Cinema’s only “perfect” movie, according to Dave Franco
It could have been so easy for Dave Franco to get lost in the shadow of his brother. James Franco is not only seven years older than him, but he also became famous long before he did, thanks to the likes of Freaks and Geeks and the James Dean biopic. However, in recent years, the younger Franco has caught up and, crucially, hasn’t been accused of any misconduct.
Dave got his film career rolling with a small role in Superbad, before getting his big break in the final season of Scrubs. You know, the one everybody loves. Since then, things have really taken off. Parts in the Neighbors, Now You See Me, and Jump Street franchises followed, as well as two voice roles in two different Lego films, for some reason. He also teamed up with James for The Disaster Artist and recently co-starred with Community star and his wife, Alison Brie, in the horror movie Together.
As well as having two older brothers also in the business—his other brother Tom can be spotted in a background role in The Disaster Artist—Dave also grew up on movies. He worked in a video store as a teenager, where he was paid in free rentals as he was too young to earn a wage. There were also the movies he would have watched growing up, one of which was the 2001 film Y tu mamá también by Alfonso Cuarón.
“I re-watched this movie recently and it’s perfect,” he told Rotten Tomatoes. The aggregation site had asked him to name his five favourite films, and this one was top of the list. “I’m not a very forgiving critic these days—I hate myself for it—but if I’m watching a movie that’s really great that has one scene that stands out to me as not working, it almost ruins the whole thing for me. I’m not proud of that, but this movie is one where every single moment, every single scene, or look between the actors, every line of dialogue, is just perfect.”
Y tu mamá también stars Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal as two young men living in Mexico. At a wedding, they meet Luisa, played by Maribel Verdú, an older woman with whom they both become infatuated. They embark on a road trip to a mystical beach, in the unlikely hope that Luisa will see past the age gap and fulfil their wildest fantasies. It’s a heady mixture of a road movie, a coming-of-age tale, and a good old-fashioned existential stress-a-thon.
Cuarón had had some success in the past, but this is what launched his career to the next level. His next project was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He’s never climbed down from that perch, making bigger and bigger films with each new endeavour. “It shows what a genius he is,” Dave said of the iconic Mexican filmmaker, “that the same guy can make this small, contained road trip movie about these two friends falling for the same girl, and then make a huge-scale film like Gravity. He’s one of my favourite directors.”
For those interested, the other films the actor chose were Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Psycho; Paul Thomas Anderson’s porn epic Boogie Nights; Spike Jonze’s genre-bending Being John Malkovich; and Rob Reiner’s classic coming-of-age tale Stand by Me.
