A May/December rom-com

  The Idea of You returns Anne Hathaway to the rom-com arena as a 40-year-old woman who falls for a 24-year-old member of a boy band (Nicholas Galitzine), one of those manufactured groups that inspire seventh-grade girls to plaster posers on their bedroom walls.

  A May-December romance revolves around the increasing sexual and romantic assertions of Hathaway’s recently divorced character. As you might guess, the wounds of divorce serve as a mandatory marker for an impending rebirth.

 To add complication, Hathaway’s Solene has a 16-year-old daughter (Ella Rubin) and a judgmental ex-husband (Reid Scott) who left her for another woman. 

 The movie’s cute-meet takes place at Coachella, the music festival to which Solene reluctantly escorts her daughter and several friends. Solene mistakes Galitzine’s private trailer for a public bathroom, generating a cute meet initiated by the desire to pee. Hey, whatever gets you there.

  Solene owns a successful art gallery in LA. Conveniently, she employs able assistants who allow her to pursue the burgeoning romance when Rubin’s Izzie leaves for summer camps. Solene travels with Galitzine's Hayes on the band's European tour.

  Adapting a novel by Robinne Lee, director Michael Showalter presents Galitzine’s Hayes as a self-aware young man who yearns to transcend the  limitations of a career built around boy-band superficiality. He’s looking to enrich his life with something genuine.

  The movie’s two stars generate chemistry while the plot tilts into topicality. The romance becomes tabloid fodder during the European tour.

   Obstacles arise on cue, and as the story evolves, the movie loses some of its early comic flavor without inspiring much by way of serious consideration.

   These days, my expectations for rom-coms are pretty low but this one has an inherent problem: Hathaway, an Oscar-winning actress and A-Lister, outshines Galitzine, who's asked to play the kind of star who makes women weak-kneed. 

    Let's leave it at this: A pre-summer bauble with a sturdy rom-com structure, Idea of You understands that it needs to be a bit more than eye candy -- or maybe that's just Hathaway at work.

Young gay women start a fight club

   If you haven't already, it's time you discovered Ayo Edebiri, the young comedian/actress who appeared earlier this summer in Theater Camp and who’s best known for her work in the acclaimed series, Bear.

  In Bear, Edebiri joins a beautiful ensemble as sous chef Sydney Adams. She scores again as a high school lesbian with a crush on a cheerleader in Bottoms, a risky comedy from director Emma Seligman, who directed the indie hit Shiva Baby.

   Working from a screenplay she wrote with Rachel Sennott, one of the movie’s stars, Seligman tells a boldly outlandish story about two   teens who feign a claim that they've experienced incarceration in “juvie.” Street cred established, they start a high school fight club for young women. 

   The duo wants to meet “hot” cheerleaders but sells the club as a feminist launching pad and mini-society for self-protection.

   Here, Seligman takes her biggest risk. The fight club is no feather-weight sham. These girls push and punch for real, usurping violent  strategies usually reserved for men. 

     The most obnoxious men in the movie are the school’s football players, who -- in blatant parodic fashion -- never take off their uniforms; even during classes, they refuse to shed the signature emblems of their identity.

    It’s far-fetched, of course, but Sennott, as the snarky PJ, and Edebiri, as the more wary Josie, are funny and engaging. They’re playing kids who have been tagged as “losers,” but both have an underlying sense of self that suggests they believe in their sensibilities, and the story eventually conspires to teach them that their adopted facades can be as much of a trap as football uniforms.

    Bottoms doesn't deal with the ways in which prejudice crushes young gay people. PG and Josie experience bigotry but they’re not isolated and they’re not jittery about declaring their sexual preferences. 

    Edebiri and Sennott, who starred in Shiva Baby, receive able support from Havana Rose Liu, as Isabel, the cheerleader girlfriend of the school’s principal jock (Nicholas Galitzine). Kala Gerber appears as Brittany, the cheerleader PJ is crushing on. 

     Ruby Cruz has a nice turn as Hazel, a club member who might be the most dangerously subversive of them all.

      Marshawn Lynch was never known for making public statements during his NFL career. Here,  the erstwhile Seattle star, known a plays a high school history teacher who accepts the role of faculty adviser to the fight club. Yes, he’s funny.

      Even ambitious comedies need plots and I wouldn’t say that Bottoms excels when it comes to storytelling, even though it stages an explosive finale with a riotous flavor that banishes any lingering thoughts of credibility.

      The physical violence — between club members and those deemed as antagonists — can cut against the comic grain. People really seem to get hurt; that may be part of Seligman’s strategy. She’s intent on upsetting an apple cart full of cliches about young women.

    Seligman eventually softens the proceedings to allow for genuine expression of emotion, a ploy that flirts with genre cliche.

    At  other times, the movie seems to be straining. Note the inclusion of a horny mom  (Dagmara Dominczyk) who's having an affair with Galitzine's high-school hunk of a character.

    Not everything about the movie works but Seligman, Sennott and Edebiri are onto something and, like the characters they play, they’re ready to make their mark, even if it leaves a few bruises.

A gay romcom follows formula

 

I suppose that Red, White & Royal Blue proves that a gay-themed romcom can be as formulaic and mushy as those that feature relationships between men and women. The movie’s premise brims with high-concept simplicity: What if the handsome bisexual son of an American president fell in love with a handsome British prince, the one who — like real-life Harry — never will ascend to the throne. Can the prince (Nicholas Galitzine) defy royal stricture and go public with his love? Will the American (Taylor Zakhar Perez) torpedo his mother’s campaign for reelection? Will Uma Thurman, who plays the president, accept her son’s gayward tilt? Director Matthew Lopez answers these questions in a movie that opts for fantasy and glamor while preaching-to-the-choir about the importance of love and acceptance. No arguing with the message, but the delivery system is mostly lightweight, moving the two main characters from antagonists to lovers and bringing the proceedings to a feel-good conclusion. Stephen Fry makes an appearance as the king who wants his grandson to deny his gayness, even after exposure in the tabloids. Maybe Red,White and Royal Blue deserves credit for not trying to be anything more than late-summer fluff, a movie in which two men fight the odds, rush into their love/sex scenes, and face predictable obstacles. But is it asking too much for even a formula job to include a few edgy touches?