Fun
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Nostalgic
Intense
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Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better.
What to Stream This Weekend
The very first scene of Take the 10, the newest Netflix original movie from writer/director Chester Tam, sees two best friend driving in a car, talking about The Brown Bunny, of all things. Friends yakking about pop-culture esoterica to establish characters and comedic tone isn’t anything that our of the ordinary, but there was something about starting the movie with a medias-res conversation about Chloe Sevigny giving an IRL blowjob to Vincent Gallo in a decade-old movie that nobody saw in the first place kicks things off on a note of desperation that Take the 10 never truly kicks. It’s a scene that evokes everything from Pulp Fiction to Superbad, and the movie that follows evokes those films and more, but there’s a spark missing that leaves this film wanting.
The friends, Chris and Chester, are the kinds of best pals who always seem a little at odds with each other. They’re planning to go to Brazil together, if they can get over their cold feet. But first, they’ve got a concert to go to, a work day to get through, and a drug dealer to steal from. You’d think people in the movies would have figured out what a bad idea it is to steal from drug dealers by now. Chris and Chester are played by Josh Peck and Tony Revolori, two actors who have been great in movies that are not dissimilar to this. In The Wackness, Peck played a weed dealer traversing New York City in a movie with the same kind of meandering scuzziness that Take the 10 deals in. Revolori was a supporting player in the great 2015 film Dope, another movie about kids who get caught up in a cross-town odyssey of bad decisions and dangerous scrapes. Dope is also streaming on Netflix today. You should almost certainly watch Dope instead.
Where Take the 10 at its best feels like warmed over Superbad leftovers; Dope is bright, it’s fresh, it’s energetic. Both movies are comedies that focus on a group of friends who find themselves as the unlikely center of a sprawling, dangerous plot involving stolen drugs and threats of violent retribution. Writer/director Rick Famuyiwa gave his characters such great specificity, and performances by Shameik Moore (of Netflix’s The Get Down), Kiersey Clemons, and Revolori himself capitalize on the freshness of those characters. Even as the story moves through the progressions of a crime-odyssey template that we’ve never seen before, it’s impossible not to feel invested as Malcolm and his pals try to navigate a plot that feels knowingly ill-fitting. That very out-of-placeness is the key to the whole movie’s success.
While Peck and Revolori provide decent friend chemistry at the center of Take the 10, digressions into the stories of side characters — Kevin Corrigan as a shady Whole Foods manager; Chee himself as a semi-hapless drug dealer; The Last Man on Earth‘s Cleopatra Coleman as Chee’s girlfriend — rob the story of any kind of momentum. By the end of the film, you’ll forget that Andy Samberg makes a cameo as Peck’s brother.
It’s not often that fate gives you a chance to course-correct the way that Take the 10 does. It’s going to remind you of Dope. When it does, you don’t even have to change platforms. Just click on over to Dope and continue living your best life.
