Neg & Nag
AMERICA 2028 MOVIE REVIEWS, 7
Also posted at chrismaley.com.
My first six review assignments ran the gamut: a war movie, a father/son tale, a superhero origin flick, a college romp, a wall-to-wall dance extravaganza and a cutesy, kiddie story. Switching gears to critique a rom-com sounded like a plan.
Neg & Nag.
A love story fit for a country that elected Eric Trump as its president.
A “romantic” “comedy” for the modern age.
Dear reader: give that last sentence another look. Notice that I didn’t insert quotes around the whole phrase…writing it out as “romantic comedy”. That would not have conveyed what I wish to express.
I intentionally chose to encapsulate each word within its own set of quotation marks. Neg & Nag should be seen as a “romantic” “comedy” and not a “romantic comedy” — and it definitely SHOULD NOT BE SEEN as a romantic comedy.
A movie like this doesn’t just need qualifiers, it needs multiple sets of qualifiers to isolate each word of the trope.
I call the movie “romantic” using quotes as the disclaimer to convey that this movie will feel more like our modern dating scene and less like the dating scene of years past, in those times before the Brett Kavanaugh and the rest of the Supreme Court abolished all sexual assault laws.
I utilize the term “comedy” with its accompanying set of quotes to suggest that this film, like every other film in recent years, needed to have every joke approved by our nation’s Propaganda Minister, Donny Trump, Jr. As with any person or persons who attempt humor these days, I appreciate the producers of this film for feeling motivated to even try in the first place. A job this daunting, I would have given up long ago.
Anybody looking for light escapism that comes close to resembling a carefree boy-meets-girl tale — like the movies from times when the skies were not-as-cluttered with radiation like they are now — will be disappointed watching Neg & Nag.
Just throwing that out there.
This story centers around two caucasians, Neg and Nag, who each begin the story surrounded by their tribes, their respective packs of same-gendered — and same-temperamented and same facial-expressioned — friends.
Neg is your bro who can spot the woman at her weakest, then pour alcohol down her throat until he shames her into the sack. Neg’s most sexually-charged moment of each encounter is his recounting of the conquests to his bros the next day while they gather at the sports bar to sexually harass the waitstaff.
Nag isn’t the type of woman who stops herself after asking to speak to the manager. Slim, cat-like Nag demands to speak to the manager’s manager, then the manager’s manager’s manager, then the manager’s manager’s manager’s manager. Like peeling away the layers of onion, Nag and her gaggle of similarly-haired girlfriends do not relent.
About thirty minutes into the movie, our two lovebirds meet.
“Lovebirds”…whoa…what an intriguing term to ponder when thinking of Neg and Nag.
These two late twentysomething characters, if they were birds, I guess they would be vultures. Yeah, that seems to fit. Ugly-souled, judgmental, dead-eyed, empathy-free, vapid love-vultures…yeah…there you go. That works.
It took me a long time to come up with my favorite aspect of this movie. After deep thought, it finally occurred to me that these two characters didn’t end the tale looking like they were going to have kids and this fact made me extremely happy. Impressionable dead-eyed vapid types could see this movie. Sometimes, those ugly-souled, judgmental folks copycat behaviors that they see on the big screen.
Then again, compared to most characters in the majority of stories these days, Neg and Nag seem like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet.
The two characters also vaguely remind me — in this roundabout way — of Danny and Debbie in About Last Night.
Danny tells Debbie that he never once cheated on her.
Neg tells Nag that he never once roofied her drink.
The two scenes felt similar, yet different.
Kind of like these modern times. Everything feels similar, yet different.
President Eric the Great!
President Eric the Wise!
All hail President Eric!
I don’t just write reviews of movies that haven’t been written yet. I write fiction, too.
