[Editor's Note: For more coverage of GIFF, check out Joe Bardi's cover story on GIFF and expanded Q&A with festival President Chad Moore Mitch Perry's story on festival entry Full Signal, and more reviews of some of the films playing the festival.]
If you ever sat around with your friends talking about your lives in college and said "we should totally write a movie about this," then you probably could have made Friends (With Benefits). Of course, your friends would all need to be sleeping with each other and one would need to look just like Zack Morris (seriously). The film is a fairly predictable story of six 20-something friends “benefiting” from the one another, talking about it, failing spectacularly and then getting over it and/or falling in love in the meantime. It appears to be an attempt at creating Reality Bites for a new generation, except that movie was extraordinary and Friends (With Benefits) is merely watchable.
Friends (With Benefits) is screening Fri. March 19 at 10 p.m. at CinéBistro in Hyde Park.
Check out the trailer after the break …
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2010.