Chuck Zlotnick/Universal Pictures; SonyWhile the upcoming Ghostbusters featuring four female leads and Chris Hemsworth playing against type as pure eye candy has launched a raging debate about just how much of a problem people still have with women doing jobs once done by men, is the sleeper feminist hit of the summer actually coming out this weekend?
"[Seth Rogen] and the boys called me in and they said they were interested in making a Neighbors 2 involving sororities," Chloë Grace Moretz, who stars in the sequel to the 2014 blockbuster that met nary a dick joke it didn't like, recalled to the Los Angeles Times in a recent interview. "They said, 'As 30-year-old-plus men, we think this is an interesting story, but do you think this is something your generation would want to see?' And I said, 'Hell yeah!' There aren't many female-driven stories for 18- to 21-year-olds. They're mainly for 30-year-olds."
And then she made a point that was at first hard to discern between the sinews of returning star Zac Efron's abs in the trailer.
"I think right now in this world, girls are having to push so hard to be perfect," the 19-year-old added. "We can't mess up. We can't do anything wrong. The idea behind this movie is that girls can be just as confused and idiotic as boys, just as vulgar and raunchy. It might not be portrayed in cinema, but it's happening in real life, and it's about time that we all clue in."
By showing a bunch of female college students getting sloppy, talking trash, swearing up a storm and refusing to take any s--t from their stodgy thirtysomething neighbors (or Zac Efron), is it the girls of Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising who have finally leveled the gender playing field?
Moretz, who proudly presides over a flock of party animals as brazen sorority princess Shelby in Neighbors 2, has made her mark in Hollywood gravitating toward your decidedly nonaverage teen-girl characters, such as the vulgar kid superhero in Kickass and Kickass 2; the angel-faced vampire who protects her male neighbor from vicious bullies in Let Me In; or tortured, telekinetic teen Carrie White in the 2013 remake of Carrie.
She told E! News at the film's premiere this week that it was "fun to be raunchy" for a change, but she once again may have taken on a subversive role. Just as Seth Rogen, writing partner Evan Goldberg and the Judd Apatow squad from whence they sprang have made it safe once again for men to be completely ridiculous and appreciated for it on the big screen, perhaps the day has finally come for women to be allowed to do the same.
That is, be ridiculous without having to ultimately be the "moral authority" or "learn a real lesson" after the fact or be horribly annoying, let alone the kill-joy. Or even be ridiculous with their boobs out, as female nudity is used this time around less for titillation than for comedic effect.
"The Day a Pair of Breasts Became as Sexy as a Gratuitous Male Butt": Discuss.
Rose Byrne already gleefully waded into the muck in the first Neighbors, and with seemingly every subsequent raunch-com striving to push the unrated-version envelope further, won't it be refreshing to see Neighbors 2 takes its place alongside female-centric comedies such as Trainwreck, Bridesmaids and...
Exactly.
But because the comedy about girls giving boys a run for their money in the behaving-badly department has come cloaked in Efron-ab wrapping and a cloud of pot smoke, it has thankfully avoided being scrutinized as some sort of forced feminist polemic, the way the most misguided of Ghostbusters critics have framed the Paul Feig-directed comedy, in theaters July 15.
The trailer for the new movie, starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon, effectively shut down any further reservations on my part, at least regarding whether the film deserved to exist or not in the wake of 1984's Ghostbusters, one of the greatest comedies ever.
Not so, however, the millions of inexplicably overbearing thumbs who made the trailer the most disliked trailer ever on YouTube.
To be fair, the trailer isn't exactly comedic gold, and plenty of clichés run amok. But the negativity seems largely irrational.
We can attribute at least a portion of that reaction to the still-fierce opposition to any Ghostbusters project that doesn't involve the original stars (though Dan Aykroyd is a producer and has given the new film his blessing). Then there are the people (we're going to guess of both sexes) who have no use for a woman wielding a positron collider.
But remove the purists and the glaring misogynists from the bunch and you're still left with a fair amount of people who apparently think that a female-centric cast was shoehorned into the movie, as if the only way the film got made at all is thanks to casting females in male roles.
You know, taking the safe route.
It's unfortunate that the entire endeavor will be held to an unbeatable standard and will therefore be almost impossible to judge entirely on its own merits. But 2016's Ghostbusters also shouldn't be preemptively punished for being the sum of its lady parts.
Meanwhile, Neighbors 2, doing keg stands at a theater near you starting Friday, only has to live up to the previous Neighbors. But it's important to remember that special consideration still had to go into whether or not to make a frat-humor movie with a sorority at all, and whether the despicable antics of young women would be as fun to watch as the despicable antics of young men.
Like the over-judged Ghostbusters trailer, the Neighbors 2 trailer didn't break any ground as far as movie tropes or women's liberation goes. But the girls of Kappu Nu don't have to waste time making the case as to who's a worse next-door neighbor. They just get right down to business.
And as Chloë Grace Moretz pointed out, these aren't girls doing guy stuff, but rather girls being their own rascally selves.
So as these ladies move seamlessly into Animal House territory, let that serve as yet another reminder that you don't have to hire men to get the job done right.
(E! News and Universal Pictures are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)