Are we ever going to better than this?
We Are Your Friends knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be when it grows up. We Are Your Friends is fun, predictable, and leads the audience on a hero’s journey. It demonstrates that working hard enough gets us to where we want to be and it asks a fundamental questions of: “Are we ever going to be better than this?”
Reviewers who didn’t like the movie:
A plethora of beats drop but little else of note — musical or otherwise — happens in the Zac Efron DJ fest We Are Your Friends — Brian Truitt, USA Today
Not unlike the generation it’s trying to represent, We Are Your Friends never really takes the time to consider what it would like to say. — Dan Mecca, The Film Stage
Efron is a natural and likeable presence on screen and has proven to be a pretty decent actor in films like Hairspray and The Paperboy. But the problem with “regularness” is that, in the wrong hands, it’s kind of dull. — Max Weiss, Baltimore Magazine
We Are Your Friends Captures the Millennial Malaise of, “If I’m not selling my company for 400 million then I’m a loser.”
But the movie gives the viewer a formula of how to combat that malaise — if we happen to be an aspiring artist or creative. This is highlighted in the plot of the movie and it goes something like this:
- Have friends that ask good questions and aspire to greatness
- Get a mentor
- Work on your craft
- Challenge your mentor
- Have experiences — Good — Bad — Really Ugly.
- Use life experiences to make art
- Rinse and repeat
Zac Efron is a bit dull, his friends are caricatures, and Emily Ratajkowski is there for being hot. I didn’t start the movie “We Are Your Friends” with the idea of seeing the next Daniel Day Lewis.
We Are Your Friends’ premise is that Zac Efron needs one good song to launch his DJ career. The same could be applied for any profession.
To be a DJ you need to start with one good song
To be a writer you need to start with one good story
To be a filmmaker you need to start with one good film
To be an artist you need one good piece of art
To be an entrepreneur you need one good business
In the movie Zac Efron’s character is 23 and has been presumably working on being a DJ since he was in high school. In theory he has been working on this since he was probably about 17 — maybe earlier. It takes Efron’s character a minimum of 6 years to get his big break.
Patience fellow millennials. Patience.
I’m a millennial. It is easy to compare myself to the wildly successful people my age or younger. To some extent my friends are like the characters in the movie and I the viewer project myself onto Zac Efron’s blank character.
We Are Your Friends lets you live the life of an aspiring DJ for 2 hours. Despite everything else that is wrong with the movie at least it got that part right.
The final song is the culmination of everything that has happened to Efron during the course of the movie. And after it was over I was asking myself, “what I could do right now to be better?”
My immediate response was to write this story.
