After spending several frustrating years in Hollywood schlepping from audition to audition waiting for that big break, actor Jon Favreau's luck changed when the semi-autobiographical screenplay he had written scored some meagre financing and went before the cameras with a debuting Doug Liman on board as director. Featuring Faverau in the lead and his two best friends, Vince Vaughn and Ron Livingston, playing essentially themselves, the film is a surprisingly wry, insightful ode to male bonding which captures the loose banter and self-deprecating humour of a group of guys who spend their daytime hours griping their about life and their nights bar-hopping and looking for love in some of L.A.'s hippest night spots. Couched in the language of the so-called cocktail nation, a 90s retro-Swing movement that's apparently captured the imagination of the nation's nightclubbers, it all adds up to a laid-back, anecdotal journey into the comical, pseudo angst-ridden world of guydom where love and its attendant euphoria and shortcomings is only as far away as the next trendy bar. Not bad.
