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 They Came Together is a romantic comedy directed by David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, Role Models, Wanderlust) and written by Wain & Michael Showalter. It stars Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Ed Helms, Cobie Smulders, Jason Mantzoukas, Max Greenfield, Melanie Lynskey and a lot more. The plot doesn't really matter too much. It opens at a restaurant where Joel and Molly (Rudd, Poehler) are having dinner with two friends (Bill Hader & Ellie Kemper). Joel & Molly tell the story of how they met and fell in love, which they frequently describe as a "bad romantic comedy." They Came Together turns out to be exactly that, but it's completely aware of it. The best way I can describe the film is Airplane! for romantic comedies. It follows the same cliched structure/format of the films it spoofs, going for general references rather than specific ones. A lot of the humour is based in how accurately they replicate the different cliches of the genre, only to follow it with some absurd twist on our expectations. A clip, to give an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu6w-_ViHZ8 And a trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPzHRXUcUWU Anyone who likes WHAS or anything done by members of The State should absolutely go see it. I was laughing pretty hard throughout the whole movie, and it's the best thing David Wain has done since WHAS (not that Role Models or Wanderlust are bad, mind you). It's on VOD and iTunes now, and also in select theatres.
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Jun 30, 2014 05:30
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 19:04 |
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It's absolutely the best film Wain and has done since WHAS. I loved The Ten, but this blows that away. There's so much wacky loving nonsense in this that it could really only come from Wain/Showalter. The scene referenced in the thread title, for example. That sequence comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere, and is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a movie. Also the music video sequence. I laughed so hard at some scenes in this that I probably woke someone else in my building up. It's outstanding. Some jokes don't hit, and are kinda dumb, but if you're a fan of David Wain or Michael Showalter or any of The State folks, you should expect that by now and find it endearing rather than off-putting. There are so many classic gags that it more than makes up for the misses anyway. Max Greenfield's character always referring to Rudd as "big brother", and the recurring "Wait.... thanks". Oh man, just spot on parody and it's carried so goddamn well by the cast. I've liked every film Wain has directed, but this and Wet Hot American Summer are on the top of the list for sure. It's just as rapid-fire as WHAS or an episode of Stella or Childrens Hospital, and never really loses that pace. It's exactly what I want from a David Wain movie. Loved it. Cpt. Spring Types fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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Jun 30, 2014 10:45
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I saw this last night and was kind of disappointed. I'm a massive fan of Stella, WHAS, and David Wain's humor in general. Maybe it's because of that that I just didn't like it. To me it felt Wain just stitched together a bunch of episodes of Wainy Days and recast Paul Rudd as a better looking version of himself (a la John Cusack as Woody Allen in Bullets over Broadway). And maybe it's because Wainy Days exists that this felt like rehashed material. It also wasn't nearly as cohesive or coherent as WHAS. WHAS barely had a plot but it did have inertia with Showalter's character growing up at the end. This one kind of just circles itself character development wise until it's over. I still laughed a bunch but it just didn't feel like a real movie to me and doesn't come close to WHAS.
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Jun 30, 2014 14:08
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This was really good and a lot funnier than Wet Hot American Summer
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Jun 30, 2014 16:49
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The "Tell me about it" scene absolutely destroyed me. It just keeps on going and going and going...
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Jun 30, 2014 19:34
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I liked it. Did you guys notice how New York City was almost like another character in the movie?
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Jun 30, 2014 22:02
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This movie is supremely hilarious and I recommend it to anyone who likes anything. The scene where they meet Molly's parents made me cry.
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Jul 5, 2014 02:21
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Christopher Meloni owns
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Jul 5, 2014 03:03
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Hat Thoughts posted:Christopher Meloni owns poo poo, now I definitely need to see this. He was awesome in WHAS.
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Jul 5, 2014 03:21
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I thought it was kind of trite and telegraphed every single joke, dunno why people seem to really like, Ifucking love Wain but seriously I think this is the worst movie he's done. It was just "Oh, look they're doing that thing they do in Romantic Comedies, but instead of being specific they're just being super generic". Just didn't think it was funny at all. The one scene that did make me laugh though was Bill Hader and his girlfriends reaction to him talking about his Grandma, but even that was telegraphed.
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Jul 5, 2014 03:33
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I rented it VOD today and liked it, didn't love it. The ending started to drag for me, which is saying something because it was only 78 minutes long. But I'll take any Stella I can get. I swear to god though, the scene where Michael Shannon bursts onto the scene, fights Paul Rudd, and is immediately shot point-blank in the face by an NYPD officer in the background of the scene made me laugh for at least a minute straight. Oh, and when Paul almost hosed his grandma also killed me. Great, I'm already remembering scenes I loved. Looks like I'll have to watch it again tomorrow before my rental ends. I have a feeling it's going to keep getting better. And, of course, the quoted scene from the title was the best. You can say that again!
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Jul 5, 2014 05:13
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Well, this is a good movie if you have forgotten that comedy exists outside of the LA comedy scene. This movie works fine despite clearly not really hitting the nail on the head of what they were going for. Best part of this is simply the little gags every once in a while. The film in between those gags was not very interesting. But it's pretty good. Lauged out loud a bit. Kinda cool to see lots of NBC inner circle NY comedians in this. Although the best part of this is the LA based actors... dare I say...
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Jul 5, 2014 05:38
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Saw this tonight and thought it was kind of a mixed bag. I absolutely loved a few bits like when Bob and Brenda are mouthing words to each other across a dinner table and the words are subtitled on the screen and Bob sneezes and knocks over the words and nervously sweeps them off the table, when Joel meets Molly's son for the first time and talks Pokemon statistics with him, the whole scene with Molly's mom seducing her boyfriends as a test and the family laughing about it, the Judge Judy cameo, Joel almost loving his grandma and the Michael Shannon fight scene. Those all totally made me lose my poo poo. Chris Meloni was hilarious in it, too, and there were several throwaway lines that I chuckled at. But then there were also quite a few jokes that fell totally flat for me and a couple scenes like the "Tell me about it!" scene were funny at first but then went on wayyy too long to the point where they stopped being funny, like something out of Family Guy. Also I've been binge-watching Parks & Rec the last few days and Amy Poehler is a riot in that, but very few of her parts in this made me laugh. Fortunately her few scenes that really are funny are some of the funniest scenes in the whole movie. I'd say it's above-average for sure but I wasn't consistently laughing my rear end off throughout the whole thing. I suppose I'd recommend it but it's not like a "holy poo poo, you have to see this right now" type of recommendation. Rageaholic fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 09:29
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Watched this tonight, and while I laughed my rear end off at quite a few bits, there was a running "theme" which just didn't work for me, namely the insistence on breaking the fourth wall and pointing out exactly what aspects of the Romantic Comedy they were parodying. That, and when they just outright tell you "this is a Corny Romantic Comedy". The whole framing device gimmick was just kind of dumb, and while I understand that that's the whole point (in a real romantic comedy it'd take you out of the movie... here they make it so that not only does it take you out of the movie it tells you you're watching a movie). I don't know, that's just always been a sticking point for me in genre parodies. If you're going to mock a cliche, don't explain that it's a cliche while you're doing it. Wet Hot American Summer kind of did that in a few places but it never just stopped the film and then explained to the audience what it was doing. I know that David Wain seems to like sarcastic "Anti-Comedy", where he takes something lame or awkward and then drags it out until you laugh, but it didn't always work in this movie. Pretty good overall, and hilarious in small does, but not really great and it didn't really "mesh" well as a movie.
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Jul 6, 2014 04:55
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. . . poo poo.
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Jul 6, 2014 05:13
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The weakest part of the film is the outright 'we're explicitly saying in dialogue that this is a romantic comedy parody' parts, to be sure. However, according to Wain in the Q&A I attended with him for TCT, that framing device was added in after test screenings, who legitimately couldn't tell that the movie was a parody of romantic comedies. Rex Reed didn't even get it after the fact. I'm a little more forgiving of the film now that I know that the dumbest parts were basically forced into the film for dumb people.
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Jul 6, 2014 06:52
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I just watched this and thought it was pretty okay. Around the second half of the movie, it got pretty funny, but I felt the first half of the movie played out too much like an earnest attempt at a movie; in the beginning, the jokes were spread thin, and were separated by scenes that felt a bit too "normal". Had I not known beforehand that it was a parody, I'd probably have given up on it after 15 minutes thinking it was just a poorly done standard romcom.
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Jul 6, 2014 14:14
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Argue posted:I just watched this and thought it was pretty okay. Around the second half of the movie, it got pretty funny, but I felt the first half of the movie played out too much like an earnest attempt at a movie; in the beginning, the jokes were spread thin, and were separated by scenes that felt a bit too "normal". Had I not known beforehand that it was a parody, I'd probably have given up on it after 15 minutes thinking it was just a poorly done standard romcom. Well it was a good thing they also told you it was a parody in the opening minutes, too  I think the movie would have been so much better if they kept the slow build-up, took out the framing device (or left it in minus the "our life was like a dumb romantic comedy" bit) and just let the audience figure it out for themselves. Start out almost completely straight and then start ramping it up and see how far you can take it before the audience "gets it". The big thing this movie had against it was that it was pretty much created for people who're already familiar with David Wain. Anybody who wasn't a fan just wasn't going to get it without some serious explaining.
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Jul 6, 2014 14:29
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I'll have to get this on VOD or something since no theaters within several hours are showing it. I'm a huge Wain/Stella/State/WHAS/Etc fan so I can't help but feel I'll love this one too. Any of y'all who liked it, I suggest you check out Michael Show's 'The Baxter', which I imagine may hit a lot of the same notes. It's a "genuine" romantic comedy, but still fucks around with the genre tropes. Oh and also Peter Dinklage, Paul Rudd, Justin Thereoux, Elizabeth Banks and Michelle Williams.
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Jul 6, 2014 16:22
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King Vidiot posted:
I think this is why Wet Hot American Summer is still the better movie. It starts out as a seemingly standard camp movie/light spoof, only to slowly introduce the absurdist elements before it completely overtakes the film by the end. They Came Together starts out as something very absurd and silly. The Zucker/Abrahams influence is really strong in this compared to WHAS.
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Jul 6, 2014 18:17
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Tell me about it!
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Jul 7, 2014 15:48
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I thought the really self aware stuff worked pretty well just in how self aware it was. I know this sounds really  but for me it just sort of went past meta and just almost became a parody of meta. I just found it to all be so hilariously blunt and so blatant that for me it pretty much worked as asort of joke about how most movie handle this stuff these days. Anyways, overall I enjoyed it. It was extremely uneven but that's kind of the nature of this sort of thing. It's the type of movie where sometimes jokes get so far removed from the thing they are parodying that it's hard to even know what they were going for, but this also often leads to them doing jokes so odd that they're just unlike anything else.
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Jul 9, 2014 14:34
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Oh my god, this is incredible. I really liked the movie, maybe not quite up at WHAS level, but consistently very funny.
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Jul 9, 2014 15:51
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I thought there were a lot of really good little touches like Christopher Meloni and the sister apparently being in love out of nowhere. I think it definitely suffered by comparison to WHAS. It just never really builds up like WHAS does. It stays at an even baseline throughout, which was fine, but isn't exhausting in the way that WHAS is. Also, the divorce reveal seemed out of place and intended to echo the great ending of WHAS. But that ending in WHAS felt emotionally earnest whereas the reveal in this felt muddled and unnecessary. I'd definitely love to see another cut of the film.
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Jul 10, 2014 04:54
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 19:04 |
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I finally watched this today, and while I did enjoy it, I must've overhyped it in my head or something cos it just wasn't as good as I thought it would be. That's probably my fault, though. A few little things I liked: the fact that Cup Of Joel just literally ended up being tacked onto Molly's shop as a cart, that blatant "this is where I'll end up if I walk out on my wedding", the getting-dressed montage ending with Molly just missing Joel, the poop scene (can't not have a poop scene in movies like this). That's off the top of my head. I do wish they had used Max Greenfield a lot better, though. He's great comedic relief, but his character as Little Brother (did he actually have a name?) just didn't showcase what Greenfield can do. Missed opportunity, I think.
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Oct 20, 2014 12:50
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