BFFs (Andrew Putschoegl, 2014): USA

Reviewed by Robin Kadir at Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2014

World Premiere of BFFs became a hit. Writers and leads were the same. Kat (Tara Karsian) gets a ticket to couples counseling weekend from her mom who wants her to get back together with her ex, but instead Kat brings her best friends Samantha (Andrea Grano) to have a relaxing and fun weekend while laughing at all the other couples. Pretty soon things start to get out of control and it don’t go quite as they expected.

A very expected setting due to the mood and genre. It was clear how they wanted the film to be, typical american comedy and to be honest; They pulled it off. Everybody laughed then they were suppose to, sometimes more than others, jokes that everybody understands and finds funny. The film had nice scene-endings, where they always end with a funny line or something you find exciting, not revealing everything in a scene, leaving somethings for the own mind. Something that is good for comedy-movies is to have strong face-reactions in closeups. Sometimes even exaggerating, for the fun of it and it’s really not as intense as a thriller or drama so it’s okay to do that, and director Andrew Putschoegl really took advantage of that.

It was filmed well, at the Q and A after the film they talked about the time pressure and how they skipped to take closeups of every character in a room with 10-12 people, and that is of course something you understand. They worked it out well to do it two and two and that really worked since everybody were couples. But something they should have had were going back to the master-shot once in a while, it really bothered me that you never got to go back to it, I quickly forgot how many that were in the room and when I didn’t get a master shot after a couple of coverage shots I were going crazy, I tried to count them and totally got away from the storyline, so that is something to think about.

Great work from Tara Karsian and Andrea Grano who both wrote this and also starred in it, it was well-written, really modern, this is what we expect from 2014, new jokes and funny lines, great acting as well. You could really tell that they had a great time doing this film, and also well directed by Andrew Putschoegl who got the right performance out of his actors.

I would definately recommend this movie, a lot of people are looking for these kinds of comedies, a feel good movie that just gives you some laughters and a good time, the world premiere were at hit and I have no doubt that it will keep on hitting.