Anorexia drama cuts to the bone
Friends From College 6 episodes, available Friday
THIS series was created by husband-wife duo Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco and follows the lives of an ageing friend group coming to terms with their dysfunctional attachments to one another.
Stoller is best known for his big comedy hits on the big screen, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall and both Neighbors movies, but Friends from College is perhaps a bit more akin to his movie The Five-Year Engagement, which straddles the line between drama and comedy without feeling like it does either especially brilliantly.
The plot centres on married couple Ethan and Lisa, who move back to New York and reunite with their old college pals from the 1990s, including ultra-successful designer Sam (Annie Parisse), literary agent Max (Fred Savage of The Wonder Years fame), perpetual waster Nick (Nat Faxon) and New Age-y actress Marianne (Jae Suh Park). But they’re not exactly as close as they were back in their Harvard days and turns out several of them are having affairs with each other.
The writers seem to be going for a bittersweet, anti-hero vibe with this — sort of like Carrie in Sex and the City — but the cheating storyline doesn’t say anything profound about love or relationships, and it’s difficult to fully care about characters that are this unlikeable.
To The Bone (2017) Available Friday
FROM the suicide controversy surrounding 13 Reasons Why, Netflix releases this pot-stirring movie which deals with the thorny issue of eating disorders.
Lily Collins plays Ellen, a 20-year-old woman with anorexia who is starving herself to death because she thinks that she can never be thin enough. Keanu Reeves stars as the woman’s caring but unconventional doctor.
The trailer has already caused a stir on social media with some alleging that it glamorises a very serious medical problem, while the movie’s defenders have argued that it’s important that issues around eating disorders are aired in dramas such as this. Interestingly the young star has said that people frequently complimented her on her extreme weight-loss for the role, but says that magazines were reluctant to use her on their covers because they feared a backlash.
Not an easy watch but it does pack a punch and doubtless the personal experience of writer/director Marti Noxon (who starved herself as a teen) lends it emotional authenticity.
The Standups, Season 1 6 episodes, available now
IT does feel like there is a glut of comedy content at the moment. Hardly a week goes by without a new stand-up release on Netflix and the number of sitcoms on the service has also risen exponentially over the last two years.
Much as we all need to laugh, either to escape the horror of real life or to mock the ridiculousness of it, not everyone who’s putting out stand-up has the material worth filling that time. That’s where this series — a sort of ‘best of’ variety pack — comes in.
Rather than dishing up the standard comedy special length of one hour, this gives us half-hour segments of acclaimed comedians — Dan Soder, Nate Bargatze, Fortune Feimster, Deon Cole, Nikki Glaser and Beth Stelling.
With bingeing in mind, the half-hours share the talents of veteran comedy director Troy Miller, who has designed the end of each standup special to segue seamlessly to the next.
Chasing Coral (2017) Available Friday
THIS is a little bit like An Inconvenient Truth but it focuses on one particularly awful consequence of pollution and global warming: the death of the world’s coral reefs. The film shows the bleached wasteland that once vibrant reefs have been transformed into — and explains the huge significance of the seemingly small temperature changes that global warming has wrought. (Basically we need to think of a one or two-degree rise, not in terms of how that would affect us if it were air temperature, but in terms of our internal body temperature.)
The photography is jaw dropping — every reef is an eye-popping delight — and the sight of the pollution doing its damage is unexpectedly moving. There’s also the nice bonus of actress Kristen Bell singing the theme tune.