‘Bros’ Review: Billy Eichner In Gay Rome Is Good Enough To Make You Wish It Could Be Better

Funny, sweet and sometimes sharp Nicholas Stoller brothers (written by star Billy Eichner) is a gay romantic comedy with a personality crisis. While he cracks a lot of jokes at the expense of corporate types co-opting gay culture for prestige or demoting it for direct consumption, he slowly reveals himself to be almost exactly like every lucrative boy-girl love story in the country. The last thirty years. Described as satire in TIFF materials and elsewhere, it’s just the opposite. Forget the movies that want to relegate unrequited love to the heteronormative mode: Eichner wants his love story to be even more stereotypical, heteronormative.

It will be exactly what many multiplex viewers want and what many fans of the artist expect: fans of chaos. bill on the street and duly appointed difficult people His fearless love/hate relationship with pop culture can be estimated at 85% love and 15% self-deprecating laughter. And of course the lack of mainstream/studio gay romantic comedies makes us accept brothers For representation purposes only. But was it wrong to expect something strange?

Eichner (who, let’s face it, proves he’s fully equipped to co-host a feature) plays Bobby, a podcaster passionate about gay history. Early on, he lands his dream job as the first director of a new museum of LGBTQ+ culture. Its board meetings (which are the closest thing to satire in the film, but aren’t) are a gleeful nightmare of political identity wrangling, with everyone worrying that their part of the story isn’t getting the attention it deserves.

Meanwhile, an emotionally unavailable Bobby builds a single life that he says is balanced: anonymous sex with men he doesn’t want to talk to, plus happy times with good friends he’ll never sleep with. Standing in a club full of rowdy youngsters, he and his friend Henry (Guy Branum), practically the only people at the event wearing T-shirts, complain about how stupid everyone around them is. They then see Aaron (Luke MacFarlane), a muscular, shirtless jock in a baseball cap, who comes to flirt but disappears every time Bobby appears to be going somewhere.

Aaron’s perspective on the novel mirrors Bob’s. But after several “not a date” confrontations, including one that ends in an awkward foursome, the two have a fight that heats up and ultimately leads to cuteness. The second or third song that could have been when Harry met Sally It plays silently in the background and you know the irony-free montage between Central Park and the Christmas trees isn’t far off. (Does not stop at needle drops: brothers Composer Marc Shaiman arranged the music. when Harry met Sally Which.)

The feud between the two men remains hilarious in the first half, with Bobby mirroring Aaron’s taste in music, movies, and men. But of course Aaron’s attraction to gym rats makes Bobby tall but restless and vulnerable. And she acts, ruining her first day with Aaron’s visiting parents, turning their outings into an ongoing lecture on gay history.

Eager to explain the chip on his shoulder that will destroy this relationship, the script now says a lot more than it shows. A long and emotional monologue about the beach in Provincetown (after a fun cameo by Bowen Young) goes to work, showing that Eichner can act and showing Bobby’s lifelong resentment that he said he was too “beautiful” to have success. But the speech trend shows up in a few other places as well, which sounds especially odd considering the writers have already shown they can understand a lot of things while still being funny.

For such an honest (but not gratuitous) film about man-to-man, man-to-man, and man-to-man sex, it’s strange that Stoller Forgetting Sarah Marshall He had more penis than in this movie. Supposedly, some execs were making comments about how gay the movie could be and still be open on 3,000 screens. Perhaps the same executives who were mocked at the beginning of the film.

But don’t worry about the costumes. brothers He’s so immersed in mainstream pop culture, the epiphanies that led up to it, and the absolutely incredible public declarations of love that he would never alienate anyone but a homophobe. Bob is right to complain that “love is love” is a false public relations catchphrase for gay acceptance; This is something that no one who has been in love more than once should openly say (sorry). But when it comes to romantic comedies, a love story is a love story. They are almost the same, almost completely false, even when their stupidity says something true, or when they have enough charm to make you spend your life trying to believe them.