Welcome to the post-Pride edition of Film on the Internet, where I’m get to hate on a bad gay movie while waiting for my annual Pride sunburn to stop hurting and my body to realize that I’m not as dehydrated as it thinks because it has had over 200oz of water so far (it was really hot, you guys. Like in the 90s!).
OK, technically, Me Him Her is a straight movie that looks and acts like a bad gay movie. Max Landis claims that he’s straight, and yet he fused a shitty version of Chasing Amy (straight guys idealize going where no man’s ever gone before; thank you Hooper X) with a generic coming out story that gets pushed to the wayside. Maybe Max is trying to make gays be cool or interesting or hip. The question becomes, why does all his understanding of gays come from sitcom style satires like Another Gay Movie?
Cory Isaacson (Dustin Milligan) visits Los Angeles because his best friend, Brendan Ehrlick (Luke Bracey) is a television-level actor who is struggling to come out as gay while starring as a heterosexual action star. Cory’s first idea is to take Brendan into a nearby gay bar where Brendan’s crush is having a drink, but Me Him Her‘s idea of zany is to have the bathroom full of freaks who chase Brendan out of the bathroom for fear that he’d be outed while Cory hooks up with Gabbi (Emily Mearde), a recently dumped lesbian.
The plot never develops much beyond this. Gabbi is caught between her lesbianism (which, she confesses is because men are shitty and want to fuck her instead of being friends) and her new found love of quirky Cory’s dick (her first heterosexual encounter ever). Her only complication is she’s still in love with her psychotic ex, Heather, who acts like every psycho female ever (but, most especially, the lesbian witch in Kaboom). And she has two lesbian friends who fit into the butch/femme dynamic. Brendan’s story gets even fewer complications: his agents don’t want him to come out. That’s it.
Much like every low budget gay movie with a paucity of plot, Max Landis seems to believe that interjecting pseudo-surreal zaniness and celebrity cameos will cover up the sitcom-style humor that fills every frame of this shit show. In two separate dreams, a giant stuffed penis pops up and terrorizes the dreamer. When Gabby and Cory have sex, the mattress floats into outer space. Geena Davis and Scott Bakula pop up as Brendan’s parents, Chris Hardwick pulls out his Singled Out persona to be the face of their version of TMZ, and Haley Joel Osment has a walk-on that is neither funny nor has anything to do with the movie. I’d argue that Haley Joel’s cameo is arguably the laziest use of a celebrity since Eric Roberts in the family classic, A Talking Cat?!? And, because lesbians wielding phallic symbols is hilarious, the whole movie ends with a lesbian and a dude getting into a sword fight.
Hey Julius, can you say something nice? Yeah…Dustin Milligan is cute and looks good with his shirt off. Luke Bracey gets in his underwear. But, nobody gets fully naked. That’s about it.
Who the fuck was this movie made for? I mean, besides Max Landis. His surrogate gets to fuck a lesbian into heterosexuality and helps solve his best friend’s homosexual crisis because he’s such a good guy. This movie isn’t made for straight audiences who have their own brand of shitty straight comedies to pick from. This movie isn’t made for gay audiences who don’t need straight bros telling them how they could improved their life. This movie isn’t made for hip people because it’s terminally uncool. What is the target audience?!
Ultimately, this lack of focus is what makes Me Him Her one of the worst gay movies ever made. Not only is it cheap, boring, unfunny, and unoriginal, it was also made by a heterosexual and centers a heterosexual character in two plots about queer sexuality. This is a big fat awful movie, and my sunburn still hurts.