As I grow older, the stick of wisdom that I brandish onto the younger generations is that when it comes to mixing friendships with other spaces in your life, you should never shit where you eat. Moving together? You better coordinate that morning rush schedule. Co-owning something together? Get that pet prenup. Working together? My thoughts from Fair Play can summarize my fear. In Extremely Unique Dynamic, the collaboration between friends Harrison Xu and Ivan Leung, their friendship is put to the test when in-movie longtime friends Ryan (Xu) and Danny (Leung) decide to make a last-minute movie in the last weekend Ryan has in LA before he moves to Toronto.
Socially, making a movie without a script or direction with friends can be a blast. Professionally, I can’t wholly advise that. Within the first film’s quarter, Ryan establishes that he wants to make a movie-inside-a-movie-inside-a-movie (I don’t think even Inception gets this far into the labyrinth) within the house. Though Danny’d rather have fun and get high, he aides to his friend’s convoluted process. Ryan gets amped, pulling up his director/writer/cameraperson pants to get the movie just right.
Unlike My First Film, another meta-moviemaking experience dipped in serious tones, Extremely Unique Dynamic is all about the tongue-in-cheek. The movie’s title describes an all-too-familiar feeling between two friends who feel that their friendship is so entertaining that everyone else will be reduced to tears in laughter when this dynamic is portrayed on screen. While this groupthink-of-two is acknowledged by Danny in the beginning, Ryan then starts thinking about the movie in “marketing”: which demographics will their film reach? How does one appear like a normal person when Danny, playing a closeted character named Gregg and/or Jasper, is trying to talk about his sexuality in and out of script? Who will love it?
The movie is homespun from friendship developed from the womb up who work and work it out together. They think a lot about themselves and their experience in the audition-extra-no callbacks gamble. How do two Asian American filmmakers find appeal in the US market nowadays? Do you bulk up like Simu Liu? Do you find yourself cast in a rom-com directed by box office extraordinaire Jon Chu? Or do you luck out in a blue-lightning role like EEAAO?
Except for the presence of Michelle Yeoh, those films have next to nothing in common but a sliver of representation in those genres. When did we think we could see Asian men as romantic leads again? Or make audiences understand the nuances of the Mandarin language? While the conversations in Extremely Unique Dynamic might not feel as particularly interesting, what we can get out from watching it is the effort of filmmaking tugged between marketability and creative intent. Putting things together that you personally think looks cool or sounds great is a worthy enough endeavor. Ask any two people — two childhood friends, two roommates that despise each other, director and random audience member — to make something together. If they follow their heads with the unfiltered attempt to make something, anything, it’ll be a different result. If not, edibles can help.
Extremely Unique Dynamic
2024
dir. Harrison Xu, Ivan Leung, and Katherine Dudas
73 min.
Available digitally and on demand Wednesday, 1/29
