There, meek homeowner John Belushi and his wife Kathryn Walker get terrified by the loud, pushy couple, played by Dan Aykroyd and Cathy Moriarty, who have just moved in next door. So instead of getting as mad as hell and picketing the theaters, they sink into their seats and sigh at the clichés that pass for the Shock of the New.ĭirected by Nicholas Stoller (who helmed the Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Five Year Engagement and Get Him to the Greek), Neighbors bears some similarities to the 1981 film of the same name.
But they also can’t take much pleasure in variations on the same visual and verbal affronts they’ve consumed for decades.
Psi plot for mac movie#
The problem is this: A movie can’t have the purgative power to upset and astound, by terror or laughter, if viewers don’t take offense. What was sensational was soon codified, as transgression devolved into genre and audiences built up immunity for shock tactics in horror movies and in R-rated comedies of the Judd Apatow stripe. But winning takes its own revenge on social norms. Not that we miss the old days: the battle for freedom of the screen was long, difficult and well worth waging. (READ: Remembering the brunette bombshell Jane Russell) That’s what happens when the outlaws become the in-laws. And the only thing forbidden in most current movies is subtlety.
When Mac and his wife Kelly (Rose Byrne) frantically whisk their child to the hospital for tests, a doctor tells them, “Your baby has HIV.” Like the rest of the movie, he’s just kidding.Īt this point, a weary viewer may mutter, “Oh, outrage - how I miss you!” These days, indignation is mostly political, stoked by the easily infuriated pundits of Fox News. Teddy is barely more mature than Mac’s several-months-old daughter Stella, who sits on the front lawn about to taste a used condom tossed there by one of the Delta Psis. The frat boys’ penis fixation, in the enervating comedy Neighbors, could be an expression of their homoerotic bonding to the virtual exclusion of women - their mantra is “bros before hoes” - or a clue to an infantilism these boys never outgrew.
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