Getting on Party

This morning I watched Joshy (2016).

This one snuck up on me. The opening credits shows the story of a woman making dinner for her fiance on his birthday while he goes out to the gym. This section is intercut with the list of the cast, except instead of just fulfilling union requirements, this list of actors serves as a stark juxtoposition. The film features Thomas Middleditch, Adam Pally, Nick Kroll, Brett Gelman, Jenny Slate, Lauren Graham, Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Jake Johnson, and Paul Riser among others. It's an all-star team of great comedic minds, great comic performers and the sequence is concludes with the fiance finding the woman has killed herself while he was at the gym. On his birthday.

This is a funny story about a group of people going through tough times in adulthood coming together through the circumstance of a bachelor party for the saddest of them all. They don't know each other all that well and their personalities don't quite fit together. They make bad decisions that don't quite go away but they don't fall into traps a Hollywood comedy about a misfit bachelor party would run in to.

In a way, the movie feels more like it's a scene away from being a horror movie, like someone is going to break into their party and change the tone of the story. It could have swung to one of the party guests having a secret that only comes out when he glowers into the camera with a smirk. Instead, the characters are more complex and real than characters from a raunchy comedy or a horror film and it's quite enjoyable to meet those characters. Additionally, I was glad that in a movie where I recognized every actor but one, that one, Alex Ross Perry (the character who wants to play a role playing board game the whole time) made me take notice of his acting and the strange depth of his character that has interests in legitimate science fiction as well as obsessive conspiracy theories.

Letterboxd review.