with an easy statement like, “Look at how they behave in Los Angeles.” They live in a generic, affluent America. Only the Kinski character seems adrift, as if she wants to be nice and is a little puzzled that Keener can't seem to receive on that frequency. The Brenneman character is enraged to be treated like an object by her new lover, but of course is treated like one by Eckhart, her husband. himself, and he likes the look of his lover. The Eckhart character, who pleasures himself as no other person can, is cheating on his wife with. ![]() The Jason Patric character, too, makes his living off the physical expression of sex: He's possibly a gynecologist (that's hinted, but left vague). Later, in a store, Kinski reads the sides of a tampon box and asks, “Did you write this?” It's like she's picking up an author's latest volume in a bookstore, although in this case the medium is carefully chosen. He doesn't insist on the funny moments, because they might distort the tone, but they're fine, as when the Keener character tells Kinski she's a writer-”if you read the sides of a tampon box.” She writes ad copy, in other words. As a writer, he composes dialogue that can be funny, heartless and satirical, all at once. His emphasis is on writing: As a director, he is functional, straightforward and uncluttered. LaBute, who writes and directs, is an intriguing new talent. Meanwhile, they're helpless captives inside a system that has cut them off from their full natures, and they don't even know it. Every once in a while two of them would square off into a squawking fit over which rock they were entitled to stand on. The other day I spent a long time looking at the penguins in the Shedd Aquarium. The underlying truth is that no one cares for or about anybody else very much, and all of the fooling around is just an exercise in selfishness. During the course of the movie these people will cheat on and with one another in various ways.Ī plot summary, describing who does what and with whom, would be pointless. In addition to Kinski, who works as an artist's assistant, there is another single character, played by Jason Patric. A character played by Catherine Keener can't stand it when her partner ( Ben Stiller) talks during sex, and later, after sex with Nastassja Kinski, when she's asked, “What did you like the best?” she replies, “I liked the silence best.” Ben Stiller and Keener are a couple Eckhart and Amy Brenneman are a couple. Early in the film, the character played by Aaron Eckhart frankly confesses that he is his own favorite sexual partner. And yet there is some kind of a wall closing them off from one another. They live in good “spaces,” they have good jobs, they eat in trendy restaurants and are well dressed. Of course they have fashionable exteriors. In LaBute's world, the characters are deeply wounded and resentful, they are locked onto their own egos, they are like infants for which everything is either me! or mine! Sometimes this can be very funny-for the audience, not for them. LaBute's “Your Friends and Neighbors” is to “In the Company of Men” as Quentin Tarantino's “ Pulp Fiction” was to “ Reservoir Dogs.” In both cases, the second film reveals the full scope of the talent, and the director, given greater resources, paints what he earlier sketched. ![]()
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