Cinema Very Gay

033 - Moonlight (Season 2 finale)

We are rounding out our second season with one of the most acclaimed movies of the last decade, Barry Jenkins' Moonlight (2016). Moonlight is a touching and poetic coming-of-age story showing the life of Chiron, a black man in Liberty City, Miami, in three chapters- his childhood, his adolescence, and his adulthood. It explores how Chiron struggles not only with poverty and race at the height of the crack epidemic, but also his struggles with his sexuality. At the center of Chiron's struggles are his relationships with his mother and his close friend, Kevin. Moonlight stands out as a beautifully edited and directed film, but sticks in our cultural consciousness for its success at the Academy Awards, taking home the prize for Best Picture. Is there a performance in this movie that isn't perfectly calibrated? Is the imagery too heavy-handed? Can you wipe your hands on sand? This and more with Jake and Kevin on our new episode!

032 - Joyland

Turn on the AC and pour yourself a cold drink because things are about to get hot and muggy on the podcast. This week we're talking about Joyland (2022), a Pakistani film about a family living in Lahore. In the movie, Haider (Ali Junejo) escapes the demands of his family through an affair with Biba (Alina Khan), a transgender woman/his boss at an erotic dance revue. Haider stumbles into his job as a dancer, just as he stumbles through the rest of his life. But has he found his calling as a background dancer? No. Can he at least get the choreo down? No. Directed by Siam Sadiq, the movie won the Jury Prize and Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival before being shortlisted for Best International Feature Film at 95th Academy Awards. Does it live up to the hype? Join us to find out. And we're continuing our miniseries on the Criterion Channel's LGBTQ+ shorts collection. After a quick glance at the painfully earnest Blood Below the Skin (dir. Jennifer Reeder, 2016), we take a deep dive into Marin Håskjold's What Is A Woman? (2020), a thought experiment about a transgender woman who becomes a lightening rod for a couple of Norwegian Kårens when she enters a women's locker room. Høres morsomt ut!

031 - Desert Hearts

Pull out your hat pins and loosen up because it's time for another installment of Cinema Very Gay! Desert Hearts (or, "Not Another Lesbian On This Ranch") is a seminal piece of lesbian cinema, and for many good reasons. The film was directed by Donna Deitch in 1986 and stars Helen Shaver as Vivian, a stuffy literature professor at Columbia who is in the process of divorcing her unseen husband. To expedite the process, she establishes residency in Reno by staying on a "ranch" run by Frances (Audra Lindley). As in any good lesbian period piece, a woman can't run into the wilderness without finding romantic entanglements, as Helen is unexpectedly seduced by the confident and carefree Cay, played by Patricia Charbonneau. Though there are some familiar beats to the script, the movie is touchingly directed and does an incredible job at showing the complexities of Helen and Cay's romance, as well as its impacts on those around them. Why does Frances care so much that Cay might find love? Is this the dustiest lesbian movie ever made? Is Kevin actually in love with Patricia Charbonneau? This and more on this week's episode! And then an entry in our miniseries on Criterion's LGBTQ+ shorts collection, but we aren't over the moon about this one. Jake and Kevin watched the short film Call Your Father (dir. Jordan Firstman, 2016), which follows a disastrous first date between men from different generations. There's not much reason for the date to have continued as long as it did, but there is a bit of sit-com humor to appreciate.

030 - Looking: The Movie

It's San Francisco, how hard can it be to meet cool people? Well, if the only people you run into is the cast of the HBO series and movie, Looking, you might have some work to do! This week we tackle the controversial and short-lived HBO series and subsequent moviefilm, Looking, created by writer-director Andrew Haigh. The series followed a group of gay men in San Francisco and their travails in life and love- Patrick (Jonathan Groff), our anxious protagonist with deeeeeeeep mommy issues; Augustin (Frankie J. Alvarez), the tortured "artist" looking for meaning in his work and finding drugs along the way; and Dom (Murray Bartlett), a peri peri chicken lover having a mid-life crisis. Over the course of the series, which only ran for 18 episodes from 2014-2015, we follow this crew and a great cast of supporting actors, including but not limited to Lauren Weedman, Scott Bakula, and sexpot Raul Castillo, as they look for meaning in their lives, with plenty of cringe, Grindr dates, and drunken dancing along the way. The series unfortunately had a short run, but was brought back for one final installment in 2016 with Looking: The Movie. Join Jake and Kevin this week as we talk about the highs of lows of the series and how successful the movie holds up as a final episode. Why did they not cast any gay or queer Asian characters in a show set in San Francisco? Why are the three protagonists so insufferable in the first season? Did Richie and Patrick really get back together in the movie? This and more on this week's episode! PLUS: We dive back to our regularly-scheduled mini-series programming this week! The Criterion Channel (who does not yet sponsor this podcast but we're open to the idea) has a fantastic selection of queer filmmaking, bolstered recently by a collection of queer short films. For the next few episodes, we'll be watching some of these shorts, beginning with the film The Red Tree, directed by Paul Rowley in 2018. This pseudo-documentary short follows a fictional gay man who travels back to the island where Mussolini interred hundreds of gay man in his rise to power in the 1930s.

Bonus Minisode - Rock Hudson's Home Movies

Oh you thought that Hudson content was in the past huh? We're sneaking back into your feeds with a short episode on the "biographical" passion project from Mark Rappaport, Rock Hudson's Home Movies from 1992. Taking an ironic look back on Hudson's filmography, Rappaport has amassed a clip reel highlighting all of the ways in which Hudson was supposedly subverting his own macho-man image with queer tropes and dialogue over the course of decades. Do you think Rappaport really believed in this conspiracy, or is this a comical way to review an actor's career? Either way, it's a fun way to wrap our series on Rock Hudson's movies, so go watch Rock Hudson's Home Movies and enjoy the bonus episode!