July 2025

Friendship

“People are weird, they’re getting weirder,” Kate Micucci once sang with her twee, indie-inflected sunniness: a quaint lil’ ditty to some, but a horrifying omen to others. Maybe it’s largely due to my own specific tendencies (*ahem*...), but I would pray for a fabled D&D-style rulebook on social interactions when braving the perilous art of ‘the hang’: inside jokes, unreadable faces, obscure references, indecipherable tones -  it’s like a taunting, sneering rorschach test from simply attempting to meet a few new fellas. Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship feels like it has bottled the essence of that anxiety, and bestowed it (rather mundane) life through the vessel of Craig Waterman. Helmed by the cringe-connoisseur himself Tim Robinson, we initially see Craig as this belligerent buffoon, an inept suburbanite, as he commits, less suicide, and more social-seppuku before his mystified newfound chums. Although somewhat egomanic and undeniably odious to those closest to him, Robinson expertly instills our anti-hero with an oddly sick sense of unfortunate empathy: his catastrophic cordial blunders all stem from a very human need to be accepted. Enter Paul Rudd’s seemingly angelic Austin Carmichael, first introduced to Craig through the celestial bloom of a lens flare, ringing with almost godly idolisation. I lament that I have been Craig Waterman, and it’s this regrettable relatability that grants Friendship its venom; for what DeYoung has truly concocted is one of the most relevant horror-comedies of all time. 

Friendship positions itself within a constant air of unease. With an arguable implication of neurodivergence surrounding Robinson’s character, presentations of the ritualistic, haze-like practices of fraternal societies and covert networks seem bafflingly alien: Austin and his buddies spontaneously belt out a rendition of My Boo and engage in amateur boxing, his teenage son (Jack Dylan Grazer) kisses his mother on the lips, who herself (Kate Mara) decides to retreat to her idyllic ex-partner after overcoming cancer - it’s all bemusingly cryptic to Craig, as well as us the viewer, and something the pedestrian outsider attempts to mask himself into with calamitous, often hilarious results. It cannot be overstated that Friendship is capital ‘F’ Funny, with Robinson contorting the mannerisms of an Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell ‘man-child’ archetype, to a level of extreme, explosive anti-comedy: think Step Brothers from hell. 

But the brilliance of Friendship lies in the aforementioned bizarro sense of woeful relatability- Craig’s absurdist outbursts manifest from an attempted, genuinely earnest understanding of the ridiculousness of human communication and comradery, something that suggests everyone, even his mustachioed muse Austin, is masquerading due to a warzone-like trepidation around breaking these customs:  Rudd’s character has hints of an insecure poseur and the ‘butt of the joke’ in his work, not too dissimilar from our leading so-called ‘weirdo’. It’s this ‘destruction of etiquette’ phenomena that’s equal parts dire, laughable, and incomprehensible to anyone navigating the terrifying thick of it. I may be a Craig Waterman, but I think most people truly are.

KPop Demon Hunters

I haven’t yet had a chance to bust out the line “Why yes, I actually wrote my dissertation on high-femme cinema” onto unsuspecting unfortunates. It would probably lead to the three-word death sentence of a perfunctory “...oh did you?” (and then a call to human resources). But it is my ultimate not-even-guilty pleasure - a shame-free penchant for all things pink, pretty, and girly, so KPop Demon Hunters should’ve been a slam dunk for me. It shares a somewhat spiritual succession to Josie and the Pussycats, one of my all-time favourites, with a trio of rockin’ gal-pals defying the commercialised status quo in punky rebellion - Demon Hunters echoes this perhaps not narratively, but rather visually. With the homogenised Disney-style of regulating female characters to the exclusively delicate and dainty, the film boasts an egalitarian stance in its portrayal of traditionally ‘gendered’ animation. The girls are allowed to be goofy: their faces stretch, their eyes bulge, and then inexplicably burst into popcorn when ogling a hair-swishing rival boy band. The hyperbolic expressions extend to their atypically unruly personalities too, the crown-jewel being a carb-infused pig-out frenzy scene, leading to an interruption of the bad guy’s monologue with an unladylike belch: the unapologetically overt silliness of Rumi, Mira and Zoey brilliantly strengthens their sisterhood, adding a new layer of empowerment beyond the zippy, neon monster slashing. 

Although my main problem could be boiled down to the fact that it simply isn’t Josie and the Pussycats. For whilst KPop Demon Hunters’ aesthetic squees with a cartoonish charm, I find it sorely disappointing that it feels overloaded and entangled within the intricacies and really mismatched self-seriousness of its own high-concept, unlike the brash simplicity of the former. Sandwiched between the poppy fun are stretches of long-winded nattering about Honmoon, dimensions, and otherworldly oojamaflip - it’s the solemn, verbal bilge that bloats the overall plot into a fatiguing bore. 

I’m not suggesting for a second that animated films should be averse to grounded drama, but I must emphasise that what it says on the tin is ‘KPop Demon Hunters’; there’s a character with gorgeous abs literally called Abs. The awkward shoehorning of convoluted lore, not to mention an aggressively straight-played romance and third-act breakup just feel inharmonious to the established pep that the film should exude. And unlike Josie, there seems to be a glossy censorship of the true toxicity of KPop culture: the adoring fans are presented as Huntr/x’s fragile lifeblood, when a truly daring narrative would adopt a more biting, tongue-and-cheek edge to complement its looks. Up the camp, lose the angst, and then we’re on to something.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (4K Rerelease)

As redundant as this sounds, the fact that Mamoru Hosoda’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time returns to cinemas, with his two sophomore features following suit, is in itself a form of time travel. On one level, a retrospective across the austere timeline of the heralded ‘next Miyazaki’, launching a new generation back to his humble, post-Digimon, pre-academy accoladed roots. But from a more selfish viewpoint, a rewinding of a thirteen-year gap for me personally, and a welcome mingling with the foggy, tweenage memories of my initial first encounter. Because The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was one that never really clicked: the supposedly mushy high-school melodrama and sappy, gossipy sop of it all resonated next to nothing for my romance-repellent, 11-year-old self, still under the kiddish spell that relationship dramas were, and in most sophisticated terms, ‘yucky’. What a joy then to say that this rerelease proved to be a well-needed do-over; I left the screening with a fresh, unclouded appreciation for Hosoda’s excellently twisty breakthrough, a spring in my step, and my qualms, fittingly, a thing of the past. 

Before the fantastical extravagance of projects like Belle and The Boy and the Beast, Hosoda’s virtuosic oeuvre was the ‘lo-fi sci-fi’, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time showcases the auteur at perhaps his most lackadaisical. Scenes of bounding across the ominously impressionistic outer realm of the multiverse are counterbalanced with sights of orange skies, a summer humidity, and bouts of baseball. And our timeless heroine, the scatterbrained Makoto, essentially wielding the power of a deity, uses her omnipotence for the most trivial and mellow gains. She retakes tests, sings karaoke for hours, and constantly resets a friend when he asks her out, resulting in one of the film’s most playful and funniest scenes. The back-and-forth time jumping of Makoto’s juvenile hijinks is a testament to the superb editing in Hosoda’s early work; his use of tight, snappy cuts aids the storytelling flow massively, transforming the plot into something so satisfyingly spirited and lively. And when the deeper mechanics of her powers are eventually revealed, it’s kept brief and succinct (something KPop Demon Hunters wasn’t able to abide by). 

Hosoda never lets the mumbo-jumbo cause a rift within the character-driven core, that being a coming-of-age tale of prolonging the inevitable - the ‘timey wimey’ itself being almost emblematic of the lazy, repetitive trance of high school life. As Makoto freewheels through her past, she learns to grasp the utmost face of maturity: the future. Much like my own journey and perspective on the film itself, she accepts the contentment and pain that things change, she changes, and people change, though ultimately, for the best. I look forward to hopping back into Summer Wars and Wolf Children next month to see if my nostalgic fondness for those films will be reaffirmed. You could say it’s the ultimate form of cinematic time tra…oh forget it.