Alex Strangelove

So Alex Strangelove is a weird little movie. It's a marriage of Superbad and the last gay foreign film you saw and a lot like Superbad, it makes me think straight people should stop being in movies.

Basic plot rundown is that Alex and Claire are dating and Alex is super psyched to lose his virginity. But then Alex meets the sexy and sweet Elliot, who Alex develops feelings for, which throws a wrench in his plans to lose his virginity to Claire.

Okay so all the schlocky tropes of the teen "let's get laid and party" film are there, a kind of shitty protagonist with shitty friends, the cute quirky girlfriend, projectile vomit, awkward sex scenes, profesionally lit frat parties and copious amounts of substance abuse. What's also there is a coming out and of age story about a boy who meets another boy and falls in love.

So the first major problem is that Elliot is barely in the movie. Past the 40 minute mark we swop from Alex's conflicted feelings for both Elliot and Claire to how Alex just having these feelings is a problem, and Elliot doesn't show up again until the very end. The big climax happens in the sex scene (in that no one climaxes and this causes a falling out between Alex and Claire where he admits he has feelings for someone else) and then we have the Chekov's gun in a hallucinogenic frog and Alex admitting that he's gay.

To backtrack a little, right after a night out with Elliot, Alex comes home and lays out two cereal boxes. Then he picks out a third one and lays it down which is a cereal with elements of the first two, and the editing ruins what could have been a pretty clever visual metaphor by just spelling out Hetero, Bi and Gay.

So Alex goes along, up until that point, explicitly stating he's bi.

And this is where I found myself disappointed in the film. It wasn't brave enough to explore degrees of sexuality and the bisexual stepping stone narrative so vastly overpowers other, true bisexual experiences that it empowers the myth of bi men just being gay men not ready to come out yet, despite us making up a pretty large percentage of the LGBTQ community. The film also has some shitty attitudes towards trans and pansexual people, in that they're represented by goth outcasts and openly mocked by Del Gato without any challenge from the voice of the writers and lens for the audience, Alex. Del Gato also then gets the girl he's been shitty to the whole movie so yeah, let's reward that behaviour shall we.

And it's also a film with the audacity to ask "Isn't anyone just plain straight anymore?" with a mostly straight main cast.

It's not a good gay romance, it's also a mediocre Superbad, but the one thing the film does well is the pain of being in a heterosexual relationship and not feeling attraction towards your partner. The care it takes to show the leads painfully breaking apart as two people who clearly love each other, while one just isn't sexually attracted to the other person, is the biggest strength and draw of the film.

It's just too bad you have to sit through a shitty version of both Love, Simon and It's Kind Of A Funny Story to get to watch that.

So if you're into queer tourism, Alex Strangelove might be the film for you. If you want queer romance to have a little more queer in it, there are better, gayer films. The biggest criticism I can level is that for a queer romance movie, there's very little queer romance. Also Elliot can father my children and the fact that he's practically an afterthought makes this film so goddamn frustrating that someone needs to put together an Elliot only cut.