The Chair’s Review: Bros

Who knew that Bros, the first gay romantic comedy released by a major studio, would be as good and sweet and touching as it is?

I certainly didn’t.

Oh, also, it’s pretty damn funny.

And Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane make a really convincing couple falling in love.

It might not seem that way in the poster, which features only the backsides of two unidentified men, each with a hand on the other one’s ass.

But, hey, you can’t have everything.

Sadly, one thing Bros didn’t have this opening weekend was box-office success.

It received almost universally glowing reviews and scored 97% on Rotten Tomatoes’ audience meter. But grossing approximately $4.8 million domestically on 3350 screens makes it a huge financial disappointment in light of the $10 million plus it was expected to earn.

Not to mention the $22 million it cost to make and the $30-$40 million above that Universal Pictures spent to market it.

Box-office numbers are a strange indicator of what is good, bad or indifferent about a movie. Trust me, I know whereof I speak. In the eighties, I started the first weekly national box-office column for Daily Variety, which in turn popularized the international trend of reporting the grosses each weekend as if movies were racehorses in the Kentucky Derby.

But what seemed a good idea at the time for a business publication inundated with inflated numbers of seeming profit provided by their corporate-entity makers (Note: There is often little correlation between box-office grosses and actual profit, since it depends how much the damn thing cost to make and promote) promptly became nothing more than another way to measure a film’s VALUE.

In turn, it too often was the barometer for it being dubbed a SUCCESS or a FAILURE.

Yes, we live in a capitalist society and who doesn’t like making money? This is especially the case for corporate entities.

But as far as the measure of worth is concerned, the numbers a moviemaker’s film pulls in on opening weekend at the box-office in 2022 couldn’t be less-related to its artistic, and, yeah, even its ultimate financial worth.

This is not 1980, when Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder’s bro comedy Stir Crazy was lighting up the box-office coffers in one of the first Daily Variety stories I ever wrote. And Bros is certainly not Annie Hall (1977), a film about another neurotic Jewish New Yorker who falls in love with a gorgeous person from the planet SHIKSA/SHAYGETZ (Note: Look it up!) much the way Mr. Eichner does here.

As a young gay man who loved Annie Hall when it was released and had not yet come out, I could NEVER have imagined in my WILDEST, WEIRDEST dream that any movie studio, much less a major one, could make a gay male love story starring a much too talkative, know-it-all Semitic boy from Queens, like Billy AND myself, with any other boy boy from any other PLANET.

I mean, I barely realized those kind of love affairs were possible in real life on EARTH. And you might even substitute the world barely with I didn’t even know.

If only I had Bros way back when, I might have kissed (Note: And much more) A LOT less toads until I found my prince.

But I suspect that was partly Mr. Eichner’s story too, and at least a sliver of the reason he wanted to make this movie in the first place. It’s a laudable ambition and effort but practically a fool’s errand given the finicky nature of the way audiences watch new films in these pandemic and post-pandemic (Note: Ahem) days.

Personally, this is only the second time in more than two and a half years I’ve been to an actual public movie theatre as opposed to the at least 1-2 times PER WEEK that I used to attend pre-2020.

This might not be the case for most young people but, then again, we need to consider what everyone is now going to see publicly en masse.

Once you cut out Marvel movies, horror films and tent pole-type action flicks, how many big opening weekends for romantic comedies are left??

Bros director/co-writer Nick Stoller scored big with the pre-pandemic 2008 film Forgetting Sarah Marshall. And producer Judd Apatow directed the writer-star Amy Schumer to opening weekend success in 2015 in her big screen debut, Trainwreck.

But those might have been made and released a century ago as far as our current movie-watching habits are concerned.

Imagine a world where at least half of the new movies can be had opening weekend at home on your big ass screen with a click of a button from a service you pay a minimal amount of money to subscribe to.

You don’t have to. It exists.

… and you don’t even need to wear shoes (or get dressed!)

Or better yet, think about a life when any moviegoer can pay the price of a single ticket of admission plus a few more dollars and entertain as large a group of friends as they want to their house (Note: Or even a first date with someone they like) and together watch that new movie they’ve been dying to see, on their computer, in their living room, bedroom or, well, any room in or outside their house, apartment, or trailer home?

You don’t have to. You can merely open your eyes and fulfill that wish for 80% of the movies out there.

Universal and the other big four or five major studios (Note: Six? Seven? Three? How many are technically left?) might not want to recognize this fact. But it’s still a fact.

This is especially the case for a genre that’s always been close to this gay man’s heart – the romantic comedy.

On the other hand, maybe I’ll be proved wrong in a few weeks when the new George Clooney-Julia Roberts rom-com, Ticket to Paradise, debuts solely at movie theatres.

Yet is it fair to compare movie star royalty like the Clooney-Roberts combined billion-dollar box-office oeuvre with Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane?

Well, too bad. Who ever said life was fair?

See, that’s the gist of the argument. But the market doesn’t quite exist anymore to launch a new rom-com star, or stars, solely on the big screen. Even Julia Roberts did a TV series a few years ago and the last theatrical box-office success starring George Clooney was…… okay, Gravity (2013), where he didn’t even have the lead and which was certainly no rom-com.

Bros got the most difficult thing right in a movie of any genre, but most especially one that is a romance AND a comedy. It persuades us to care about its two leads by presenting them as real people rather than cardboard cutout movie types generated by a computer program, a list of old films and the shuffling of scenes written on a bunch of recycled index cards.

Sure, there are moments where what we are watching has so many LGBTQ plus references and people that you need a flow chart to be fluid, up to date, on trend and hip enough not to be left in the dust or mildly uncomfortable by some throwaway remark or too larger than life comic overstep or contemporary reference.

But that’s the exception rather than the rule here.

Bros is certainly not perfect but what is the last perfect movie you’ve seen in the pandemic, or post-pandemic present? (Note: Or ever?)

As rom-coms go, it far exceeds 2022’s Marry Me (starring J-Lo and Owen Wilson) and The Lost City (Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in the leads) any day of the week.

But that will not be the ruler against which the first gay romantic comedy released by a major studio will be measured against.

They’ll compare it to the Oscars won by Annie Hall (1977), the popularity of When Harry Met Sally (1989), the box-office mojo of Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds’ in 2009’s The Proposal (Note: $163 million domestically) and the zeitgeist reaction to Crazy Rich Asians in pre-pandemic 2018.

… which in this case means, box office success

This is meaningless. And it takes away nothing from Bros being a very good, very smart and very entertaining film at a time when we need the very entertaining, the very smart and the very good.

By any true measure of anything worth measuring, that makes it a success.

Not to mention, historic.

Billy Eichner – “Love is Not Love” (from Bros)

01.23.22

by notesfromachair

Seventies Stories

We tell a lot of stories and we tell ourselves A LOT of stories. Some of them are true but most of them are not entirely true.

Scratch that.

None of them are entirely true because there is no absolute truth other than we will all die one day.

HAPPY JANUARY!

It’s better not to obsess about absolute truth or death because, really, what will that get us? Instead, I’ve found over the years the better strategy is to accept that there are simply basic truths.

Like when you watch a group of many, many hundreds of weaponized people violently storm the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on, say, January 6, 2021, shouting they want to hang a US Vice President before he can, in an hour or two, ratify the results of a presidential election they didn’t like, this is, by definition, an insurrection.

That is because insurrection is defined as a violent uprising against an authority or government.

It is also true because they built a gallows for the hanging, seriously injured and/or caused the death of many police officers AND destroyed many tens of thousands of dollars worth of government property in doing so.

On the other hand, there is no way to categorically proclaim Power of the Dog, a film I found beautiful to look at but vague and strangely homophobic in its vagueness, is the best movie of the year.

Now you might truthfully state it is the best REVIEWED film of the year and, by extension, a front-runner in the Oscar race for best picture and director. But you can’t prove it is overall THE best by any rational standard.

Unless there is an Oscar for highest cheekbones, nothing is a sure bet!

No opinion of greatness is an absolute truth. Just as no memory or memory piece is an absolute evocation of what literally happened.

The best we storytellers, which includes all of us (non-writers especially included), can do is capture a basic spirit of what happened and through character, plot and actions, show it to you.

This came to mind this week as I found myself debating the merits and debits of two films set in the decade I basically grew up in – the 1970s. These would be Licorice Pizza and The Tender Bar.

Let me state at the outset that as a bit of an expert on the seventies, since I was at my most impressionable, observant and un-jaded at the time, both of these movies told the basic truth.

This doesn’t mean they were brilliant or Oscar worthy or that YOU should love or like them. Rather it’s that they were amazingly accurate on the essentials when so many stories about a particular place and time are not but pretend to be.

Most of the 1970s, particularly the first half, were really the tail end of what we now consider the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

This was a time when everything felt adrift. If you were coming-of-age at that moment your journey strangely coincided with the country’s journey. No one knew what the new rules were in sex or sex roles; in politics and social settings; and to quote a 60s/70s expression, in love or war or the whole damned thing.

This made it a quite interesting but confusing time to grow up in. To tell stories about it is like trying to hold a hyperactive puppy in your hands. Just when you think you’ve tamed the impossible it wriggles out of your grasp and runs (or circles) in an entirely different direction.

I think this accounts for some of the disparate reaction to both films.

The very reason I appreciate and enjoyed Licorice Pizza were the very reason four of the other five people watching the movie with me (Note: Okay, yes, it was a screener and we watched it on Christmas Day at home!) lost interest.

The story of a weird, pseudo romantic relationship between a 15-year-old boy and a 25-year-old girl that unfolded in disjointed episodes where they sold waterbeds, met drug-fueled celebrities like producer Jon Peters and each grappled with their even stranger, ill-defined family lives, just wasn’t really compelling.

Even an unhinged Bradley Cooper cameo couldn’t do it for them

Yet for me, it was surrealistically accurate because that was what I saw as the story of the seventies. Everything felt disjointed, and not merely because I was an adolescent. It was a disjoined time and, in retrospect, a rather lovely one when you consider that the decade that would follow it were the Gordon Gekko-like greed is good eighties.

Sure, the seventies was also the era of Watergate but the eighties brought us Ronald Reagan.

And let’s just let that sit there for a little while.

Okay, enough.

The Tender Bar spends most of its time in the later 1970s and, as a memoir of a young boys’ coming-of-age, has a naturally gauzy quality to it. But to its credit, it also doesn’t spare us the social reckoning that Licorice Pizza cleverly avoids.

At this point, there was direct retribution and consequences for underage drinking, hitting women (note: particularly one’s wife) and the snobbism of economic class. If it feels a little pat, well, at that time, on Long Island, if you were a teenager, it was a little pat.

I only know this because I grew up in Queens (Note: Not quite Long Island, but still….) and saw it play out in real time. The years prior made it okay for kids to now call out adults in no uncertain terms. In fact, it even got you support from that group of adults that had made the choice to evolve rather than stand their ground in insurrection to society’s changing norms.

I loved The Tender Bar not because it was THE best of any film story but because it so entertainingly and boldly and emotionally told ITS story. No one thought about being too sentimental because, let’s face it, it was something of an emotional time.

This was my truth of that moment and it happily coincided with what these filmmakers chose to show us. Which is about the best you can hope to do as a storyteller of any kind.

Where we all get in trouble, especially society, is when we try to twist the basic truth into something patently and grotesquely untrue.

That’s not only unacceptable but it’s strangely un-American. To this very American art form, that is.

Gordon Lightfoot – “If You Could Read My Mind”

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: George Clooney

The Chair’s Review: Bros

Seventies Stories