Most Movies Are Just Okay: "Bros" Edition

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 The quintessential 2022 experience: 

- A few conservatives pretend to be offended by, or boycott, something that they didn't know existed a day ago and were never going to buy.

- The left-leaning creatives making thing choose to make "owning the haters" a weirdly big part of their marketing campaign for thing, because that rhetoric mostly does work for the other side.

- The extremely online and mostly liberal audience who would actually spend money on thing think that this whole approach is kind of cringe and lose interest, maybe aided by a few ideologically incoherent twitter communists who think that actually Jordan Peterson has a point here.

 Anyways, this page is about "Bros", a decent to mediocre romantic comedy that failed financially not because homophobes who were never going to watch it in the first place made a loud show of not watching it, but because the Gen Z progressives who make up most of Billy Eichner's audience thought it was cringe and lame that Billy Eichner marketed the movie by talking about how Historic and Important it was. I liked "Billy on the Street" enough to pay $5 and watch the thing on a Tuesday, but I had a hunch that I didn't like Billy Eichner enough to watch him play himself in a 2 hour Judd Apatow type movie, and I felt pretty much validated. When "Bros" goes for creative writing, it's funny. The numerous "Hallmark but pandering to gay people" parodies are great. Luke MacFarlane is great as the semi-closeted hunk. There is a weirdly high number of hockey jokes, which I appreciate. But because it is produced by Judd Apatow, it runs for around 2 hours, there are many improv-ish scenes where it's not so much a sequence of jokes and more a series of observations that happen to end in a joke, and the last half hour wants me to care about the characters in a sincere romance way (I do not). A sillier version of "Bros" that clocks in at 90 minutes could have been wonderful. The 2 hour version, with important commentary (tm) (c) on modern issues that was presented to the world as a film festival movie, is fine I guess. On the relative Apatow scale I rate it above his first couple bro-y comedies but I don't think it hits the highs of "Trainwreck" (it has exactly the same lows in exactly the same way as "Trainwreck). It's not as good as "Forgetting Sarah Marshall", the career highlight for this film's actual director Nicholas Stoller, because that had all of its actors playing characters.

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