A gay romcom hits the mainstream

   

  Billed as the first gay romcom released by a major studio (Universal Pictures), Bros arrives in theaters with a stamp of approval from Judd Apatow’s production company and the benefit of having been shown at the recently concluded Toronto International Film Festival. 

    Additionally, the movie was directed by Nicholas Stoller, who has targeted mainstream audiences with comedies such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five Year Engagement.  Stoller co-wrote the screenplay with the movie’s star Billy Eichner, a gay comic and actor known for Billy on the Street, a comedy game show that aired on cable.

 I mention all this because the movie’s bona fides suggest big-time ambition. Bros apparently doesn't want to be assigned to some narrowly defined gay niche: It wants to bring everybody on board.

 How you react to the movie depends, at least in part, on how you react to Eichner, who’s playing Bobby, the host of a gay podcast and the movie's main character. 

   Early on, Bobby is appointed as director of the nation’s first LGBTQ+ museum.  Obsessed with gay history and with its purposeful exclusion from America’s story, Bobby presents a problem common to all obsessives: He can be annoying.

  Fortunately, as played by Eichner, Bobby also can be funny. He’s a walking compendium of edgy comments on pop culture, gay life, homophobia, and other subjects that make it clear that he's in the know —sometimes even about himself. 

  And, yes, some of the movie’s humor takes aim at gay culture. In a bar, Bobby and a friend talk about how straight people always think gay people are smart. Many actually are stupid, we're told.

   Later, a major donor to the museum insists that it include an interactive gay trauma exhibit that resembles a fun house ride. Ridiculous, no?

   Evidently well-versed in varieties of gayness, Eichner also gets  comic mileage making fun of gay Bro culture with its commitment to weight lifting, fitness, and ripped bodies.

  Because he runs a museum, Bobby also serves as the movie’s mouthpiece for gay history, presented in breezy fashion but still saddling the story with explanatory chores that are a little too much like a lecture.

 And now for the romantic part of the movie. After meeting at a club, Bobby falls for Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), an estate planner and gym rat who often relates to the world as a jock. 

  The rest of the movie adheres to romcom formula as the romance faces obstacles on its way toward the obligatory happy conclusion. 

  The gay sex scenes are no more explicit than what you'd find in most heterosexual romances, even when Stoller (Remember him? He's the director.) tries for a bit of outrageousness. 

   Eichner and Stoller treat a foursome as an opportunity for physical comedy, later letting us know that Bobby learned from his participation. He's looking for a more committed relationship than he initially imagined.

   There's also a scene in which Bobby meets Aaron’s parents when they make a Christmas visit to Manhattan. They're upstate New Yorkers who accept their son’s gayness but remain conventional.

   A second grade teacher, Aaron’s mother, decked out in a notably untrendy Christmas sweater, receives a lecture from Bobby about why her pupils should be exposed to gender diversity. She thinks they're too young.

   The movie later draws mom into woke circles: She brings her young students to the museum for a tour.

    Mostly Bobby and Aaron dominate the movie. The rest of the gender spectrum finds representation in the museum's staff, a smorgasbord of gender identities that results in amusing intra-staff rivalries.

   I'm not the biggest fan of today's romcoms. I don't do my cinema worship at the altar of When Harry Met Sally. So you'll pardon me for not celebrating the genre as much as Bros might like.

   But will Bros spark a trend of movies that might be billed as identity comedies? Who knows.

    It will be interesting, though, to see how Bros fares at the box office. Movement at the turnstiles may convey a bigger message than the movie itself.

Cozy up to 'Neighbors 2?' Not me

Still crude and dumb after all these years -- two to be exact.

If you loved the comedy Neighbors, you probably can stop reading. I was not a fan of that vulgar heap nor am I about to enthuse over Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the sequel to the 2014 hit.

Neighbors 2 declares its intentions almost immediately as it re-introduces us to Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne), the harried suburban couple from the first movie. In the movie's opening scene, a queasy Kelly vomits in Mac's face, letting us know -- in case we didn't already -- that we're in the kind of comedy more attuned to zits than wits.

But wait ....

Neighbors 2 seems to want to steer its sensibilities toward something more politically correct. A gay couple, former frat boys, become engaged during an early picture poker party. Later, Zac Efron's Teddy -- the frat-pack leader from the first movie -- cautions against using the word "ho" when referring to women. Not cool, says the suddenly sensitive Teddy.

Silly discussions about masculine and feminine roles also crop up from time to time.

Of course, all of this "sensitivity" has been stuffed into the same grossly stained sack that was tossed into the nation's multiplexes a couple of years ago.

As you can guess from the title, the sequel pulls a switch: Instead of noxious frat boys living next door to Mac and Kelly, noxious sorority girls move in.

This spells trouble. Mac and Kelly have just sold their home. During the escrow period, the buyers (Sam Richardson and Abbi Jacobsen) are entitled to back out for any reason.

Needless to say, once they learn that the house next door will be occupied by a sorority, they're eager to withdraw.

A word or two about this sorority: It's called Kappa Nu, and its members are young women who supposedly are rebelling against college rules. Evidently, on-campus sororities aren't allowed to host parties, something that the weed-smoking Kappa Nu women can't abide. If frat boys can have parties, shouldn't women be allowed to stage revels of their own?

The solution: rent a house off-campus.
Additionally, Kappa Nu's sisterhood consists of women who say they're repelled by typical frat-boy misogyny.

As it turns out, the founders of Kappa Nu (Chloe Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons and Beanie Feldstein) seem more dedicated to smoking pot than they are to upsetting any campus stereotypes.

Because they need help renting a house for their sorority, the women take in Efron's Teddy, who serves as an advisor. He tells the women how to throw parties that will raise the $5,000-a-month they'll need to rent a home and -- not coincidentally -- drive Mac and Kelly crazy.

The girls eventually tire of Teddy, and give him the heave-ho. He is, after all, the most dreaded of their personal nightmares, an "old person."

OK, enough about the plot, which obviously focuses on attempts by Mac and Kelly to oust the sorority girls from the house next door.

You'll have to overlook a Jewish joke (offensive, I thought) to enjoy the rest of the comedy, but Efron certainly gives his bare-chested all as a dim-witted guy who wants to feel appreciated.

In conversation with Mac, Teddy describes the girls' lack of team spirit with a claim that they don't know how to work together. "There's no 'i' in sorority," he says, thus turning the joke on his own meager mental powers.

Director Nicholas Stoller doesn't do much to keep the movie from looking like what it is, a sloppy second helping that for all its attempts to capture a 2016 zeitgeist is really just more of the same.

When the neighbors are frat boys

A gross-out comedy that parties hard.

The new comedy Neighbors failed to persuade me that Seth Rogen's inner schlubiness deserves to occupy a movie's center ring, a spot he's now sharing with Zac Efron and Rose Byrne.

Neighbors -- which contrasts a dissolute-looking Rogen with a super-trim Zac Efron -- may create an early summer stir at the box office.

Why? The movie bristles with the kind of vulgar energies that mark most of today's successful comedies. Neighbors is full of opportunities for gross-out jokes -- and doesn't pass on many of them.

The high-concept gist: A party-hardy fraternity moves next door to a young couple that's adjusting to taking care of their first child, a baby daughter.

At first, the new parents (Rogen and Rose Byrne) try to cozy up to their raucous neighbors, who are being led by Efron's Teddy, the frat's chief party boy.

Husband and wife share in the drug-fueled debauchery, awkwardly trying to present themselves as peers -- albeit peers with responsibilities.

When that tactic fails to produce the desired quiet, Rogen and Byrne declare war on the rowdy neighbors, employing subterfuge and other means to close the frat house.

The purported battle between adults and hormonally active young men is a bit of sham. Neighbors seems like the kind of comedy that would become a DVD staple at Delta Psi Beta, the movie's fictional fraternity.

Director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five-Year Engagement) happily embraces the movie's premise, which allows for more gags than story.

To me, Rogen's performance seems barely distinguishable from everything else he's done. Byrne -- whose Australian accent seems to come and go -- displays no qualms about leaping into the profane fray. Efron -- often sans shirt -- tries to mix comedy and hunk appeal as the movie's Peter Pan figure, another guy who refuses to grow up.

A subplot pits Efron's character against one of his fraternity brothers (Dave Franco), a young man who begins to understand that the fraternity's concerns (who invented the game of beer pong, for example) aren't exactly on a par with working to limit the effects of climate change.

We get it: A few years ago, Rogen's character would have been Efron's character: A few years from now Efron's character might be Rogen's character. Profound, no?

You'll find jokes about breast pumps and dildos. A sight gag involving airbags made me laugh.

Personally, I wouldn't want to live next door to any character in a movie that parades its crude humor across the screen while making what feel like random attempts to play grown-up.

Oh well, I suppose something is accomplished here: Neighbors makes the strongest case for restrictive zoning ever put on film.