Antiracist Accountability x Belated Pride Post: "Fire Island"

Hello again,

I wanted to write a pride post this year despite not getting to it during actual pride month, so here we go!

Let's talk about "Fire Island" (2022)!

Written and starred in by Joel Kim Booster, "Fire Island" deftly updates Pride and Prejudice by transporting it to New York's Fire Island, long regarded as a major gay vacation destination.  While its foundation in that literary allusion grants the film a comfortable narrative arc that many viewers will recognize either from reading the original or from its multiple film adaptations and references, it also delightfully shakes up and updates what could be a tired narrative by centering gay men of color (and Margaret Cho!) at the heart of the story.  The result is as charming and amusing as it is also imbued with a sweet heart plus a little dash of pathos.

This film continues a seemingly robust parade of extremely enjoyable, high quality comedies from Hulu, which makes me excited to see what they might have in store next!

I gave the movie a 4.

{Heart}

Save the Date for "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"

Hey friends,

I'm mindful of the ongoing slow-down in movie watching and writing this past several months and I'm hoping to start reversing that trend.  While my motivation for both has admittedly flagged recently, this continues to be a precious outlet for me and I'm still very firmly committed to maintaining it.  Happily, I've had some success this month in watching more movies than I have the past three months, and I'm hoping to write a couple of brief (emphasis needed to myself: BRIEF) posts this weekend to compensate for only writing one last month.

So let's talk about a movie I watched recently: "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates" (2016).

As you might be able to guess from the title, this is hardly fine cinema.  Precisely because rest has been a major priority for me recently, this was a desirable attribute of the movie, and it delivered what I needed--it was a great, silly escape.  

One of the successes of the film is that it immediately plays with the expectations it sets up at its beginning, where we are greeted with what appears to be a celebratory montage of hijinks concocted by the titular brothers, Mike and Dave (played by Adam Devine and Zac Efron).  We are swiftly disabused of any illusion that these guys are anything other than garbage party bros (in the biological and figurative sense of the term) who manage to ruin the aforementioned party for everyone else, as we learn their family is launching an admittedly somewhat harebrained intervention in advance of the next family event: requiring that Mike and Dave have dates to their sister's upcoming destination wedding, because surely being accompanied by some nice ladies will tame them.  

As yet another little twist, the film then mercifully eludes the tired trope of yet another film about self-involved hedonistic dudes by instead creating a head-to-head competition for who is the most trash: the brothers or their titular wedding dates, Alice and Tatiana (played by Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza).  Many laughs and absurd, relatively low stakes scenarios ensue.

I don't mean to oversell this movie.  It's in the same vein as wedding-themed "Vacation Friends" (2021), but arguably not as successful.  It's certainly not as inventive as "Free Guy" (2021) another comedy I loved earlier this year.  And let's be honest, I'm probably more than a bit influenced by my long-standing love for Aubrey Plaza (and a cameo by Kumail Nanjiani!).  But still, if you're in the mood for a low-stakes and fun little romp through an all-but-ruined-by-ultimately-redeemable-living-messes Hawaiian wedding, this is your film.

I gave it a 4.

{Heart}