Bros

Scott Hardie: One of the film's best qualities is that it doesn't spell out the central conflict for the audience the way that too many dumbed-down Hollywood movies feel like they have to slowly and carefully articulate every detail for viewers.

Forgive me if I misinterpreted this as a straight viewer, but it seemed to me that Aaron's internalized homophobia drove the couple's conflict throughout the film. It started in little ways, like how he had to express his queerness in an acceptable way (body-building) to how he was reluctant to sleep with a man who genuinely liked him as more than a piece of ass until that man turned him on by treating him the way that he's used to the straight world treating him (beaten-up and beaten down) to how he was attracted to Josh mostly as a live-out-an-impossible-high-school-fantasy thing rather than having a sincere connection. And this culminates in the couple's big fight at Christmas, where Aaron asks Bobby to be less gay to be palatable to his visiting family, and Bobby can't bring himself to do it, which really brings one of the film's philosophical concerns (how gay people should respond to homophobia) to the foreground.

Other than the conversation about Aaron suppressing his childhood dream to make tiny chocolates for a living, the film never once openly says how the straight world has forced Aaron into a tiny boring life full of self-loathing. And I love it for trusting us (especially us straights) to make those connections ourselves.This reply contains spoilers. Reveal it. − October 2, 2022 • more by Scott

Scott Hardie: Weird technical issue: I noticed a lot more dialogue looping than in a normal film. There were numerous times when an actor's mouth didn't match what we could hear them saying, and often an accompanying cut to a different camera angle in the middle of a sentence in an attempt to conceal the mismatch. I don't know what happened -- I'm guessing they didn't have money for proper reshoots so they tried to patch the film via ADR instead? -- but it was a little distracting. − October 2, 2022 • more by Scott

Scott Hardie: Me too! So glad you loved it! :-)

My favorite scene is Bobby's five-minute monologue on the beach. (For those curious to watch it, it's on Amazon Prime Video at exactly the 1-hour mark in the film.) The two main characters are celebrating a big win earlier that day, but Billy Eichner's character starts talking about how he's had to fake confidence his whole life, and his words grow increasingly bitter and honest. You can feel the movie shift gears, because up to this point, it's been a fairly straightforward romantic comedy, lots of traditional setup-joke-setup-joke kind of material, and in this moment you get the sense that co-writer Eichner just can't hold in his pain any longer and it flows out of him. It's a heck of a moment, akin to America Ferrera's monologue a year later in Barbie about the impossibility of being a woman in society, another scene that brings the comedy to a halt because the truth that it needs to discuss is too painful and too important. − September 6, 2023 • more by Scott