Bros

Your enjoyment of this film will very likely hinge on how long you can tolerate Billy Eichner and his shtick. He is almost unbearable at the onset of the film, and while he gets better as it progresses, he can still be difficult to root for. Bros also tries its hardest to push its way out from the rest of the pack, but falls back on lots of genre conventions.

There are some genuinely clever bits strewn throughout and I found myself actually amused more than I expected. The film can be pretty in your face at times, largely due to Eichner and his towering personality, however Bros shines when it showcases its two leads' chemistry and rapport.

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.

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.

Oy vey, Bobby sure kvetches, pisses and moans endlessly throughout this movie, doesn't he? How can a nice guy like Aaron hook up with such a scold and malcontent? He must have the patience of a saint. But we the viewers are not.

We found a lot of laughs in BROS, and while it was great to see Harvey Fierstein and Debra Messing in the mix, it was, unfortunately, all tempered by Bobby's unpleasantness (he reminded us of an ex-friend who was too much of a pill to be around), and we wanted to bop him over the head with a rock-hard, week-old challah! I sure hope Billy Eichner isn't like this in real life!

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.