Friends with Kids: some thoughts

[diaphenia]

As the last person to see the movie (besides stillscape) I am sure we're all talked out on it, but let's take a few minutes and get back to it.



Overall, I enjoyed it. I mean, Adam Scott. How are you a person? How do you look so awesome in t-shirts? How could anyone believe your nose is a bad thing? Sigh I don't really think I'm that obsessed with him, really, but he was great. I liked Adam Scott; I liked his character less. Now, they tried their hardest to win me over, from the opening scene's close up o The God Delusio to his impassioned speech that tossed in a 'organized religion is crap.' But he comes across as pretty sleazy when it comes to women.

But probably still better than Julie, who's annoyingly passive for most of the movie. And this is awful, but I had a difficult time with Jennifer Westfeldt, or more specifically, her voice. I'm not sure I've ever seen her in anything else, but I'm disinclined to do so; her voice annoyed me. I don't know if that's her natural voice or a character choice, but I spent most of the movie wanting her to speak louder and deeper. I do covet her hair; it's luscious and beautiful, and I want to touch it. 

If I had one wish, I wanted to see more of the Bridesmaids remixed couples. I feel like those four had some interesting stories and I wanted the cameras to follow them home.

Here's the issue I had with the movie: I don't buy it. 

Caveat: I'm in my mid-20s, and I don't have kids. I don't want kids. I'm pretty happy with my potted palm tree.

The premise of the movie seems to be that having children makes you awful. I could buy that. I mean, to be fair, my friends haven't had kids yet, though there's one on the cusp, so who knows if children make adults awful? But I could believe it. Or at least I could believe Westfeldt, who has no children herself, could buy it, though if I were Adam Scott or Maya Rudolph I might have some things to say on that topic. But it' so weir to me that Jason and Julie could look at their friends turning awful and decide that the problem is being in a relationship with your co-parent.

And then the idea that five months into Joe's life they are making quiches? I call shenanigans. Even if they are parenting part-time, even if they have a nanny, I just don't buy that it's smooth sailing. Again, my friends haven't had a baby yet, but I don't know any parents who make quiches. 

I think they might have drugged that kid. Way too well-behaved, apparently the easiest child in the world. 

The other thing that really confused me was MJ. Let's be clear: I liked her more than Julie, if for no other reason than that she knew what she wanted- at least with her career- and went to get it. But here's the thing- if MJ was so anti-child, why was she dating an older man with a brand new baby? Did she want a lasting relationship with Jason, and if she did, what was her plans in regards to Joe over the long haul? When I say I don't want kids, I mean it. I don't want to parent someone else's child either, which is why I would never date someone with a young child (in a decade or two I can picture myself dating someone with grown children). Why did she keep dating him? Would she have agreed to be a stepparent to a child we never saw her interact with?

On some level I agreed with Jon Hamm's character when he argued that they should have thought this through. Had they not had their necessary rom-com ending, they would have had only a gentlemen's agreement regarding their child. She moves? He apparently can't do anything about it. It's a strange plan, and I don't... is this really something people do? Because they shouldn't.

I sound harsh, here, and I did like it and I'll probably go see it again in theaters, because I'm a childless person with disposable income and I want to see it again. But the premise is so insane I just don't understand how adults with children agreed to film it. 

Comments

[saucydiva.livejournal.com]

I find the demographics vs. reactions all over the map, at least of the people on my lj tonight. I need to stop arguing with rikyl that parenting should be depicted as being harder since, you know, she has two kids and I have a plant.

The point that Jason came to love her only in her absence is interesting, and I'm going to have to contemplate it more. As with the rest of your points, because, for instance, I didn't really think about their parenting styles or communication patterns. Hmmm.

[saucydiva.livejournal.com]

Now, the suddenly deemed worthy girl is just such a trope I didn't even really contemplate how screwed up an idea that is as as a trope. What's up with that, society?

[ballroom_pink.livejournal.com]

The iPhones got me out of sync from the beginning.

[sullen-aquarian.livejournal.com]

There has got to be a business for selling old technology to movies/TV so they don't look anachronistic. My personal pet peeve is songs appearing in movies set before the song came out.

[k8-26-2.livejournal.com]

I mean, that specific instance where he gets mad at her for being late when he wanted to do something is a good example of something that happens, whether you parent under the same roof as a couple or as divorced parents or, in the case of this movie, as platonic friends. I don't think Julie ended up being the primary parent until she moved away, but that was my take on it.

[k8-26-2.livejournal.com]

I don't think the premise is that having kids makes you awful. I think Jason and Julie thought at first that having kids made their friends awful. (Though, really, Ben was awful from the beginning so I don't know why they didn't come to that realization earlier.) the problems their friends had were always there, and maybe the stress of having those kids amplified those problems. And I do see those two couples as having very different types of problems. Ben and Missy had a genuinely terrible relationship. With Alex and Leslie, I think it was probably more that they were shocked at how their friends were so tired all the time, and not as "fun" as they used to be. (But, one thing I have learned is that once everyone starts having kids, everyone has fun again. It's just a different kind of fun.)

At 5 months, yes, they could totally be making quiches. A baby that young doesn't do very much that requires both parents' attention at the same time, at least not very often. My older son would only nap on me for the first six months of his life - which was not a huge problem because I really happen to enjoy sitting around watching TV and reading books - so I did a lot of sitting around holding a baby. And even then, without my help, my husband (the better cook in our family) regularly made good food. When I was on my own with the babies I made edible food. I still make merely edible food. Also, some babies are just really easy. My sister and I have four boys between us, and while I wouldn't say either of my kids was particularly difficult (aside from the older one NEVER NEEDING TO SLEEP), her 3.5 year old was such an easy baby compared to my boys and his brother. Angel baby. They got lucky with him and it does make you kind of want to hate those people, but it does happen. My reality is closer to Alex and Leslie. I mean, if you are terrible at keeping house and prone to letting things slide, ithat situation is not going to improve when the baby arrives. If you are super compulsive about cleaning, your house will be clean even after the baby is born.

I like Jennifer Westfeldt a lot but I can see what it is about her that you may find off putting.

[k8-26-2.livejournal.com]

But at least they looked like the older model. I have the boxier one, which was the newest one when they were filming the movie, and the phones in the early scenes looked like the older model.

I don't know why I focused so intently on that, but I did.

[whimsical-irony.livejournal.com]

I can't find the post on tumblr where I ranted about it, but I wrote up a new thing here.

[whimsical-irony.livejournal.com]

It all worked out for the best, because I totally agree with everything you wrote. I zero'ed in on the dynamic between men and women as problematic but you brought up some really interesting points I hadn't considered.

[summerswings.livejournal.com]

Didn't you hear? Apparently the Mayans didn't have leap years so we've already passed the date which should've been December 22nd, and the world didn't end! If we didn't have leap years, today's date would be somewhere around July-August 2013.

[summerswings.livejournal.com]

I thought the premise was just 'having kids makes your relationship suck and you not want to have sex with your partner anymore' which for Jason would be the biggest travesty in the world, apparently. I think I really liked the premise in a movie, but in real life I think it would suck. Being a child of divorce sucks, but being a kid whose parents were never even married, and you have to switch houses like every two or three days, or even every day? Where is the stability? Don't kids need stability? I feel like it should've worked for them though, because technically, they were raising the child together, but they still got to have their own lives, free time and personal space, and whenever they had the child they basically got to raise it however they wanted without having to have any input from the other person (apart from the part where we saw Jason tell Kurt that he and Julie didn't allow sweets in the morning or something, so obviously they had made some kind of list of common agreements).

I'm sorry if this is a weird question and asks too much of your personal views, but, about not wanting to be a step-parent to young kids, what if you fell in love with someone who had kids? i know you can make the conscious decision to not date anyone with kids, but it's a crazy world and sometimes life happens and you fall in love with someone before even dating them, or maybe knowing them enough to know that they have kids. I can kind of see that MJ didn't want to be a parent, but they only had Joe half the time, and I think if you were completely in love with someone, you would rather have them and their kid in your life, than not have them at all. I do find it weird that we never saw Jason and MJ talk about that, though.

Now, thinking about it, if it didn't have such an incredible cast, I really don't think I'd bother seeing it at all, or that it would even be theatrically released. Although, it was really funny in parts. But I feel like I missed half the jokes because JW's voice was so soft. It was frustrating.

I also really didn't like the male/female dichotomy, although it was interesting that Julie's [annoyingly] perfect boyfriend kind of reverted that trope, and was made more appealing because he didn't want to go off with the men and MJ and ski, and instead preferred to stay at the cabin with the women. Have those of you who didn't like the gender stereotypes in this movie seen Away We Go? I really expected FWK to be more like Away We Go, with the unconventional parenting, and the awesome comedic leads, and do you prefer the gender commentary in that movie?

I was kind of annoyed that they went with the conventional cliched ending, because I wanted it to work, even though their stupid, weird idea actually working out would probably be the biggest cliche of all. Wah.

[sullen-aquarian.livejournal.com]

I completely missed that! Well, that is certainly a relief : ).

[ballroom_pink.livejournal.com]

They were iPhone 1 or whatever but it still seemed like a stretch. (The first iPhone did come out in 2007 if that's what they were going for.)

[saucydiva.livejournal.com]

To be fair, and I should have made this more clear in my post, I was basing my reaction to the ease with with J/J took care of that baby on the reactions of their four friends. Now, I can see myself with a five month old (and I'm confused where she came from in this scenario) and I would be melted in a pile on the floor, but these other four people were certainly shocked they were doing so well with the kid. As I do not have much experience with babies, I'm not sure howaccurate anything is, but the four characters with three kids between them were shocked.

For the record, as a baby I apparently napped once a day when you are supposed to nap twice a day, and once I was supposed to nap once a day I refused. Other than that I was perfect, probably.

[k8-26-2.livejournal.com]

Ha! You and my son, apparently. He was a terrible napper, started phasing it out when he turned 1, and stopped altogether by the time her turned 2, by which point I was very pregnant with Kid #2. It was super awesome. (It was not.) He will be nine in a few months and I am still bitter about this. Still.

[rikyl.livejournal.com]

Ha ha, yes, this is kind of a ridiculous argument. Ironically, I spent all last week arguing with my 5-year-old and went out to see this movie in the frame of mind of desperately needing to escape my own children. But I was actually kind of relieved that the movie didn't portray parenting is this totally awful, soul-sucking thing.

I don't remember them talking a lot about parenting details, but I had a general sense that they were on the same page on things, that they shared values, and agreed on things like religion. There were miscommunications and probably things that came up that they didn't anticipate, but I didn't see that as a huge problem for them. It seemed like they were coparenting a lot. But, I think the movie didn't really spend much time on that section, so it's hard to tell. A lot was glossed over.

[whimsical-irony.livejournal.com]

I loved Away We Go! I hadn't thought of it in comparison with FWK, but they do touch on a lot of similar issues while tackling them from different perspectives. I loved the show, don't tell route Away We Go took with Burt and Verona trying to find the best way to raise a kid and discovering that really there is no perfect system and you just have to make it work for you. And Burt was super into talking about boobs, but somehow it came across as endearing instead of annoying.

[saucydiva.livejournal.com]

I've not seen Away We Go; incidentally, I was with my friend D recently and I saw a copy of that and mentioned I had always wanted to see it and he said it was awful. But I'd be curious your thoughts on it, if you'd care to share.

I don't know if MJ would have been ok with being a step-parent, but I think marrying someone with a child is committing to a lifetime of parenting, since you can't share a space with a child and refuse to engage with it. And maybe she's be ok with that, but maybe not.

As for my own love life... I mean, time will tell. But I tend to believe that love isn't enough; you must have compatible lives. Not to mention that someone who loves their child is unlikely to fall for someone who isn't enamored of the child as well.

[saucydiva.livejournal.com]

Not to prolong the argument, but I was writing a response to Kate and it occurred to me that, wait, why do I think parenting is hard? and then I realized that the reason I thought they couldn't make quiches is because the parents in the movie thought that. So I'm not so much arguing my experience- which is a younger sibling, and not much more- as the reactions of the parents in the movie. So, there we go. I'm not arguing from my perspective, but from Ben/Leslie/Andy/Missy's.

I mean, rock those quiches, parents. Or don't! Not rocking them is e

[rikyl.livejournal.com]

Ben and Missy think making quiches is hard because making quiches requires numerous hostile marital spats about, let's see ... who was supposed to remember to pick up eggs ... the fact that one of them has to feed the baby because the other one is busy making the #$#%$ %$^% quiches ... whose idea was it to have people over anyway? ... go pick up the baby because the baby is crying you heartless bastard ... whose idea was it to have the baby anyway? ... etc

Leslie and Alex think it's hard to make quiches because he spends so much time in the bathroom.

Mystery solved.

[lizinstereo.livejournal.com]

I read your post and agree with everything you said. I felt the same way about Jason's sudden change of heart.

[lizinstereo.livejournal.com]

The male/female thing really irked me because it was pervasive. It wasn't just insults, it was eating away at every level of the movie.

That trope is so messed up. He rejected her in public and then decides he wants her once he can't have her. And we're supposed to support him because?

[lizinstereo.livejournal.com]

My plant just grew a new flower. I feel like a proud parent (not really).

There were glances and other things that indicated Jason was coming to terms with his real feelings for Julie. It just did not work for me. I would have liked it better if he came to his epiphany in a different manner.

[summerswings.livejournal.com]

Ha ha yeeeah, I bet it was a huge concern...

[throwingpens.livejournal.com]

"I sound harsh, here, and I did like it and I'll probably go see it again in theaters, because I'm a childless person with disposable income and I want to see it again."

In one sentence, you sum up everything that I feel about this film and also make me laugh like a lunatic. I really dislike Megan Fox though, so I had a harder time enjoying her character.