Feh! In this dismal display of “least common denominator” filmmaking, Seth Rogan goes mano-a-mano with Zac Ephron, totally wasting the talents of all concerned.
Neighbors has one of those “concept plots” that sounds like it was cooked up in a bar: what if some guy is living in the suburbs and he has just become a new father and one day a wild fraternity house moves next door? And what if the guy wants to be “cool” because he still lives in his college town and the frat boys are students at his Alma Mater? And what if the head of the fraternity has wasted his entire college career cooking up pranks and now the frat house is on probation?
Answer: Endless scenes of drinking, drugging, and partying, leading to lewd behavior, car crashes, and explosions, and ending with the inevitable fist fight. Feh!
Unlike Adam Sandler (who almost always manages to carry his Jewish identity gracefully), Seth Rogan makes me cringe. It goes without saying that his wife in Neighbors is a shiksa (which is par for the course these days). But when, in a moment of stress, Rose Byrne screams out “Fucking Jews and your mothers!,” I think Rogan has gone one step too far. There are a couple of other Jewish references, none of which are either important or necessary, but this degree of hostility is beyond the pale.
Top Photo: Zac Ephron as “Teddy.”
Bottom Photo: “Kelly” (Rose Byrne) and “Mac” (Seth Rogan) meet-up with their friend “Jimmy” (Ike Barinholtz) to figure out how to win back the neighborhood. Curiously, Mac and Kelly are alone in this endeavor. Even though the frat house is negatively impacting the entire block, no one else seems to mind…
Photo Credits: Glen Wilson
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Yes, at one point the screenwriters gave Zac Efron a line where he says, “It’s in Jewish!” (implying his character doesn’t know the language is called Hebrew). Even though Zac is one of the few major actors in the history of Hollywood whose last name IS Hebrew.
Also, most of this cast is of Jewish heritage one way or the other (Efron, Franco, Halston Sage, Lisa Kudrow, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) but the only explicitly Jewish character is Seth Rogen. This is distressing.
It is like the upcoming WWII movie Fury where most of the cast is Jewish (Jason Isaacs, Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal, and Cajun-Jewish mix Shia LaBeouf), but none of the characters will be (having read the script). There’s a Seth Rogen movie coming out around that time where his character name is “Aaron Rappaport”, though….
Bee: My apologies for not posting sooner. Somehow this was buried in the inbox. Comments most appreciated, Jan