In honor of Shaun of the Dead's 30th (woof. can you believe it?) anniversary, here a friendship bracelet of the best best friendships the big screen has shown us. The thing with best friends is that sometimes best friends are family, sometimes lovers, but the important thing with best friends is you can only have one. That's what makes them the Best friend. I don't make the rules, I only enforce them in list form.
Thelma & Louise
The phrase “partner in crime” has become a cliche when it comes to best friends. Your “ride or die” has also suffered the same fate. What remains is the romantic sentiment that your best friend will remain by your side no matter what. They would put aside their comfortable life because you're having one of the worst weeks imaginable. They would drive off a dang cliff while holding your hand and look great doing it.
Dumb and Dumber
The Farrelly Brothers comedy that was part of Jim Carrey's “best year ever” became a basic cable staple. Unlike the Farrelly's other efforts, it didn't lead with its braindead comedy. It had the friendship between two low-status boneheads at its heart. What made it so relatable was it hit the nerve of what Capitalism dangles in front of you: you can be rich and everyone will like you and be nice to you. You'll have cool friends that laugh at your jokes all while you wear expensive, stupid-looking clothes, eating expensive, stupid-looking food and Lauren Holly will be into you. But at the end of the day, it's all bullshit and all that really matters is your stupid best friend.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The classic “we sure got into a bunch of crazy stuff, didn't we? Well, might as well die together.” It means there was a certain alchemy when these are perhaps THE roles that first come to mind when we remember Robert Redford or Paul Newman.
RRR
The strongest (and I do mean strong) new entrant to the Best Friend canon, is the feature length embodiment of the hands-clapped-bulging-bicep meme from Predator. It's a story of love, revolution, but it's mainly a grandiose soap opera about being pals. A plot line where Raju plays wingman of the century to Bheem results in a song and dance sequence so irresistible it ended up on the Oscar stage. The two share one of the greatest friendship montages ever projected.
Frances Ha
Early adulthood is filled with the joy of getting to do adult things mixed with the pain of learning what it is to be one. An adolescence energy propels Frances and Sophie’s contemporary bohemian life until it inevitably hits the speed bump of the terrifying question “what’s next?” When your best friend’s life starts to take a different path than yours, it triggers the existential dread of anxiety, anger, jealousy, and a feeling of betrayal. It’s difficult to have to actually figure your shit out.
Stan & Ollie
A dual act can try to find success by going their separate ways but often times it's the combination that's greater than the sum of its parts. Audiences largely slept on the biopic about Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy on the downswing of their career, but Coogan And Reilly offer a bittersweet portrait of two legends who never stopped appreciating the genius in the other, even if the world already did.
Scarecrow
Pacino and a bossy Gene Hackman are two drifters that get tangled up like two pieces of trash in the wind. Pacino scampers after Hackman, stifling his short-fuse time after time. A forgotten gem in Pacino’s masterful run that can hang with the likes of The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, and Serpico.
Brokeback Mountain
A best friend is someone with whom you can share secrets. Someone with whom you are comfortable in professing the superficial pressures of society that make us feel shame or hate ourselves. That openness may not be so easily communicated but there's an understanding that exists on a more primal level. It's a connection that transcends the Gordian knot of pride, morals, and every outside influence that clogs your soul. It doesn't need words. It's a silent “I know. I know you can't really figure it out. But I know.”
Ghost World
Mean girls come in all persuasions. Terry Zwigoff’s realization of the graphic novel presents the drab lives of misfit teens, unforgettably portrayed by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, navigating adolescence and the eccentric characters in their town.
Clerks
Would Dante and Randall be friends if they weren’t sentenced by the suburban gods to work in adjacent shops? Chained to their hourly-wage counters with only enough slack to reach each other; their bickering friendship is a match made in heaven given the options around them. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is a worthy alternative.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
If not the poster children of the “Dudes Rock” label, certainly up there on Mount Dudemore.
Midnight Cowboy
I didn’t know much about Midnight Cowboy when I first saw it. Yeah, I knew at some point someone would be “walking here.” But I didn’t know it was about how these two people, the personification of Rizzo the Rat and a hick who loves to fuck, find each other in the desperate era of 1970s New York and come to rely on each other. And I sure as shit didn’t know I would be crying at the end of it.
Lethal Weapon 2
It’s Lethal Weapon 2 because the toilet bomb scene is the best encapsulation of the Riggs-Murtaugh partnership in all four movies.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar
A work of staggering genius, Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumalo gave us the tale of two culotte-loving ladies who go on the journey of a lifetime… to Florida! Their small town lives selling furniture and eating hot dog soup at talking club gets turned upside-down when they stumble on to Jamie Dornan and his mission to get revenge for his lady love.
First Cow
First Cow begins with a framing mechanism in which Alia Shawkat and her pup stumble across two skeletons beside each other. It's the image that tells you what Kally Reichardt's film is about and how it ends. Two good-hearted souls find each other on the frontier of a burgeoning America. It's a tale that borrows from the formula of the successful entrepreneurs that have yet to come: one has the talent the other has the charisma. It came to us amidst a pandemic lock down when a gentle, genial, and spacious film was just the cure we needed. It has a heist, it has a cow, it has a heart the size of Oregon.
Wayne's World
Wayne & Garth: sweet boys who rock and are funny enough to get two movies out of a recurring SNL sketch. They’d be doing a podcast if it was set today, right?
Big Night
As an only child, sibling dynamics are elusive to me. It's like being assigned a best friend even though you don't particularly like each other. I imagine there's a love that's not mandatory but inherent. All that time spent together must develop relationship skills with the other that are only developed via a shared bathroom. Dreams dashed, fist-fight on a beach, and you can still end up arm-in-arm in one of the loveliest final shots I've ever seen.
The Trip
Are Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon best friends in real life? Probably not. But they are also not the Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon they portray in the travelog series The Trip. So for the purposes of the kayfabe, Steve and Rob are best friends who can rib each other about the balance of their accomplishments, both professional and personal, until it devolves evolves into doing Roger Moore impressions and singing Abba a capella.
Tenet
Christopher Nolan gives us a friendship movie in true Nolanesque fashion. John David Washington is a capable spy guy who is best friends with Robert Pattinson –only he doesn't know it yet. The COVID-released backwards action thriller offers all of the difficult-to-follow-but-don’t-worry-about-it plotting we’ve come to love from our IMAX daddy. In a temporal pincer movement of a drink order, Pattinson knows Washington loves his Diet Coke.
Back to the Future
Yeah, there’s the time machine out of a DeLorean and Biff and almost fucking your mom and changing the course of your family’s life by messing with the past but at the heart of it is Marty and Doc. The fact that we don’t really care about how weird it is that this seemingly popular, good-looking high school kid and this crazy old inventor are each other’s maybe only friends is a testament to how much we care about their relationship. The letters they write to each other to inform them of the events of the future/past in order to make sure the other is okay are the emotional beats that charge the narrative.
Step Brothers
How many of you have best friends you hated at first? Hands? Yeah, I see some in the back there. We can be blind to connecting with others when we've got issues to deal with. Sometimes a new person thrust into your life can be a good lightning rod for all those frustrations. But when you can each finally get over yourselves, you may just find out the other person is just as stupid and cool as you are.
Superbad
When you're young, it's kinda nice to just always have that one person you hang out with all the time. Like, there's no question. You and this person will be hanging out. It's also nice when that person shares the same social status. Superbad was the horny teen movie that was really about male intimacy; forever signified (for better or worse) by the famous nose boop.
