Movie review: We Are Your Friends

Hello, my dear readers!

This blog post is very special. You know why? Because I’m writing this post at Edinburgh Airport. Yes, I have finally turned my dream of 8 years into reality and moved to United Kingdom, Scotland to be specific. However, I won’t be staying in Edinburgh and the reason why I have time to create this blog post is the fact that my train to Aberdeen leaves in only 5 hours. And since I don’t feel like exploring the nightlife of Scotland just yet, I am sitting at the airport writing the review of We Are Your Friends – the last movie I have watched this summer. Without further ado, let’s begin!

IMDb summary: Caught between a forbidden romance and the expectations of his friends, aspiring DJ Cole Carter attempts to find the path in life that leads to fame and fortune.

Briefly, I would describe this film as a mash-up of Project X and High School Musical. What do these two things have in common and more importantly, how are they connected to this film? Well, for one this film has that talking to camera/breaking the 4^th wall action that Project X had. Moreover, the hardcore partying and living life in the name of fun are also a few themes that are similar to these two projects. High school musical is another side of the same coin. First of all, We Are Your Friends and HSM share the lead actor – Zac Efron (more on him later). Secondly, both of the films are movie musicals but not in the typical sense. Usually, music numbers in classical musical (Les Miserables for one) make no sense and without them, there would be no film. In HSM and WAYF, musical performances are relevant to the plot and have a more realistic explanation.

Writing and Directing

This movie is written and directed by Max Joseph. I only know him from Casey Neistat’s vlogs on YouTube. I am not really familiar with his previous work (he has directed a lot of documentaries as well as short films in addition to being the co-host of Catfish on MTV), but I think he did a nice job with this motion picture. The movie definitely wasn’t perfect but I believe that it deserved to have a much better opening weekend box office haul than it did have.

Story

The film’s plot was interesting and, while a bit cliché and choppy with tiny specs of cringe-worthy dialogue, it still succeeds at its biggest aim – to bringing EDM music to the level of real music. Now, please don’t get angry with me, but I have always thought that EDM should not be considered a real genre of music. I believed that it was very simple to make and that pressing a few keys on a keyboard of the computer required no real talent whatsoever. However, this movie showed me how ignorant I was and how much work actually goes into the creation of a single EDM piece. WAYF gave soul and substance to the genre as well as showed that magical things can happen when you mix real organic sounds with computer generated ones and sprinkle some emotions on top of it.

Visuals

This film was very appealing to the eyes as well as ears. Club scenes looked amazing and exciting and the explanatory animation and words, appearing on screen, were also nice additions. Some transitions from scene to scene were a bit awkward, but there weren’t many of them for me to penalize the film.

Music

Not surprisingly, this movie had a great soundtrack. The real life DJs, who were responsible for the majority of tracks were Segal and Pyramid. WAYF’s soundtrack was the thing that I was listening on my flight and I highly recommend you to give it a listen even if you don’t see the film.

Acting

Zac Efron as Cole Carter did an excellent job. I was always a fan of his and I believe that he played down-on-his-luck DJ perfectly. As much as I want to see him try his hand at more serious roles, I don’t want him to stop be in easy flicks like this one because he really shines in these types of films.

Wes Bentley as James Reed. The trailer sold this film to be a story about Cole (Efron) and his friends, but Bentley’s character – an older accomplished DJ James Reed had a very prominent role and his and Efron’s character’s relationship is much more developed and much more interesting than all the friendships in Cole’s crew. Bentley, as an actor, have been working for quite a while but he still hasn’t reached the A-list status and I have no idea why because he deserves to be on top with all the big names in the business.

Emily Ratajkowski as Sophie. Emily is known to most people as the girl from the infamous Blurred Lines video but she was also in Gone Girl (review). I liked her in this film, I loved the fact that her character was the boss in the business (meaning she was the one who planned James Reed’s gigs) and I enjoyed seeing her following her dream at the end of the film. I can’t wait to see more from Emily as an actress as well because she has real talent and people should just forget about that damn music video.

Jonny Weston as Dustin, Alex Shaffer as Squirrel and Shiloh Fernandez as Ollie. These three actors played Cole’s friends and sadly, while they were pretty to look at, they were disposable and unforgettable as characters. However, I liked the ideas that they introduced with each of the characters, just wish that the creators would have developed these ideas a bit more. Dustin symbolized the family, Squirrel – dreams and Ollie was the money. My favorite was Squirrel and his dialogue Best Part Of Life Is Before Everything Starts and Are We Ever Gonna Get Better Than This were quite nice additions to the story.

Jon Bernthal as Paige Morrel. Paige was the real estate businessman, who helped Cole and his friends get some money when they needed it. That side story derailed the plot a bit and the pay-off that Ollie would side with Paige at the end was very predictable.

All in all, I have enjoyed this film much more than the majority of people who actually saw it. And there weren’t many of them, to begin with. This movie was a perfect ending chapter of this summer’s films’ season and I was very happy that I chose to spend my last day of summer with We Are Your Friends.

Rate: 4.25/5

Trailer: We Are Your Friends trailer