BEFORE: I could have gone several different ways with the linking after "Steve Jobs" - I've got another film with Kate Winslet on my list, but I'll get to that on Labor Day (because the film is "Labor Day"). And I've somehow got FIVE films with Michael Stuhlbarg in them, and I'm going to link those together next week. For now, I'm going to follow the Seth Rogen link, because that gets me to the third of my three back-to-school films, this one centered on a college sorority.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Neighbors" (Movie #2,134)
THE PLOT: When their new next-door neighbors turn out to be a sorority even worse than the fraternity previously living there, Mac and Kelly team with their former enemy, Teddy, to bring the girls down.
AFTER: Before I begin, I'm going to take a moment to re-read my review of the first "Neighbors" film, from about two years ago. Yep, same problems here, with inconsistencies in the set-up, and then more inconsistencies with the constantly-shifting motivations of the main characters. Well, at least the series is consistent in the fact that it's inconsistent.
The set-up problem - once again, we have a fraternity/sorority that seeks a property outside the college campus, for reasons that are barely mentioned, let alone explained. This is a major zoning issue, one that any real estate agent should be hip to - "Oh, you're a sorority, this is a residential neighborhood, and you need to be registered in one of the houses for exactly this purpose on the campus." This is what the realtor SHOULD have said, but instead it was, "Well, the rent on this house is $25,000 a month, but I'll rent it to you for $5,000 a month, for no stated reason, other than this is what will move the plot forward."
The inconsistencies with the factions - on one side we've got the (approaching) middle-age couple, and on the other side is the sorority AND Teddy, the frat brother from the first film. But wait, at the end of the first film Teddy and the couple had reconciled, made their peace and they were hanging out together. What happened in-between to make him shift his allegiance? Again, never explained, except that this does move the plot forward, so let's go with it. The couple similarly finally gets around to moving (which they should have done in the first film, if I'm being honest - if living next door to a frat was so bad, why not just cut your losses and run for the hills?) and after putting money down on their new house, their old house is in escrow, which means they don't get the funds for 30 days while the new owner performs inspections and such.
Oh, if only there weren't a sorority that just moved in next door, which would be grounds for the new buyers to immediately withdraw their bid, leaving the couple financially stretched too thin, as the owners of TWO houses! This means they're going to lose them both, right? Umm, no, it doesn't, that's not how real-estate works. Assuming they have equity in the old house, that's money that belongs to them and does not go away, no matter what else happens. The worst case scenario here is that they would lose one house in order to afford the other. Someone NOT buying their first house means that they still own, it doesn't just belong to nobody after an offer is withdrawn.
But, they clearly state that the couple is very dim when it comes to real estate, because they don't understand "escrow" in the first place, and their faces go blank when the real-estate agent explains it for what presumably is the fifth or sixth time. You know what, some people are probably meant to live in apartments and not own real estate, it's probably safer for them. I've only purchased two properties, but I sold my condominium in Brooklyn just before buying my house in Queens, and they way they usually structure this sort of thing is that the closing on the new property is contingent upon the sale of the old one, for exactly this reason, so that the seller/buyer doesn't get stuck between the two houses, with no place to live. (I had a good real estate lawyer, and she even got us extra time to move out of the condo and advance time to move stuff into the house.) But the closings on both deals happened in two meetings that were close together, I got a big check from the guy who bought my condo, my bank balance was HUGE for a few days, then we sunk as much of that money as we could into the house to reduce the mortgage, leaving enough to pay back my parents for the down payment and to also buy some new furniture.
It's not like the frat boys or sorority sisters are any smarter - their basic unit of money is the "bucket", which they collect cover charges in when they throw a frat party. Hey, you know what, instead of paying $20 to get into a frat party and then drinking for "free", you could take that $20 down to the deli or mini-mart and buy TWO six-packs of some very nice (or a case of some awful) beer. But anyway, how much money is in a bucket? Doesn't that depend on the size of the bucket, or how much the money is pushed down into the bucket? Can we all agree that "5 buckets of money" is a haphazard, non-standard amount?
For that matter, creating a new sorority that's outside the fraternity system, is that even a thing? This screenplay wants so badly to have it both ways - they're students, but they're living off-campus, and I don't think we see one character open a book or study for a test in the whole film. They're freshmen and therefore possibly teenagers, but they're somehow allowed to drink without consequence - so what state is this located in, and what's the drinking age there? They don't have any money, so they need to throw a party, but then where did the get the money to buy the drinks and decorations? Same goes for their "scheme" to corner the market on marijuana sales during the big tailgate event. We have no money, so let's sell pot! Great, but first you have to BUY the pot, and that takes money, which you just said you don't have. So big glaring, honking NITPICK POINT there.
The fight / prank war between the couple and the sorority sisters was basically just a repeat of the fight they had with the fraternity - "Let's call the cops!" "No wait, we can't call the cops!" "OK, let's crash their party and take it down from the inside..." "Change of plan, let's call the cops!" Haven't we seen all of this before, even the bit with the airbags, despite the fact that someone pointed out that airbags just don't work that way, even though the screenplay dictates that they must? Then they just borrowed the sorority's team dynamic from "Pitch Perfect", right down to having one of the sisters act just like Fat Amy. When they say that our country needs to recycle more, this is not what they mean.
Time and time again, this movie also proves that the PC movement has gotten way out of hand. The Dean says, "I can't go after this sorority, because of what they stand for, how would that look?" OK, so girls get a pass on all of their bad behavior, just because they're girls? That doesn't seem fair. There's another gag where the black cops rough up and use tasers on all the white drug dealers they arrest, but then when they burst in on black drug dealers, they're very polite and offer the dealers beverages in the squad car. It's meant to be funny, but it underlies the fact that in our quest to be "politically correct" (again I note that should be regarded as an oxymoron) we're practicing a distorted form of discrimination. Either everyone from this point forward gets treated equally, or according to their actions and not their race, sex or religious beliefs, or else the whole system is BS.
I watched an episode of that HBO news show "Vice", all about the events of Charlottesville a couple of weeks ago, where alt-right NeoNazis showed up to cause trouble around the taking down of those Confederate statues, and like most reasonable people (I hope), I was sickened by what I saw. Entitled white males who are convinced that the problems in the world are caused by Jews taking their jobs, or black people acting like "savages" in the streets. One had hoped that these clouded racist attitudes were a thing of the past, but unfortunately you don't have to dig too deep to find people who still think this way. But, on the other hand, if we treat people of certain races or genders or religions differently because of real or perceived biases in the past, then the pendulum has maybe swung too far in the other direction.
However, it does seem to be some kind of injustice that fraternities in the U.S. can throw parties with alcohol, while sororities can't. (Assuming this is true, which a quick search on the web confirms.) There are other matters connected to this, such as the fact that fraternities pay more for insurance as a result, but the basic sexism here doesn't seem to make much sense. Which group of people is more likely to get out of control, a bunch of frat boys or a group of sorority sisters? And which group of people is more likely to get in trouble for sexual assault? And why is that the same group that's being given access to alcohol at parties? This voluntary practice seems to assume that men are more inclined to drink responsibly while women can't be trusted to figure that out, when the opposite is probably more true. So there really should be one set of rules applied to the entire Greek system. If having no alcohol at female parties is truly safer and more cost-effective for insurance, then the same should apply to the male parties. Or why can't some system be implemented to check the ages of everyone partying on campus, male or female?
Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "Dirty Grandpa"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Chloë Grace Moretz (last seen in "The 5th Wave"), Dave Franco (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), Ike Barinholtz (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Hannibal Buress (ditto), Billy Eichner (ditto), Carla Gallo (last seen in "Neighbors"), Lisa Kudrow (ditto), Jerrod Carmichael (ditto), Kiersey Clemons, Beanie Feldstein, Clara Mamet, Awkwafina, John Early, Liz Cackowski (last seen in "The To Do List"), Sam Richardson, with cameos from Christopher Mintz-Plasse (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon 2"), Kyle Mooney (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Kelsey Grammer (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Abbi Jacobson, Brian Huskey (also last seen in "The To Do List"), Selena Gomez.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Minions on exercise bikes
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