Say Gay: BETTER NATE THAN EVER and ROTHANIEL

The bigotry inherent in Florida’s Republican “Don’t Say Gay” Bill, recently signed into odious law, is in the central premise of restricting schools’ ability to even reference the existence of LGBT+ people as if they are definitionally inappropriate subjects, using vague language that would allow any aggrieved parent to sue teachers directly with accusations. It operates from the assumption that denying youth information about same-sex affection will stop them from developing it. This is further underlined by the bill’s proponents’ and defenders’ falsely claiming with drooling insistence that anyone opposing the measure is inculcating victims in what some still stubbornly believe is a lifestyle choice instead of a simple fact of life. Just when those of us who recognize that romantic and sexual desires are complicated and fluid elements of being alive—even beyond labels of gay, straight, and between—thought that concept had finally lodged into mainstream understanding and acceptance—to look at all reputable polling over the last decade, it has!—these backwards-looking revanchist culture warriors are on the march. Emboldened by the political ugliness unleashed by the worst among us of late, they’re eagerly hoping to reverse the gains of the open-minded plurality and impose their cruel policies and prejudiced views on us all, by any anti-democratic, minority-rule measures they see fit.

Not content with their victorious stuffing the courts to the point where they’re about to end a right to safe, legal abortion in this country, they’re moving in multiple federal and state cases to restrict discussions of race and LGBT+ issues, and making noise about pulling back on interracial marriage and birth control, too. Scary times. These conservative activists—some usual confluence of moral panic, internet trolls, moneyed distraction, and rank prejudice—wish to ignore those who make them uncomfortable. But ignoring people doesn’t make them disappear or die out. There’s that other old homophobic trope—that new gays aren’t born, but recruited. They might be confusing that with right-wing reactionaries. (One must be carefully taught that way of thinking.) Ignoring those ugly ideas hasn’t made them disappear either.

In light of this, what can the movies do? After all, that’s where Disney CEO Bob Chapek said the difference can be made, after employees raised concern that the studio, Florida’s largest employer, stayed uncharacteristically silent about the legislation. Previous CEO Bob Iger at least knew it was better business to say the right things from time to time, and would advocate for humane policies and against inhumane ones, so long as they didn’t ask the company to, say, raise wages for their theme park employees. Chapek instead said they’d stay neutral on attempts to erode civil rights materially and focus on “creating a more inclusive world...through the inspiring content [they] produce.” (Never mind the creatives who later divulged how the corporate brass asked them to downplay gay characters in some projects of late, I suppose.) The symbolic gesture isn’t nothing, and it’s true that representation of all kinds in a good movie can shine a light on oft unseen peoples or circumstances, invite empathy for others, and point people toward possibilities they’d never before understood. There’s magic there. It can’t materially improve conditions, but maybe creates a way of thinking that could help someone feel accepted. A fight for a better world can’t happen only through some well-intentioned movies without actually pushing back on the laws and politicians preventing that better world, or dragging us back toward constricting corruptions of public goods.

Maybe Chapek was thinking about Better Nate Than Ever when he mentioned projects showing “a more inclusive world.” The newest straight-to-Disney+ live-action family movie—the sort of thing that would’ve played in theaters back in the days of Max Keeble’s Big Move or Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, though it’s smaller and thinner and more in line with the Disney Channel Original Movies of the time—is a cute comedy about a flamboyant middle schooler with big Broadway ambitions. The theatrical boy (Rubey Wood) hears about auditions for child actors to play in an upcoming stage adaptation of Lilo & Stitch so, when his parents leave him with his butch brother (Joshua Bassett) for the weekend, he sneaks off with his best friend (Aria Brooks). They get to the Big Apple, where luckily they run into his estranged aunt (Lisa Kudrow, funnier than the material deserves) who reluctantly helps him stay for his chance at treading the boards. Much prolonged silliness ensues.

The movie never quite says gay, but it’s all over the broad sitcom antics—the squeaky-voiced boy loves Designing Women in addition to show tunes and constantly undercuts the heteronormativity of his lumbering brother. (When older bro glowers that it’s unfair his younger sibling can sleep over at a girl’s house, their father admits, Nate’s not going to get in trouble with that.) And it’s in the wide-eyed naive showbiz stardust sparkling over everything. So it’s a sweet little movie with its heart in the right place—even if its corporate synergy says everyone is equal…in that they’re able to experience the magic of Disney. (Surely not a coincidence there’s a live action Stitch in the pipeline, natch.) Even the setbacks are bright and buoyant and no underdeveloped sadness can last. Writer-director Tim Federle—of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series—gives the thing an up-tempo glossiness and squeaky-clean simplicity. There are modest musical numbers, some gentle joking, and an ending calculated to give the kids who’ll see themselves in such a picture the self-esteem boost needed. I wasn’t entirely unmoved to see this plucky kid succeed. I’m glad it exists for those who’ll find in it permission to be themselves.

For those of us wanting more introspection engaged in the thorny difficulties of exploring one’s sexual orientation, and of coming out—to oneself, as much as to family, friends, and the world at large—there’s Jarrod Carmichael’s latest stand-up special: Rothaniel. In it, the 35-year-old comedian, perhaps most famous for The Carmichael Show, his excellent three-season multi-cam comedy on NBC from a few years ago, reveals that he’s gay. That drops early in the hour. The rest is a reckoning. He arrives there after a winding preamble about his family secrets, including the affairs of both of his grandfathers and his father, with the attendant sense of betrayal and complicity he felt in holding that in. He goes on to unravel how various family and friends reacted to his revelation. The hour covers a lot of ground: his internalized homophobia, how his sexuality interacts with his Christian faith, how he senses friction from some family members. Even loving responses can feel cold when it’s wrapped in layers of disappointment, distance, or confusion. He tip-toes up to explicit confessions, crosses lines and then slips back, a little embarrassed he waited so long, or divulged so much, but recognizes the complicating factors of social structures and family expectations that constructed his closeted years. This isn’t easy.

It is personal material, often going stretches without punchlines, amusing only for Carmichael’s natural easygoing charm. He has the same sitcom brilliance in his delivery he did on his show, shades of Lear (Norman, not King), that let him get away with provocative political needling without losing the aw-shucks, All in the Family, real talk, just-having-fun thinking-out-loud magic trick. Somehow it’s also still so real and immediate and raw, a sense of an unfolding personal extemporaneous working-out of deep emotional pain and promising release. The balancing act wobbles and teeters at times, but never quite steps off. And he never loses a sense of the audience reaction. He plays to them even as he slips into impromptu therapy. And he has a killer last line in his back pocket the whole time, even as you might wonder where he’s going. Even as he might be, too. He knows it’ll land, even if he’s not sure where he will. He talks himself into a more truthful language of his being.

In this way, Carmichael turns in on himself as he comes out. The filmmaking by director Bo Burnahm emphasizes the effect of the spotlight in intimate closeups as the intensity of the bulbs cause a heat that fades colors and washes out the background into a milkiness. The camera also draws attention to Carmichael’s posture as he speaks, sometimes even interacting with a largely unseen crowd that’s rapt and a little off-balance, sometimes shouting out questions or affirmations at him. He sits in a folding chair, often leaning back, other times shrinking into himself, slouching, his hand sometimes running over his face and neck or teasing his collar in a nervous fidget. He’s the center of attention, suddenly his full self in the public eye for the first time. It’s the opposite, then, of Burnham’s excellent mad musical comedy of indoor pandemic creative expression Inside; you could call this Out. Carmichael’s not sure what he’ll do there, but the very fact of speaking the truth about himself creates a power, and a permission, to grow into the man he is before our eyes. And maybe that’s what scares the people who, as George Eliot once wrote, “would have every man's life ordered according to a particular pattern, and…are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them.” In this special, a man explains an existence that can’t be ignored.

Track Changes: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

The Girl on the Train has all the right ingredients for a polished tawdry thriller, but it never really gets cooking. There’s a missing woman. There’s a cast of talented performers assembled to play suspects. There’s a glossy, handsomely photographed look, like its upstate New York setting is a high-end furniture catalogue with roiling undercurrents of jealousy, abuse, addiction, and intimate crime. There’s a solid, dependable director at the helm in Tate Taylor, whose previous films The Help and Get on Up also had some interest in complicated women’s roles. And there’s Emily Blunt acting her heart out in the center of the movie as a depressed, alcoholic, unreliable witness at her wits’ end, who either did or did not see something integral to the investigation. The stage is set for something interesting, but the movie is instead a total snooze. Its mysteries are haphazardly developed, its tension is erratically sustained, and its characters remain flat types.

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson adapts Paula Hawkins’ bestseller with a scrambled chronology and shifting points of view. It’s a Three-card Monte plot, shuffling back and forth in time and perspective while withholding key information just because it can. By the time the pieces finally stop moving the picture comes up empty. Its central character’s confused mental state motivates the jumbled telling, which takes the idea of an unreliable narrator to its least helpful illogical conclusion. Blunt’s girl on the train is depressed. The dual shocks of learning she can’t have a baby and being left by her husband (Justin Theroux) for their realtor (Rebecca Ferguson) haven’t helped. Nor has incessant drinking improved her life, leaving her stumbling, slurring, blacking out, and missing time. It’s not uncommon for her to ask her roommate (Laura Prepon) what she did last night, a habit that carries over from her ex. She’s used to being out of control and not remembering. But she’s sure she saw the missing woman (Haley Bennett) on the night of the disappearance.

There is a dusting of interesting thematic work here. Blunt is playing a woman who is told stories about her life she has no choice but to believe given her condition. She, in turn, enjoys looking out the train window during her commutes, making up little stories about the people whose lives she glimpses for a few moments a day. That’s how she feels she knows the missing woman enough to try to give a statement to the detective on the case (Alison Janney) or approach the woman’s shocked husband (Luke Evans) or therapist (Edgar Ramirez) to slip some of her information or delusions into their narratives. Ah, but how to do that while seeming sane? It’d take a sharp mind and sober social skills to pull that off, and she can only fake it for so long. Besides, she’s not totally sure she didn’t have something to do with the vanishing. The movie takes us into flashbacks narrated by the missing woman describing her sad life, then back to Blunt wringing her hands over the state of things. This interest in the stories people tell to convince themselves of one thing or another is a good enough hook to make the lackluster execution all the more disappointing.

Taylor handles this material with some confidence. He trusts his close ups of Blunt’s tear-streaked face and woozy booze-soaked flashes of memory to carry across the haze through which the facts can be glimpsed. He’s also sure his oblique references to horrible things – a character’s tearful monologue about the death of her infant; a bludgeoning; a pattern of emotional abuse – are worth springing as surprises and then cutting away before the visuals get too rough. But ultimately there’s just not enough there there. The twists are artificially delayed through obfuscation, stretching out obvious developments for the sake of the story’s deliberately frustrating structure. (We can’t be sure of anything until late in the picture, by which point it’s hard to retroactively care.) And the whole ensemble of terrific performers (down to two scenes for the always great Lisa Kudrow) are stuck playing slight types whose actions are determined by the circuitous plotting and whose decisions and developments hinge only on the dictates of the surprises. Worst, there’s never any compelling question pulling it along. I was so frustrated by the film’s thin psychology and unforthcoming shiftiness I simply didn’t care where the missing woman went and whodunit. I was merely waiting out the runtime.

The Boys Next Door: NEIGHBORS

An R-rated comedy can sour quickly. There’s a tendency among Hollywood’s purveyors of that subgenre to rush to the R and forget the comedy when planning their edgiest jokes or letting the actors endlessly riff on the lines until scenes grow baggy and dirty. The surprise of Nicholas Stoller’s Neighbors is that it gets the balance mostly right. You’d think a movie about a married couple and their newborn daughter who find their lovely suburban college-town lives disrupted by a rowdy fraternity moving in next door would lend itself to lazy stereotypes and general degeneracy. It does, but even though the movie is exuberantly vulgar, broad, and loud, it never loses track of the human qualities in its characters. There’s an allowance for some small nuance that avoids reducing the characters to their cheapest, ugliest selves.

We start with the married couple (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) trying to adjust to life as parents. Unlike Rogen’s many man-child roles, this is a movie about two adults who are mostly happy to have matured to the extent they have. With movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five Year Engagement, director Stoller has proven himself interested in exploring the emotional shifts the continual process of growing as an adult entails. In his films, the relationships ring true and are treated with a degree of weight. Here our leads are doting on and toting around their adorable baby, enjoying life while still wondering if having a child has to mean leaving their carefree party days behind. Just as they’re figuring out their new, more responsible, fully adult selves, an explosion of youthful id moves in next door.

At first it doesn’t seem so bad. The frat’s president (Zac Efron) promises they’ll keep the noise down. The other boys (Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Roberts) seem nice enough, cooing over the baby and saying they want to keep the neighborhood pleasant. But then the partying starts. It’s loud, long, and debauched, just as you’d expect. And soon the couple is forced to call in a noise complaint. When the responding cop (Hannibal Buress) tells the frat the source of the call, the frat takes it up a notch. They aren’t just loud and obnoxious partiers by night, litterers and loiterers by day. (That’s familiar to anyone who has lived in a college town.) They’re now actively antagonistic, pranking their neighbors in escalatingly dangerous and improbable ways. After a visit to the flighty dean (Lisa Kudrow) proves unhelpful, the couple decides to sabotage the frat and shut them down for good. The script by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien follows a clear structure, with the frat behaving boorishly and the couple plotting ways to force them out.

With such a setup, it’d be easy for the movie to fall into characterization as simple and button-pushing as its preoccupation with bodily functions, body parts, and bodily harm. A lesser comedy would make the frat boys only villains and the thirtysomethings only virtuous. Here the terrible frat boys are, between raunch and bullying, allowed moments of surprising tenderness, self-doubt, and worry about their fast-approaching post-graduation prospects. One guy goes to a job fair where he’s told flat out he’s “too dumb.” Later, one frat kid earnestly tells another, “You don’t like them [the neighbors] because they remind you of the future.” As for those neighbors, they like smoking a little weed now and then, want to keep their sex life interesting, and have real doubts about the suburban bliss they feel pressure to want. These unexpected shadings go a long way towards balancing the broader, dumber moments.

Some of the situations are unlikely. (Wouldn’t the couple at least close their curtains at night?) Slapstick – like a violent and far-fetched airbags prank – and gross-out gags – like a breastfeeding emergency or, worse, a mix-up involving a discarded, unused prophylactic – might go too far. But the film remains largely likable because it has the right balance. Cinematographer Brandon Trost (who also worked on the better-looking-than-you’d-think This is the End) shoots with a slick, loosely held style that gives weight and a degree of realism to the proceedings. Maybe that’s why the more exaggerated moments feel a bit false, but it also helps sell the truth in the solid performances. Rogen and Byrne have warm chemistry and easy repartee. I particularly liked them arguing about who gets to be the irresponsible Kevin James-type in their marriage. Around them the ensemble – from Efron and Franco on down – is well-cast and well-deployed. And the baby is adorable, ready to give cute cutaway reaction shots while being kept nice and safe, sleeping peacefully when the most dangerous moments erupt.

Too often movies about frats want to wink, nudge, and enjoy the sexism, racism, carousing, and homophobic hazing, wallowing in celebratory immaturity. It’s good, then, that Neighbors finds itself squarely on the side of growing up, saying to do so means finding the proper balance between partying and responsibility. It likes its characters, even when they make mistakes, even at their most caricatured and stereotypical. It’s not a great comedy, a little low on laughs, but it’s pleasant enough to be a decent time at the movies. Without a mean spirit and with a relatively short runtime of 90 minutes and change, it’s the rare R-rated comedy that accommodates dirty jokes, bad behavior, and even a few unfunny scenes, without going sour. 

Rumor Has It: EASY A

Easy A is jet-propelled by so much comedic energy that it’s perhaps inevitable that the stress from the sheer force of hilarity would start to pull it apart by the conclusion. Luckily, the film never quite falls apart. In fact, it’s the most consistently funny movie I’ve seen in a long time and easily the funniest movie of the year by far. It’s blessed with a great leading leady in Emma Stone, the gorgeous and uproarious redhead best known for stealing scenes as a supporting character in comedies like Superbad and Zombieland. Here she becomes a star, holding a whole movie exceptionally well, appearing in every scene and serving as our narrator. She’s fortunate to be carrying a movie that’s perfectly cast in every role, with characters being funny because of who they are in addition to what they do. This is the rare comedy that is completely hilarious in nearly every scene, often funny line by line. I rarely laugh out loud while watching movies; I usually end up enjoying funny moments with small snickers or smiles. Reader, Easy A had me laughing loudly and often. By the time the credits rolled, my face and sides were hurting.

That all of this hilarity ensues in a broad teen comedy that also happens to deal fairly honestly with teenagers’ fluidity of identity and basic rumor-fueled exaggerated life-and-death scenarios of high school is only icing on the cake. It all starts when Stone lies to her best friend (Alyson Michalka) about what she did on the weekend. She should have been honest and said that she barely left her room. Instead, since she had turned down an invitation from said friend to go camping, she lies and says that she had a one-night-stand with a college guy and lost her virginity. Unfortunately, the school’s biggest self-important gossipy do-gooder (Amanda Bynes) overhears them and soon the whole school thinks that Stone’s a floozy.

The plot goes on to feature an escalation of ridiculous rumors that Stone tries to harness for her own personal gain. She trades her increasingly terrible reputation for favors, though at first it’s simple charity, like when she pretends to sleep with a gay classmate (Dan Byrd) at a wild party so that the jocks will think he’s straight and stop beating him up. Later, she will have less noble reasons, like gift cards, for continuing the charade, all the while risking that the one guy she really likes (Penn Badgley) will no longer want to have anything to do with her, especially with their increasingly scandalized (or envious) and increasingly boisterous schoolmates, including Twilight’s Cam Gigandet showing off surprising comedic talent.

Bert V. Royal’s script is overflowing with great one-liners and the supporting cast has uniformly impeccable timing. These lines flow right off the performers’ tongues, barely letting in spaces between the laughs. On staff at the high school is English teacher Thomas Hayden Church, guidance counselor Lisa Kudrow, and, most chillingly, principal Malcolm McDowell. As Stone’s parents, Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci, both fine, versatile actors, present the rare teen-comedy parents that are smart, funny, and accessible. They are involved in their daughter’s life, are warm, loving, and energetic. They sometimes say embarrassing things and fumble around while trying to give advice, but they very well may be the best screen parents of the year.

This film is a big step up for director Will Gluck, who was last seen with his feature debut, last year’s truly awful teen comedy Fired Up. With Easy A, Gluck has created a very good teen comedy. It just might, though it’s a little hard to tell from one viewing, belong on the short list of great teen comedies. It’s right up there with, and sometimes besting, some of the works of John Hughes, which this film occasionally references. Gluck shoots with effervescent energy and style that ultimately works towards setting up the jokes. He knows just when to punch up a laugh line or get out of his performers’ way. Neither he, nor Royal, ever finds a convincing way to reconcile the film’s competing tendencies towards winking snark and sappy sentiment. Nor does the film’s narration, built around a webcam confessional, ever truly pay off in any big way. But I hardly care. Those are just the kinds of nagging quibbles that happen when I’m too far removed from the constant blasts of pure laughter the film provides.

Quick Look: Bandslam (2009)

Bandslam doesn’t have much reason to recommend it, but at least it has little reason to be avoided. It’s mushy and harmless, soft, and agreeably peppy. Though director Todd Graff’s and Josh A. Cagan’s screenpaly has problems with pacing and tone, and runs entirely too long, it is performed by a likable young cast (including the relatively unknown Gaelan Connell and two Disney Channel alums, Vanessa Hudgens and Alyson Michalka) who adequately fill a very familiar underdog arc; this time it’s a group of teens who pull together to, gosh darn it, win a record deal in a local contest. (Though, if we’re supposed to cheer for their victory, maybe their band could be a little better?) The movie’s oddly burdened with a strange set of weightier material, including a secret tragedy from the past, that doesn’t quite fit with the gently enjoyable nature of the rest of the film. But the tricky material is nonetheless handled quite well, with great tact and care as the characters are all treated with sympathy and respect. They’re even allowed to be visibly human at times. This is a mostly squeaky-clean family dramedy, but it’s not painfully sugar-coated or unnaturally divorced from the real world. This isn’t exactly groundbreaking in any way, and it’s certainly not any better than it needs to be, but for what it is, it’s not all bad. It even has one aspect genuinely approaching excellence, the biggest asset the movie has: Lisa Kudrow. She turns in a genuinely touching portrait of a fully believable single mom. She’s underused with a character that’s undeveloped, but Kudrow makes the most of every little scene she gets.