Friday, February 24, 2023

The Night Before (2015)

IMDb plot summary: On Christmas Eve, three lifelong friends spend the night in New York City looking for the Holy Grail of Christmas parties.
Directed by Jonathan Levine. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and Anthony Mackie.

The Night Before follows three friends who have had the same tradition every Christmas since college: going for a night of epic partying. Now as they've grown into adults with responsibilities, two of them are ready to put away the tradition, and so the three make this last Christmas Eve their best ever as a farewell. Raunchy drug party movies are usually not even close to being my genre, and I'm pretty mediocre on them at best, but a lot of the humor in this surprised me and made me laugh out loud. There were also plenty of jokes that didn't work for me, but I expected the ratio to be a lot more negative. It's also got a refreshingly supportive vibe for the genre, with everyone being pretty devoted to everyone having a good time. The strongest example is Rogen's character's wife, who could easily be framed as the nagging pregnancy wife irritated that her husband is going off partying without her on Christmas Eve (and then showing up extremely high at her family's Christmas Mass) but they neatly sidestep that trope and instead put them on the same team together helping him get through it, which is... refreshing. It's not my favorite movie by any means but I'm always pleased to find something in this vein that mostly works for me!

How it entered my Flickchart:
The Night Before > My Week With Marilyn
The Night Before < Anna Karenina
The Night Before < VeggieTales: Where's God When I'm S-Scared?
The Night Before > Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told
The Night Before > Y Tu Mamá Tambien
The Night Before > The Hidden Fortress
The Night Before > Talk Radio
The Night Before > The Mauritanian
The Night Before > Something to Sing About
The Night Before > The Romantics
The Night Before < Die Hard
Final spot: #1417 out of 3769, or 62%.

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