Netflix “The Boys In the Band” Reviews

If someone could post the paywalled LA Times review I’d be obliged

[Bold]Does Matt Bomer do full frontal in this movie?![/bold]

The reviews say he is nude in a bathhouse scene in flashback. If that includes frontal, then enough people have seen it in the play to know it is average sized.

The reviews are not kind to Bomer, saying he is the poorest cast of the bunch, so peen-flashing to resuscitate interest in him seems kind of desperate.

Outright pan from The Wrap

Bump

[Quote] And the casting of de Jesús, who is Puerto Rican, as Emory allowed Mantello to explore race in a way that the original stage and film productions did not. Mantello smartly tethered the effeminate Emory to Bernard (previously the piece’s only character of color), completely altering the meaning of entire sections of dialogue that went unchanged on paper.

Cliff Gorman read pretty ethnic in the original.

Bernard isn't a librarian, is he? He worked in a bookstore in the Friedkin movie.

Yes.

[Quote] And while de Jesus offers some of the best acting work in the film, it’s a bit of a cop-out changing Emory from a white character to a Latinx one, as it diminishes the character’s stream of jokey racist put-downs to Bernard, and Bernard’s eventual explanation as to why he allows it. If filmmakers are going to re-create 1968, it’s cheating to retroactively let white characters’ racist behavior off the hook.

Good point.

[Quote] Parsons whines so gratingly that we can’t imagine how Michael has enough friends to fill a party, and Quinto takes Harold’s most acridly funny lines and turns them into Dennis Haysbert talking about car insurance.

Eek. I can't say I'm surprised.

Zachary Quinto in BOYS IN THE BAND is like Mads Mikkelsen doing Drew Droege doing Chloe Sevigny. Truly impressive that he reads *every* line like it’s the ransom note at a murder-mystery party

They should have cast Jonah Hill as Harold.

I'll look at Matt's dick when it's posted. Otherwise....zero interest.

[quote]The reviews are not kind to Bomer, saying he is the poorest cast of the bunch, so peen-flashing to resuscitate interest in him seems kind of desperate.

That's pretty much all he brought to the play. Even the people on the Broadway boards called it a gimmick. (Even if there was an ass flash in the original movie.) He got naked and disappeared into the background mostly.

In the movie besides the peen flash they give him another sex scene with Andrew Rannells' character, standing up, at a bathhouse. However, it's apparently a very "quick" flash to establish that their two characters had hooked up before.

If anyone has something negative to say in the reviews it's usually about Matt Bomer with one reviewer reviewer calling his performance bland and lifeless, another saying he is the only negative in the cast and this one which straight up calls him miscast.

[quote]That role is the most unconvincingly written, and Matt Bomer's miscasting sticks out onscreen. He's too handsome, too perfectly sculpted, too innately calm and collected to be the supposed quivering mess that arrives early on Michael's doorstep because his therapist is unavailable. That panic is undermined by the fact he seems pretty much fine thereafter, and certainly is among the more well-adjusted figures populating the play. I've never really bought Donald as a character, so the always appealing Bomer is not at fault. But the deluxe casting in a peripheral role is also one way in which this film conforms to the syndrome of the Ryan Murphy Production.

I do agree that it's hard to believe within the context of the play that he is Michael's ex and had a fling with Larry's character. I can't even picture his character as played by him even having anything to do with the bunch. This Donald doesn't seem like he would be desperate enough to fuck those two.

Although it is kind of messed up that when the film is released, his penis is what is going to get everyone's attention and not the performances of the other actors who are much better than he is.

But the original Larry was a handsome fashion photographer and the original Michael was decent looking to go withrich, so...

to go with rich

It would only be kind of messed up if this production was otherwise noteworthy...

LA Times review

Could t you just post the review?

From IndieWire:

[quote] The performances are all superb, but this is Parsons’ show. The decorated TV actor famous for “The Big Bang Theory” deconstructs his Hollywood persona for a character who is part bitchy queen, but mostly wounded animal.

I smell Oscar©. (This year they're grading on the curve.)

You click on the link, it will be the full review as I don't want to clutter the thread with a 5-page review. Please be considerate to other pensioners who will have to scroll through it.

That link only brings pop ups for spyware.

Bomer can be entertaining, but his filmography is littered with these throwaway roles, most of which are from gay-themed productions. He literally had no chemistry with Eric McCormack on Will & Grace, but they forced that relationship anyway.

Bomer is way to Ken Doll to be sexy to me...he's almost like an Android.

I remember he had a sex/murder scene with Michael Chiklis in AHS that was good. Maybe he needs an old, borderline homely dude to get his engine going.

I'll watch it, but I'm not looking forward to Parsons. Even in the part of the embittered alcoholic, I'm sure he'll be as sniveling, and as annoying as always. I wanted to punch Parsons the actor in the face, during "Hollywood". And I guess I'm the only one who is indifferent regarding Bomer, but I have no doubt he'll be better than Parsons (and so will everyone else).

R27 is too stupid to read LA Times for free and now tries to be a fat, lying cunt and still sounds stupid.

I'm really looking forward to Ryan Murphy's version--which seems to make BitB a gay-affirmative, sexy, hopeful, optimistic and witty romp!

Boys in the Band is SOooooo outdated. Gay men in present day are not given to vitriol.

[Quote] is too stupid to read LA Times for free and now tries to be a fat, lying cunt and still sounds stupid.

Oh.

Bomer chemistry, from IndieWire:

[quote] Donald is the first one to show up at Michael’s party, and the chemistry between Parson and Bomer is the most electric of the film, two quippy queens who prove ideal verbal-sparring partners because of their shared history, and bottomless knowledge of one another’s neuroses.

I'll watch.

Please, R36, rush back immediately after and give us your insights.

Is NPH in this? If not, is he pissed he's not?

[quote]I remember he had a sex/murder scene with Michael Chiklis in AHS that was good. Maybe he needs an old, borderline homely dude to get his engine going.

That scene was with Finn Wittrock, you blind bat.

Bomer and Chiklis did have good chemistry.

LA Times

By Charles McNultyTheater Critic Sep. 25, 2020 12:01 AM

When Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band,” the granddaddy of gay plays, first appeared off-Broadway, it offered an inside peek into what had been consigned to the shadows: gay male life as it is experienced outside the closet.

The characters in this 1968 drama, New York friends gathered for a birthday celebration, slurp cocktails, trade bitchy repartee, assemble into a chorus line, flirt, flame out and throw fits. The psychodrama is relentless, but no one commits suicide, the traditional end for homosexuals in plays and movies, so it was considered progress.

A year after “The Boys in the Band” debuted onstage, the Stonewall riots would usher in the gay liberation movement. As groundbreaking as Crowley’s play was in bringing visibility to a subculture that was ridiculed when not being ignored, the work was already being dismissed as retrograde by the time the film version came out in 1970.

Crowley’s campy wisecracks resounded in gay bars across America for years, but an ambivalence prevailed. Between the indulgence of flamboyant stereotypes and the internalized homophobia of Michael, the alcoholic protagonist and psychological arsonist, the drama only seemed to compound unflattering caricatures.

But Crowley was actually condemning society for making love between men the dirtiest secret of all. Vito Russo went so far as to declare in “The Celluloid Closet,” his irreplaceable 1981 book on homosexuality in the movies, that “The Boys in the Band” made the “best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever offered in a popular art form.”

As I said to my gay BFF after watching the new Netflix version of “The Boys in the Band,” which reunites the cast of Joe Mantello’s Tony-winning 2018 Broadway revival, Crowley’s landmark work is both dated and eternal, a period piece that still has something urgent to say. The conditions have improved for LGBTQ people in the last half-century, but discrimination and homophobia persist. Crowley’s work maps out the internalization of this toxic brew of intolerance, the way it seeps into the fabric of gay identity and corrodes from within.

With a screenplay by Crowley and Ned Martel, this handsome remake is directed by Mantello at an entertaining clip. Jim Parsons stars as Michael, the host of the all-male soiree who tries to conceal his self-hatred under Hermès cashmere that still isn’t paid off. Zachary Quinto plays Harold, the birthday boy, who forthrightly describes himself as a “32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy,” making clear that no one, not even sharp-tongued Michael, is going to be able to wound him with a cutting remark.

Lighting up a joint as he settles into the festive turbulence, Harold presides as a choral counterweight, parrying Michael’s caustic thrusts with his own savage truths. Michael has fallen off the wagon after a surprise visit from his supposedly straight college friend, Alan (played with sorrowful gruffness by Brian Hutchison). Agitated and embarrassed, Michael unleashes his rancor on his guests in a manner that could give Martha a run for her money in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — a palpable influence on Crowley’s drama.

The hostility in “The Boys in the Band” is not only ugly but also dramatically confining. Michael’s viciousness loses some of its psychological nuance when it kicks into high gear. The character begins to resemble a plot device as he works feverishly to intensify the static situation of a birthday party gone awry.

Parsons doesn’t always seem perfectly cast but he gives us a powerful glimpse of Michael’s horror of aging, when, catching sight of himself in the mirror, he turns his head as though he were a vampire sensing glimmers of dawn. He subtly connects Michael’s accommodating friendship with Alan, who makes no bones about his distaste for male effeminacy, to Michael’s own self-loathing. Yet the behavior of this divided, semilapsed Catholic gay man grows contrived when he’s awash in gin. Crowley’s somewhat monotonous writing needs more subtle delineation in performance.

In the 1996 off-Broadway revival of “The Boys in the Band,” the inimitable Obie-winning theater artist David Greenspan played Harold as though he were an extraterrestrial draped in an exaggerated 1960s zeitgeist. The portrayal offered a bracing jolt of weirdness that awakened the play for a new era. Quinto’s performance brought to mind Greenspan’s bizarre daring, except the camera isn’t as welcoming of this Harold’s drawn-out speech pattern, hyena laugh and gravity-slowed movements. At times it seems as if we’re viewing Harold through the jaundice hue of his tinted glasses. The character, a cynic with a knowing heart, is an outsider. But Quinto’s portrayal, while fascinating in its eccentricity, disconnects Harold from the one group to which he’ll always belong.

One advantage of the original “Boys in the Band” film, directed by William Friedkin (who would go on to direct a slightly less scary movie called “The Exorcist”), is that the actors were not widely known, making it easy to mistake the originators of the roles for their characters. Mantello’s starry cast doesn’t allow for the same confusion.

Beyond the marquee names of Parsons and Quinto, this deluxe Ryan Murphy-produced offering features the recognizable faces of Andrew Rannells, who plays sexually prolific Larry, and Matt Bomer, who brings a chiseled beauty and hushed grace (along with a flash of nakedness) to Donald’s neurotic dithering. Although he sometimes looks as though he’s wearing “Boys in the Band” drag, Rannells breathes bickering life into Larry’s relationship with Hank (an impeccably natural Tuc Watkins), the math teacher who left his wife for Larry and doesn’t understand his partner’s compulsive cruising.

Michael Benjamin Washington lends bookish Bernard a poignant dignity as the character shrugs off a battery of racist put-downs. As the Cowboy, one of Harold’s birthday presents, Charlie Carver imbues the slow-witted hustler with an affectionate sweetness that only throws into relief Michael’s gratuitous cruelty.

Emory, the most flamboyant in Crowley’s taxonomic set, is described by a disgusted Alan as a “butterfly in heat.” But he’s given wings of steel by Robin De Jesus in the film’s freshest characterization. Mincing about the apartment with the lasagna he’s specially prepared, he puckishly mixes up pronouns, tosses out ribald quips like confetti, delights in Harold’s approval of his Cowboy gift and doesn’t flee after he’s assaulted by Alan and verbally assailed by Michael.

Emory’s strength, however, is most evident during the sadistic party game, in which the men are bullied by Michael to telephone the one person they truly loved and confess their secret before hanging up. In De Jesus’ grounded portrayal, Emory’s hurtful memory of an older boy from his Bronx childhood with whom he just wanted to be closer humanizes without sentimentalizing a character who has been separated from the herd for as long as he can remember.

Even Alan, who has hung around out of a combination of shell-shock and sexual curiosity, develops compassion for the flouncing impish id he only a short time earlier punched in the mouth. Michael’s game might have had malicious motives behind it, but a single theme emerges to unite the disparate stories that are shared: how different life would have been had love — innocent, boyish, uncalculated love — not been made a source of shame.

Any revival of “The Boys in the Band” is forced to recognize the lingering traces of the past in the present. The film, dedicated to Crowley, who died this year, beautifully summons a vintage gay New York that was building inexorably to Stonewall.

If some of the character subtleties get lost in the drunken shuffle, Mantello’s dedicated company honors the communal bonds that have transformed characters from such different backgrounds into a family. These raucous friends inhabit Michael’s stylish apartment as if it’s their home too. And they bear with one another because they understand the rage of backlogged pain.

Perhaps the most remembered line from the play is Michael’s desperate crack at the end: “Who was it that used to always say, ‘You show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.’” But the most moving is Harold’s parting remark to Michael, spoken after pointing out the self-hatred at the root of his friend’s animosity: “Call you tomorrow.”

Some of the text was cut off in the linked version - I have ad and redirect blockers on Chrome, so I didn't get spyware attacks. So thank you R41 for your kindness in cutting and pasting.

Why was this shit made to begin with? It's almost 2021, who wants to watch a bunch of effeminate catty gays calling each other names and bickering like middle school girls? Was this a vanity project?

[quote]Was this a vanity project?

Aren't they all?

[Quote] who wants to watch a bunch of effeminate catty gays calling each other names and bickering like middle school girls?

Especially when we can just READ such exchanges on DL.

Why are there two competing threads and which is the official one?

Because this is the Datalounge r48.

[quote]Why was this shit made to begin with? It's almost 2021, who wants to watch a bunch of effeminate catty gays calling each other names and bickering like middle school girls? Was this a vanity project?

I feel the same. I saw the original and it was like watching a gay minstrel show. I don't know why this old relic had to be resurrected, it's such a dinosaur.

I've noticed it's definitely a generational thing, though. Boomer gay men love the show, Gen X/Millennials think it's an embarrassment.

Can you imagine if this sweeps the Oscar nominations this year? There's so little competition that it just might.

And what are GEN X doing on this forum, then?

This was announced for Netflix, not theaters.

It has gotten rated by the MPAA so Netflix will submit it for Oscar consideration.

Imagine investing this money and talent in something original and non stereotypical. That's why I ask if this was some vanity project, because there's no commercial sense to make this show, even for Netflix.

The nerve of Ryan Murphy to submit this to the Academy Awards.

This sounds like it may be the best version yet.

At least until "Naked Boys In The Band Fucking."

Here's the trailer that was posted in another thread but may be helpful to view in the Review thread.

Doesn't a vanity project usually have to be something really out there like a 78 year old wanting to play a teenager or someone who can't sing casting themself in a big singing role? There doesn't seem to be anything about this that is too far out of anyone's wheelhouse.

Here's the trailer for the 1970 movie directed by William Friedkin.

R12 The Guardian review called him a student, which shows how much attention these critics are paying. He's "borrowing" books from his job at the book store. Unless Murphy cut the line I don't see how they could've missed it.

[quote]Parsons whines so gratingly that we can’t imagine how Michael has enough friends to fill a party

Because they're Harold's friends, not Michael's. I'm almost certain there's a line that explicitly says this, isn't there?

[quote]The nerve of Ryan Murphy to submit this to the Academy Awards.

He's already said that he's doing the same thing for The Prom, so that Meryl and Nicole can get Oscar nominations.

What constitutes a vanity project is something a specific person or group of persons want to make even though everyone else says or thinks it shouldn't be done because it isn't needed or will fail.

I think this movie is a prime example of that, an outdated look at gay life, 40 years too late. No one needs or asked for this. I think Ryan got this one for free and it became his vanity project to thank all his gay actors or whatnot.

Maybe they should have cast ESTELLE Parsons as Michael!

(Actually, I saw the Broadway production and JP was fine, even if he wasn’t a natural fit for the role.)

Estelle Parsons would guarantee an Oscar win.

Who is cast in the Tammy Grimes role from the original movie?

The apartment was Tammy Grimes'.

[quote]Imagine investing this money and talent in something original and non stereotypical.

Too bad Murphy didn't think of this.

I always think of BITB as a fictionalized version of Datalounge.

[quote]The apartment was Tammy Grimes'.

But who is playing the part that Grimes played in the movie?

R63, you have described 3/4 of HW

Why would they need to remake something that had nothing wrong with it, and was contemporaneous. Who thinks they can portray an era better than people in that era? I don't know about vanity production, but maybe we need a new term for the pointless re-production phenomenon we've been suffering under the past 20 years.

R60 Thanks for posting the trailer. You can see a glimpse of the rentboy hired for the party in one of the street scenes [West Village]?

Dominick Dunne is credited as an executive producer as well.

Gay men are still plenty bitchy, so there's that. Friends cutting/reading each other is still a part of gay life for many gay men. Is it the desperation and self-hate that is the turn off.

Some black people don't like slave movies or movies like The Help or Green Book - what's the point of revisiting subservience among other negative things tied to legal inequality? Is that sort of the reason some people see this as not worthwhile and outdated?

[quote] Gay men are still plenty bitchy, so there's that. Friends cutting/reading each other is still a part of gay life for many gay men. Is it the desperation and self-hate that is the turn off.

In order to be self-hate we would have to be like you, bitchy, catty and effeminate. We're not, that's why we're tired of this stereotype, it was old back then, it's still old 40 years later. Not everyone was bullied at school and need to get even with the world by being a cunt. As a matter of fact the majority of gays today live healthy lives within their own communities, this isn't the 60s anymore.

[quote] Is that sort of the reason some people see this as not worthwhile and outdated?

We see it as outdated because it is. The world is not what it used to be when you were in your 20s, 40 years ago. You don't seem do understand that, or accept it.

[quote]Gay men are still plenty bitchy, so there's that. Friends cutting/reading each other is still a part of gay life for many gay men.

The difference between these men and gay men today is that those men didn't have a choice but to stick with each other. There are many gay men today who would never hang around this bunch or anyone else who was "bitchy" and who spent their time "cutting/reading" each other. I'm just not sure why people don't get this. Then again I grew up at a time where they dropped class superlatives as not to make anyone feel left out and bullying in school was not tolerated because you were a different sex, race, religion or sexuality.

As one reviewer said he "understood" the film when he was a young gay man watching it but as an adult decades later he just can't relate to these people anymore.

The world, as R76 said, changed.

So when the actors do interviews and say things "haven't changed" today -- I hope they truly seek help if they believe that. There are several people in that cast who, if you ever said something nasty to them, they would crumble like origami.

It's a relic of another time, of course I've known gay men who are catty bitches but like the above poster said they're not tolerated today like they were back then. If a guy like Harold showed up at a party in 2020, he would be asked to leave because nobody would be able to stand him.

I saw the play and I'm a fan of some of the actors, but JFC it was so cringey and embarrassing.

Murphy is so prolific (although a lot of other people are doing a lot of the work but his stupid name gets plastered everywhere. He needs to go away.

[quote] The reviews say he is nude in a bathhouse scene in flashback. If that includes frontal, then enough people have seen it in the play to know it is average sized.

Bomer was in the play?

[quote] This was announced for Netflix, not theaters.

Streaming films are eligible this year.

This movie remake uses the cast from a Broadway revival, r80.

[Quote] Streaming films are eligible this year

I've read that it's only if they were originally announced to play on the big screen. BITB was always intended for Netflix.

Streaming films were eligible last year as long as they had public exhibition. It’s more lenient this year due to the collapse in public theatergoing, but I imagine Netflix was always planning on submitting this for Oscar consideration after qualifying runs at its two theaters, the Paris and the Egyptian.

It's admirable that Ryan Murphy is creating opportunities for gay actors, and even casting them in coveted roles. But I'm so fucking tired of Hollywood acting like Parsons, Bomer, Rannells, and Quinto are the best they can wrangle.

Yeah, they're all very niche r85. And Rannells is so fucking annoying.

^^And Quinto seems like he's five minutes away from turning into a serial killer.

Well at least with the creation of the movie Cats, no stage to screen adaptation can ever be that truly awful again, unless they fucked up the digital fur in the catty scenes here. Can you see any feet or ringed fingers instead of fur here?

So no one knows who's playing the Tammy Grimes role?

You mean Elaine of Elaine's?

It would have been nice if they found another cameo for Maud Adams.

OMG! Never mind. I was thinking of Don't Stop the Music that had Tammy Grimes in it, not Boys in the Band.

[quote]The reviews say he is nude in a bathhouse scene in flashback. If that includes frontal ...

The frontal is in the shower like in the play.

The bathhouse scene is a flashback explaining how Donald and Larry met. They have sex standing up. There are frontals in that scene but from extras.

I thought they didn’t do frontal on stage.

There's no bathhouse scene in the original at all.

The Variety review posted by OP and the LA Times review posted later in the thread are both very knowledgeable and make a point of placing the play's content in proper historical context.

The play was a period piece by the time it was first filmed in 1970 just two years after its stage debut and was both acknowledged as such and criticized for already being dated at the time.

If you weren't around back then you can't imagine how much and how quickly things were changing to make the play so dated so quickly.

Those were fun times.

Oh, yes. Everything was great by 1970. Long Live Judy!

R94, In the shower scene in the play, Matt Bomer enters the shower, (that part of the set pictured) strips and begins to take one on stage while talking to Jim Parsons. The the lights shift when he enters the shower, the shower glass becomes frosted and there are objects in the way but the entire set was mirrored so in many of the shows, if you were sitting in the right place, you were able to see Matt Bomer's front in reflections. Otherwise you only saw his side nude, his butt if he turned, and definitely his butt when he is getting dressed facing away from the audience in a different room after leaving the shower.

However, as is clear from the many posts on both threads here and other boards: at some point they restaged it and he positioned himself so you couldn't see his front side. On another board a few people said that when they went he was wearing a sock and didn't actually get wet and shower on stage when it's clear that he did early in the run. I don't blame him. I wouldn't have tried walking across the second floor of that set with wet feet.

R94, They added flashbacks for all of the characters in the movie. I don't like the idea of it. I liked the fact that you/the audience were stuck at this party with them and were forced to determine all of their relationships and imagine their stories based upon what they said.

A few reviewers said the bathhouse scene was quick and that all of the flashback scenes, when added together probably account for about 3 minutes of the film.

Parsons looks better with the shorter hair. The longer film hair ages him.

So no frontal. Pass.

How sad do you have to be to watch a film just to catch a glimpse of a schlong?

Was that a dick I saw in the pool during that flashback?

I am not a Eunice schlong. I am THE Eunice schlong!

R99, there was though, partial frontal by Bomer (blink and you miss it), when he's coming out of the shower. Better than nothing

I'd have preferred Estelle Parsons in the lead role...

If Keith Prentice were around today, he'd be Jacob Elordi.

R102, You see his pubes and a bag firmly over his dick and balls if you lighten the image enough.

I wouldn't even call that a partial frontal. I'd call it partial nudity. You don't see his penis or balls at all.