"Seeing a Friend for the End of the World" R
This 2012 movie stars Steve Carell and Kiera Knightley as two lonely people that encounter an extremely terse situation, one might say the final situation, that an asteroid will soon obliterate humanity and they of all people must get together. Taking the premise of avoiding someone unless they were the last people on Earth, and being stuck with them, could at times have been funny. Certainly the irony works in their favor, and at the best of times, the little moments are done well. One scene involves the lonely guy letting a spider go in his sink, only to have it bite him all over his face before he awakens the next day. Also a whacked out old man decides to off himself via mobsters, but is all preachy beforehand. In another scene, a couple he yelled at abandons their little dog with a note saying 'Sorry' and he begins using the joke about 'Sorry' as a plot device. The quirky underdog story could have been Wes Anderson territory, but it's actually Lorene Scafaria (Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist), another underdog director. As a character bit it has a tone of delight if not outward humor, but it is in no way laugh out loud. The jokes are more ironic and sad than funny. The guy realizes he is mismatched with the girl who is 20 years younger, but they learn to like each other. The only real drawback is it could have reached a much larger audience being PG 13 rather than R. Normally I don't mind it if a movie is rater R, but sometimes it really isin't necessary. The subject matter in this film doesn't even warrant an R, except a few times they say the F word. Just cutting that out would have meant more people could have seen it. This is the antithesis of the movie "2012" were it written by a Prozac sufferer.
Review by Adam Browne
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