Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Happy Together (1997)

by Nathaniel R 

I first saw Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together at an arthouse cinema in Utah where I went to college. Though enthralled by its saturated colors and amazing performances, it left me very depressed. I had only been out for a couple of years, was wildly inexperienced with relationships, and chafed a bit at "sad gays" in the movies. Mostly because they were the only kind of cinematic gays regularly on offer back then. Nevertheless I devoured the "New Queer Cinema" of the 1990s wherever I could find it (i.e. arthouse theaters or Blockbuster rentals). And this particular movie lingered. I thought about it often. Seeing it again in 2022, twenty-five years after its Cannes premiere, it felt brand new. It wasn't... but 25 years of life experience later, it was. It wasn't devoted to gay misery as I'd remembered but merely a fascinating emotionally precise account of a particular romance. Not that the title isn't wildly ironic.

"Starting over means different things to him," is one of the saddest lines ever spoken in a movie and it hits early...

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Interview: Peeter Rebane on the gay romantic drama "Firebird"

by Nathaniel R

Writer/Director Peeter Rebane (left) and his narrative feature debut "Firebird"

Sometimes timelessness is a curse. We don't neccessarily want period pieces about forbidden oppressed gay romances to feel especially resonate in the now. Neverthless that's what's happened with Firebird. Peeter Rebane's narrative debut, which recently opened in select cities, tells the true story of a gay soldier and his clandestine romance with a fighter pilot in a Russian airforce base in Estonia during the Cold War. The film has been in the works for ten years but in the interim Russian culture has become more virulently anti-gay (stoked by homophobic 'strong-man' Putin) and aggressive about it; please see the tremendous documentary Welcome to Chechnya if you haven't. At the moment Russia is also waging war on Ukraine which adds yet more unexpected charge to the film since one of the two leads playing Russian military men, Oleg Zagorodnii, is Ukrainian. 

When I sat down with the director Peeter Rebane, we talked about all this, as well as co-writing with his openly gay leading actor (Tom Prior), directing sex scenes, and homophobia in former Soviet countries... 

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"Heartstopper" and a world without Olivia Colman

by Cláudio Alves

Adapted from Alice Oseman's webcomic and graphic novel, Heartstopper is Netflix's latest hit. The story of two teen boys falling in love, this queer teen romance is an overdose of sweetness packed into eight swift episodes. There's not much conflict beyond the usual fare for this type of narrative, though a good dose of angst keeps the sentimental dessert from tipping into schmaltz. All in all, I can't call myself a fan even though I recognize how such a production would have rocked my world as a gay teen growing up. It's cute, endearing, and terminally chaste, the kind of diversion that feels bound to delight its target audience.

That's not why I felt compelled to binge it, however. So, following that train of thought, let's talk about Olivia Colman and the Oscar-y conjectures Heartstopper accidentally puts forward…

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94th Academy Awards in Review: Slaps, Tears, and Confusion. "And the Oscar goes to... Mixed Messaging"

by Nathaniel R

Nicole reacts... to what? I was sent this image but it applies to the whole show really

"What just happened?" the question ricocheted across the room at our Oscar party last night. We weren't yet drunk enough to have lost the thread but confusion reigned.

Having cut the cords years ago we were watching the Oscars via the "live TV" on Hulu, putting us at the mercy of not just ABC and Hulu but a temperamental 5G internet connection in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. We heard Chris Rock making a pretty low G.I. Jane joke at Jada Pinkett-Smith's expense (we were already aware that she lost her hair due to Alopecia and how could Rock not be aware of that?) When Smith lept on stage and approached Chris Rock with what looked like aggression we knew something was up. But wait, is this a comic bit? Smith was laughing seconds earlier. Abruptly, true story, our screen-mirror connection cut out and the menu screen appeared. When we restored the connection a few seconds later, Chris Rock was doing his presenting job (the category now forgotten) but he looked and sounded a bit rattled. We missed the whole verbal exchange too. "What just happened?" No one in the room had the answer.

But dear reader, the booze kept flowing, the pizza (sans licorice) and fried chicken (in honor of The Power of the Dog) kept being devoured, and the Oscars kept "going to"...

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Three cheers to Pixar employees for their forceful righteous letter to Disney

by Nathaniel R

Thank you to the always informative Cartoon Brew for sharing this letter from Pixar employees. The original  source was the subscription newsletter Popular Information. The letter addresses Disney's disgusting support of anti-gay legislators in Florida (which we discussed a couple of days ago) and the company's lame attempts at pretending they haven't given that support without actually removing it. The letter was written by 'LGBTQ+ employees and their allies' at Pixar. It's forceful and necessary. Of notable interest is the admission that Pixar films have tried for greater diversity in their storytelling years before the current wave of movies but has always been shut down by their parent company. We're sharing it in full because it's 100% worth reading...

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