Welcome back after a long time away from this, our recurring roundup of good things to stream. Planet’s still fucked. Tennessee is still run by grifters aiming to destabilize education. And eventually, the armadillos and the squirrels are going to start comparing notes and then we’re all completely screwed. But in the few months since the last one of these, there’s been a heap of streaming options out there for you. Let’s have a dive in, shall we?
Fire Island, June 3 on Hulu
A queer Asian American take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Fire Island is exactly the mental margarita audiences feeling the stress of a hateful nation can soak in while gathering strength and sufficience. The fact that Disney bounced this over to Hulu as a Pride Month exclusive is typical, but it’s also a gesture that will allow it to become a perennial favorite, garnished with brunch drinks and the kind of verbal shorthand shared between dear friends. Noah (screenwriter Joel Kim Booster), his best friend Howie (multihyphenate superstar of the future and SNL icon Bowen Yang), and their friends Keegan, Luke and Max have been making the trek to the LGBTQ enclave Fire Island for several years now, going all the way back to their common time as Brooklyn brunch servers. Their friend Erin (Margaret Cho) has a small but comfy house she shares with them during the summer, making the rich white tendencies of the island a bit more bearable and a lot more diverse in the process.
Booster and director Andrew Ahn (he made 2019’s Driveways, as well as the 2016 Nashville Film Festival hit Spa Night) has managed a remarkable feat with this sweet (and salty) rom-com, and Yang delivers an unexpectedly textured performance that finds the drama in The Drama and knocks it out of the park. Regardless of sexual orientation, anyone who enjoys a timeless narrative of the travails of love is going to find some aspect of this film that will resonate with them. And for gay audiences, it is pleasant, meaningful and most importantly a respite from the machinations of those who wish us harm for existing. Find the liberating dance party in your heart (excepting one unfortunate Lukasz Gottwald co-write on the soundtrack) and let your spirit fly. It’s all OK because your friends are taking care of dinner. Fire Island is a summer breeze of love, life and amyl nitrite.
Jackass 4.5 on Netflix
In keeping with the ongoing tradition of putting out supplemental films — equal parts deleted scenes, outtakes and behind-the-scenes exegeses — the Jackass crew returns with more of everything that defines their polymorphously perverse universe. It’s wild how much stress the crew put themselves under as COVID cut off radiating their Jackassery in an external direction. There’s a lot more emotional worldbuilding going on here than in any of the previous .5 addenda, and way more nudity than in previous installments. Danger Ehren McGhehey always deserved the MVP award for Jackass Forever, but good gawd, he went through a lot in the making of this one. There’s no further info about or appearances by Bam Margera, or the untenable situation he and the production had placed themselves in, but there’s a bit more of a reflective tone from the involved parties. You have to look past the vomit and pendulous dong to get there, but it’s there. To put it another way, when asked to help people broaden their cinematic horizons, it’s very easy to offer L, G or T movies from the LGBTQ pantheon. “What’s a good B movie?” someone might ask, to which I’d say, “1999’s The Mummy.” But were someone to ask, “What’s a Q movie?” the best answer is “any of the Jackass films.”
Torn Hearts via Video on Demand, Amazon Prime Video
Despite some occasional F-words and a bit of gore (including one spectacular kill that feels almost like a Tarsemian touch), Torn Hearts feels like it might have been written as a Lifetime movie. That’s not a knock on it — Lifetime has been responsible for a lot of interesting thrillers and psychodramas over the past few years. But at times this twisted tale of the dark side of country music set in Nashville — with at least a tiny bit of second-unit footage actually shot here (written and made before the recent tragedy involving Naomi Judd) — could best be described as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane colliding with Spider Baby and just a soupçon of Georgia. National treasure Katey Sagal is Harper Dutch, part of a sister duo who topped the charts in the ’80s and ’90s and then receded into retirement after the tragic death of her sister. Contemporary duo Jordan and Leigh have sought out Harper for advice and maybe to record a song, but they find themselves in over their heads and under the control of a hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’ country legend with unspeakable secrets. The script, by Rachel Koller Croft, has occasional moments of indelible cruelty that elevate it above the made-for-TV vibes that occasionally pull the edges down, and Croft’s original songs are pretty great. She understands the modern country idiom well, and director Brea Grant has a gift for horror, subverting clichés and making the tension at the heart of the situation palpable. The moment that’ll stay with you is an impromptu a cappella recording sequence, in which Sagal and the women are allowed to sing — the rest of the movie fades away, and that moment becomes everything.
Top Gun on Netflix
In advance of the sequel, Netflix did a good job of putting the 1986 original Top Gun front and center, making sure the moviegoing public has the original text fresh in their minds even as they use a modern HD master that aims for the orange-and-teal palette of modern action cinema. There’s no getting over the loss of director Tony Scott — an incredible visual stylist who developed over the course of his career into a gifted formalist. And like Adrian Lyne did with Flashdance and dreams of modern dance, he takes another Simpson/Bruckheimer production and turns it into a sleek and sensual advertisement for Ronald Reagan’s America. And the thing is, as military recruitment skyrocketed following this film’s release, Scott sold this mentality all too well — like how Ghostbusters helped breed disdain for the EPA. Top Gun is a perfect vehicle for Tom Cruise’s still-protean-at-that-time charm (it was the ’80s — rule-breaking and disregard for the safety of others was considered a feature, not a bug), packed to the rafters with sweaty homosocial vibes (Roger Avary by way of Quentin Tarantino was absolutely correct), and a soundtrack of wall-to-wall bangers (respect to ’80s soundtrack deity Giorgio Moroder and brand-new Nashvillian Michael Jay). Scott framed Val Kilmer — who is actually correct in his assessment of Cruise’s character — the same way he did David Bowie at the beginning of The Hunger. But this is not a “good” movie. It feeds on nostalgia for something that never existed, a beautiful shell concealing profound and utter emptiness at its heart.
Jonny Gowow, “All or Nothing” on YouTube
When it comes to homosocial vibes with a lot on the mind, Nashville’s own Jonny Gowow delights in complicated discourse and muddying ideological waters. His newest video, “All or Nothing,” is a striking work that refuses to allow any sort of easy compartmentalization or low-effort memeification, and it gets at some of the underlying horror that has become part and parcel of trying to have a point of view on the internet. “All or Nothing” is the kind of text that wriggles around in your subconscious and extends its most troubling tendrils deep into dreams and nightmares alike.
A quick TV catchup:
Paramount+ has a whole lot of Star Trek available for the viewing (alongside the new 4K restoration of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which is essential), and Lower Decks (which uses the freedom of animation and a superb voice cast as well as an acerbic cat doctor) and Strange New Worlds (which is the first spinoff that aims for the vibe and M.O. of the original series, also featuring former Tennessean Anson Mount) have emerged as my personal faves. Netflix’s attempt to make the queer public forget about Dave Chappelle’s descent into hacky transphobia, Heartstopper, is a pleasant YA series that would have meant the world to me as a teen. I find more complicated joys, however, in HBO Max’s Our Flag Means Death and The Magnus Archives podcast. But it’s a vicious world, so find that joy wherever you can and pack a lunch. In the way that Community’s “Digital Estate Planning” (on Hulu/Prime/Netflix) and The Boondocks’ “Smokin’ With Cigarettes” (HBO Max) episodes became comfort TV rewarding dozens of views, so too has Letterkenny’s International Women’s Day special (Hulu) become the kind of thing that yields new facets upon repeat viewings. Professor Tricia would approve.
