User:Caseyd612/sandbox

This is a podcast if you want to listen and write up http://www.ifc.com/fix/2009/03/the-rise-of-the-bromantic-come

http://go.galegroup.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/ps/i.do?action=interpret&id=GALE%7CA201090207&v=2.1&u=northwestern&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&authCount=1
 * Setoodeh, Ramin. "Isn't It Bromantic?" Newsweek 8 June 2009: 73. Academic OneFile. Web. 24 Oct. 2014.
 * The genre started with Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, followed closely by I Love You, Man
 * Buddy comedies are nothing new, but the bromance shows us that straight guys, even without the aid of a high-speed car chase, can bond almost as strongly as heterosexual lovebirds. To succeed, a bromance must walk a fine line. It must lightly indulge in gay stereotypes, but never in a mean-spirited way

http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/content/29/2_86/119.full.pdf+html
 * Modleski, Tania. "An Affair to Forget: Melancholia in Bromantic Comedy" Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies (2014) 29(2 86): 119-147; doi:10.1215/02705346-2704652
 * If some of the film’s visuals and its staging of visuality, namely the operations of the bromantic gaze, seem to work against the narrative of heterosexual coupling
 * I would like to conclude by briefly discussing The Hangover (dir. Todd Phillips, US, 2009) and returning to the idea of forgetting, a theme in bromantic films that Halberstam has discussed in her sublime — or, as Sianne Ngai would call it, “stuplime” — reading of Dude, Where’s My Car? (dir. Danny Leiner, US, 2000)
 * Whenever I talk about bromances, someone is sure to ask about Bridesmaids (US, 2011), a film produced by Apatow that reviewers speculate was meant to create a female equivalent to bromances

Pineapple Express sources (my favorite bromance): http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080809/ENTERTAIN/80809011/-1/rss66
 * Carbone, Gina. "Pineapple Express’ Review: Stonerhood of the Traveling Pants." Seacoastonline.com. Seacoast, 9 Aug. 2008. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.
 * Apatow excels at this kind of bromance, which differs from the buddy film in that the latent homosexuality of the latter is openly acknowledged and played with. In this round, Apatow and company are mixing the newly revived stoner genre with the bromance, which was also done recently in the “Harold and Kumar” films

Blog on bromances throughout history: http://thewhitescape.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/bromances-in-pop-culture-history/
 * A Bromance is the bond between two men, who go way beyond being mere friends. They become brother, follow each other to the very ends of the earth, make sure that their buddy is getting laid from time to time and have each other’s backs, no matter what! Every man in this world dreams of having such a friendship.

super-scholarly article on bromance and culture: http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1099&context=communication_theses&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%3Fei%3Dutf-8%26fr%3Daaplw%26p%3Dbromance%2Bculture#search=%22bromance%20culture%22
 * Sargent, Diana, "American Masculinity and Homosocial Behavior in the Bromance Era" (2013). Communication Theses. Paper 99.
 * this one was too long for me to focus read, but definitely can take quotes from it

McGill Daily on bromance: http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2013/01/our-romance-with-the-bromance/
 * Batyreva, Amina. "Our Romance with the "bromance"" The McGill Daily. Th McGill Daily, 19 Jan. 2013. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.
 * But more than ever, the borderline between the underlying gay tension and the purely platonic label of bromantic friendship has become tenuous – the more hyperaware society becomes of the homoeroticism that is masked by the “bromance” label in popular entertainment, the more it threatens to burst free into unknown and unexplored territory. The fear, the unease, and the residual disgust with homosexuality that lingers in our cultural psyche makes the bromance a desperate refuge, with the walls between gay and straight desperately thrown up. We can see this defensive rejection of actual homoeroticism woven throughout these comedic, testosterone-fueled flicks, such as in I Love You, Man, where Paul Rudd’s character goes on a series of “dates” with men to find a best man for his wedding. When one of his dates misinterprets his intentions and actually kisses him at the end of the evening, the scene is played for laughs, and Rudd is shown with jaw agape, shocked that his same-sex outings might be seen as homoerotic. The underlying subtextual tension in the movie is that within these platonic man-dates runs the sub-current of legitimate homosexual dating practice.
 * The industry has become savvy at exploiting the audience’s enthusiasm for same-sex relationships on screen, whether they’re platonic friendships or ambiguously homoerotic and rife with tension. The bromance label provides refuge for these writers, allowing these series to embrace male bonding and intimacy without actually portraying homosexual relationships. It allows writers to exploit a significant demographic, mostly made up of straight and queer women, who enjoy mainstream series and movies predominantly for the same-sex relationship at its core. We can see it in the recent Sherlock Holmes reboot, with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law wrestling half-naked on a train while Downey is dressed in drag.

new category of bromantic comedy, focuses of romance and bromances? http://nypost.com/2014/01/30/awkward-is-the-latest-evolution-in-bromantic-comedy/
 * nothing that worthy

another scholarly thing!: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509208.2011.575658#.VEqmlfnF-s0
 * Alberti, John. "“I Love You, Man”: Bromances, the Construction of Masculinity, and the Continuing Evolution of the Romantic Comedy." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 30.2 (2013): 159-72. Taylor & Francis. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
 * What I seek to explore here is the contemporary sub-genre of the bromance—ostensible romantic comedies centered on confused homosocial/homoerotic relationships between putatively straight male characters—as examples of this generic exploration of “other types of relationships” not defined by the conventional codes of the heteronormative romantic comedy, explorations driven by and responding to the “new climate of social and sexual equality between men and women.”
 * In these movies, we find male characters confused and even frightened by what they experience as destabilized codes of gender identity as well as the pathological nature of many of the more conventional versions of these codes. The Apatow-influenced bromance explores “other types of relationships” and other constructions of masculinity within the ostensibly heteronormative structure of the romantic comedy
 * The bromance is an ironic take on the romantic comedy, which can appeal to both genders at the box office, reaching out to the male audience that would regard the romantic comedy as a “chick flick.” These films work to reclaim masculinity for a generation that sees feminism as a historical movement and is familiar with conflicting representations of men in popular culture, ranging from the metrosexual icon of David Beckham to the macho posturings of many hip hop stars.
 * If the question of “what do women want” haunts much of contemporary Neo-traditional romantic comedy in general and the wedding subgenre in particular, bromances ask the even more potentially disturbing question, “what do men (really) want?” The male characters within bromances constantly foreground this question, assuming that the answer must obviously be “sex,” as certain popular culture constructions of Alpha masculinity keep insisting, with sex functioning as a surrogate for power and mastery. At the same time, they constantly question their own inability to access and perform this supposedly innate desire, a confusion expressed in the very title of Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin. This destabilizing of desire in the romantic comedy has complicated and confused Henderson's binary ideal of the sexual dialectic.
 * The bromance approaches the challenge of the Alpha male from the unlikely direction of the buddy movie, the counter feminist reassertion of Alpha male supremacy that emerged in the eighties and that was most archetypally expressed in the Lethal Weapon series
 * In the Apatow bromance, conflicts over heterosexual bonding derive from what are seen as the more fundamental conflicts surrounding homosocial bonding
 * The ambiguity and ambivalence of the wedding scene in I Love You, Man points to the second more dystopian example of the bifurcation of masculine identity in the bromance, one that highlights the difficulty of reconciling “other types of relationships between people” within the traditional teleology of marriage. If the nervous romance abandoned marriage as unworkable and the Neo-traditionalist romance offers an atavistic obsession with marriage, the Apatow bromance explores the question of what new configurations of masculinity as masculinity might still salvage the logic of heterosexual marriage or whether masculinity itself remains inevitably tied to the logic of patriarchy. We can see this tension embodied in the doppelganger marriages and masculine heroes of Apatow's Knocked Up.
 * The reconstructions of masculine identities and roles within the Apatow bromance remains a source of crisis but also a source of vitality and manifests a particular response to the crisis within the larger genre of romantic comedy that Deleyto describes. This crisis—the potential narrative obsolescence of traditional versions of masculine identity—affects the narrative logics of a number of other contemporary genres as well, perhaps nowhere more than in the action adventure genre, where constructions of the ideal (masculine) hero range from the muscle bound septuagenarian Sylvester Stallone to the boyish Matt Damon to genre/gender inversion stars such as Angelina Jolie and Uma Thurman. The idea of the obsolescence of masculine identity may initially seem counter-intuitive in reference to contemporary mainstream American cinema, where critics have rightly noted the virtual disappearance of women from central roles within key genres, including of course the bromantic comedy, but this obsession with male narrative function is itself a sign of anxiety over male identity. The title I Love You, Man evokes how the Apatow bromance exemplifies both this obsession with and anxiety over the narrative viability of the genres of masculinity within the romantic comedy. The simultaneous critical ambivalence and marketing popularity of these movies locate them at the crossroads of efforts to “explore other types of relationships” between people within a “new climate of social and sexual equality”: the question of what role(s) constructions of masculinity will play within the continuing evolution of the romantic comedy.
 * This was a long but good one so I definitely missed some things

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BromanticComedy
 * This is a wiki so I don't think it is considered a reliable source but it has a good list of examples to use.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bromantic-comedy-timothy-lawson/id599199546?mt=2

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Entertainment/photos/bromance-movies-11180523/image-11180662
 * Another list of examples

excerpts from a book online: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=bcZCBAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA238&dq=bromance+comedy&ots=bmdqHqC6Kj&sig=XXSBZ1uskztkMBU2TCqoKMXNqok#v=onepage&q=bromance%20comedy&f=false
 * talks more about the challenges in writing a bromance, and i couldn't really find a way to cite it, pages aren't shown and i couldn't easily copy and paste from it, so i kinda gave up

Judd Apatow: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/king-of-bromance-judd-apatow-1773842.html
 * "King of Bromance: Judd Apatow." The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 19 Aug. 2009. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
 * As the teen flicks of the late John Hughes gave way to the rom-coms of Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan in the 1980s, so "gross-out" – the pre-eminent comedy subgenre of the 1990s – has bowed to Apatow and his imitators' "bromances": male-centric romantic comedies that frequently favour the bawdy bonds between men over those of heterosexual romance.
 * "The bromance formula," says Gaydos, "mixes poignant, character-driven and feelings-based rel-ationship drama with raunchy humour." Says Apatow: "I like movies that are, you know, up-lifting and hopeful ... and I like filth."
 * Bromantic protagonists tend to be immature and ambition-free beta males, stuck in a spiral of pornography and junk food, and forced to grow up when they encounter women, children and responsibilities.
 * We had a dialogue about these comedies on Double X and one writer called them 'chick flicks for dicks'! Because the emotional content has a patina of dirty humour, guys feel comfortable with it. Apatow focuses more on male relationships than male-female relationships, but he provides an honest lens into that world, so women are interested, too."

Overall focus article on description (common themes), history, list of bromantic, and ties to homosexuals and homophobia

A Bromantic Comedy is a film genre that is closely related to the romantic comedy film genre with close male relationships instead. Many define it as, "A romantic comedy based on an eerily close platonic heterosexual relationship between two (or more) bros." One of the pioneers of this genre is Judd Apatow whose films thrive off of these bromances.

Description
A bromance can be defined as the bond between two men, who go way beyond being mere friends, becoming brothers. Bromance films delve into male-male relationships, showing that a pair of male friends can bond almost as strongly as heterosexual lovers, but in a manner that lacks sexual tension. Hence, the term itself refers to a romance between "bros", a fraternal friendship. Judd Apatow is often considered a founding father of the bromantic comedy genre, with his films The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005), Knocked Up (2007), and I Love You Man (2009) paving the way for a surge of similar films released in the mid-late 2000s. Films from this era fed audience demand for the depiction of same-sex relationships onscreen, a topic that many male viewers could relate with but had been overlooked by screenwriters in previous waves of trends in comedy. The development of this genre targeted homosocial behavior and masculinity in an inventive way. Bromance films also tend to touch on homosexual stereotypes, which may be interpreted in different ways.

History
There have been common aspects of "bromantic comedies" such male camaraderie and friendship in films through the ages but many agree the first film to be defined by these themes was Barry Levinson's 1982 film, Diner. In it, a group of six male friends struggle with growing up and finding their way in the real world but have each other to support them along the way. A similar structure is found in the 1995 film, Kicking and Screaming, and again in the more recent film, The Hangover (2009).

But it wasn't until Judd Apatow's "I Love You Man" that the genre was defined as its own. In the film Paul Rudd stars as Peter Klaven, and is getting married to the love of his life but he realize he doesn't have any male friends to serve as best man at his wedding. Then he meets Jason Segel's character, Sydney who is friendly and a great complement to Peter, but their bro-mance starts to impact the groom's relationship with his bride-to-be.

Historically there have been issues with acceptance of these “other types of relationships between people” but this exploration into the many relationships people can have has allowed an expansion of peoples' mindsets.

Themes and Elements of Bromantic Comedies

 * Male bonding and homosocial bonding
 * Conflicts with heterosexual bonding http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509208.2011.575658#.VEqmlfnF-s0
 * Emphasis of platonic love and rejection of homoeroticism, and deliberate confusion of homosocial/homoerotic relationships http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2013/01/our-romance-with-the-bromance/
 * Masculinity
 * Strong friendship, and unexpected friendships, which often overlap with Buddy Films
 * Mancation, as seen in The Hangover Series

Notable Bromantic Comedy Films

 * Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000)
 * Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)
 * The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
 * Knocked Up (2007)
 * Pineapple Express (2008)
 * Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)
 * The Hangover (2009)
 * I Love You, Man (2009)
 * A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011)
 * The Hangover Part II (2011)
 * 21 Jump Street (2012)
 * The Hangover Part III (2013)
 * 22 Jump Street (2014)