Fire Island, dir. Andrew Ahn, 2022, USA, 105m.
Thursday, June 23, 2022, 8:50pm Castro 👍
available now on Hulu
A group of gay men return for their annual week in the Fire Island Pines with their den mother Margaret Cho. The central characters are two Asian men, best friends played by real-life friends Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang (of Saturday Night Live). Fire Island is a queer paradise, with very few straight people in the mix, but it also has more than its share of racists, classists, and assorted snobs, with standards of beauty heavily skewed towards young muscle hunks.
The story is inspired by Pride and Prejudice, with all the usual rom-com trappings but from the perspective mostly of people of color. I absolutely had to see it because I went to Fire Island for the first time just before the Pandemic, and I did recognize many of the locations, (silently) squealing to myself, “I’ve been there!” There were certainly a few moments where the characters and the story got annoying, or where the plot was heavily telegraphed, but that’s par for the course in a rom-com. On the whole, Fire Island was cute and sweet with some moments of emotional realness, and in general a lot of fun. Highly recommended.
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