Bros

Ever since I knew I was gay, I've always been on the lookout for people of a similar nature, as humans naturally do. "Gay" people in film/tv have often been heavily stereotyped. EG the effeminate gay best friend, or the badass butch lesbian who is just one of the boys.

While bros does try a little bit harder to break through the stereotyped glass ceiling, it still falls into that category of trying so hard to be gay that it feels unrelatable to most gay people, and no doubt straight people as well.

It's not a bad movie and is quite entertaining, and is worth the watch for those elements. But a core idea of this movie is the normalisation of sexuality with society, which is something it fails to do.

Normalisation occurs when we have love stories between peole who happen to be gay, like Brokeback Mountain. A character's sexuality should not be the driving force behind the movie; the characters should be interesting in themselves in a variety of ways.

Billy is no Julia Roberts in "My best friend's wedding". He can't pull off being neurotic yet charming. I struggled during the first 45 minutes wondering if I should turn my TV off or carry on. You only have to see the first five minutes to understand why Luke McFarland's character would ask him to tone it down during a family meeting (with relatives that look nothing like each other). You just can't root for this very annoying leading man, who is skeptical but chooses a restaurant with live dance and songs as a good spot for a family outing. The gag is the music during awkward moments. Funny!

For a movie that keeps making fun of Hallmark movies, they really needed to be more self-aware.

The editing is also really bad. It looks like a Netflix reality where it's painfully obvious that close-ups were part of a different take.

It seems like they came up with sketches or gags first and then they wondered how they could put them all together through a needlessly long story. Most of the artists are overacting as if that would make this funnier.

Luke is decent enough in his performance, but he has been better in other things.

As a man who really struggles with romcoms at the best of times, I was rather nervous about this. Actually, though, it steers clear of some (though not all) of the gay stereotypes and presents us with a genuinely quite funny love story about two forty-somethings who meet in a nightclub. One, "Bobby" (Billy Eichner) is a ordinary looking, gobby podcaster and activist who is trying to raise the money needed for an American National LGBTQ+ museum. The other is "Aaron" (Luke Macfarlane) - a lawyer who spends a fair amount of time on the cross-fit. They wouldn't appear to be the most natural of fits but a series of brief encounters on their opening night coupled with a fair degree of sarcasm and a kiss sets the tone for what happens next. Certainly, anyone who has a Dekkoo subscription will have seen the format before - and often, and this doesn't really vary the theme much. What does make this different is the characters have much more depth. Their relationship is never going to be straightforward and though sometimes delivered via annoyingly angry monologues, the character of "Bobby" makes some fairly profound and well reasoned arguments about the constraints history has imposed on people of differing sexualities over the years. Eichner is effective as a man who uses his sharp and pithy tongue to prove the best form of defence is attack, Macfarlane proves to be far more than the man with the muscle, and the writing from the former and director Nicholas Stoller clearly demonstrates that both men have skin in this particular game. Experience has clearly informed and fuelled this creative process. It can be a bit hit or miss, especially the third quarter when it all becomes a bit contrived, but the ending redeems it rather - if only for the pure schmaltz of the serenade - and I rather enjoyed it. It sure doesn't need a cinema screening, but it is entertainingly provocative at times. The BBFC slide at the top warned of "strong sex". Clearly they have never watched "Theo and Hugo" (2016) because there is nothing at all visual in this that could conceivably cause offence; even the language is comparatively mild.

As a mostly gay bisexual guy married to another bisexual man - who lives in a majorly gay town, I hasten to add - I really wanted to love this film. I found the script to be witty and provocative, and I thought that the performances, production and direction were excellent. It was an extremely well-crafted passion project into which Billy Eichner clearly poured his heart.

Nevertheless, within five minutes, I found myself longing for the exit. I wasn't bored; I was exasperated! Yet another major Hollywood movie with unhappy, self-loathing gays in it, who seem to do nothing but talk about being gay, and demonstrating through their words and deeds what a miserable, unfulfilling experience it is to be gay in American society. If I were still a youngster on the cusp of coming out, this movie would have made me want to slip right back into the closet! It's a rom-com so at least the main characters didn't have to die at the end of the movie; how novel! But the universe that these characters inhabit... awkward, uncomfortable and distasteful. It was like a documentary of some of the worst aspects of the gay community rolled into one very misleading impression, shallow and somewhat materialistic. I'm polyamorous so it wasn't the sleeping around that bothered me, it was the WAY that these guys slept around, the way that they treated one another, that upset me... the unenlightened assumptions, the strident attitude of the film, the thinly veiled cruelty everywhere. My husband said, "This was not a comedy." Can't the LGBT community itself move past The Boys in the Band yet? Does every major Hollywood LGBT flick have to rub man's inhumanity to man - particularly the gay man - in our faces? Can't we just go out to the movies and have a fun time seeing ourselves reflected on the screen without having to suffer so much? Sure, this movie has a happy, modern rom-com ending that brings a tear to your eye. But is it worth sitting through two hours of awkwardness, bitterness, and intolerable preachiness to get there? When will LGBT characters be allowed to be normal romantic leads in a film that isn't about the trials and sufferings of being LGBT?

I mean, I wasn't crazy about Crazy Rich Asians either despite being Asian-American myself... it had a similar problem: too much wealthy Ching Ching Ding Dong and not enough universal humanity. But Crazy Rich Asians was a bastion of universality compared to Bros.

Don't get me wrong, Bros had some hilarious material in it that was quite memorable. I especially loved the LGBT museum having to install a Haunted Mansion of Gay Trauma amusement park ride in order to get the funding it needed to open. Honestly, the entire finished LGBT museum in the movie was insanely wrong-headed and thus utterly hilarious! The moronic Hall of Bisexuals with the audio animatronic mannequins was also memorable and funny in its egotistical ineffectualness. But, all in all, I found the dystopian vision of LGBT life in Bros to be ultimately nauseating despite its creators' best intentions to do so much more.

So, while I wholeheartedly support people going to see this film in order to encourage Hollywood brass to fund other, more pleasant movies with LGBT leads, I can't really recommend Bros either. I'm just saddened that the financial failure of Bros will probably keep the studio execs from green lighting other LGBT projects that might be more fun to sit through.

This romcom about two forty-something gay men trying to decide whether or not they want to have a relationship has some funny moments and it goes down pretty easily over all. But I'm not sure it has enough funny moments to make up for Billy Eichner's obnoxious performance. His character is so strident, so angry, and so condescending that it's a real turn off to spend two hours with him. I didn't really care whether he found someone to love him, because I couldn't blame anyone for wanting to stay far away from him. I know as an openly out actor he has a great deal of passion for bringing gay stories into the mainstream, and I support that. And he does get one soliloquy in the movie that brilliantly makes people understand what it was like to grow up gay during a time when gays were marginalized at best and actually persecuted at worst. But no one wants to be talked at and lectured to for two hours, and that's what this movie feels like.

The highlight of the movie is a hilarious cameo by Debra Messing.

Grade: B.