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Showing posts from December, 2024

A Man Who Defies the World of BL Final (Japanese Series)

This final season keeps leaning on the same old formula, and once again never actually gives its main character any real sense of closure. Quick refresher, our lead is a university student who spends all his time frantically trying to dodge romance. No matter what he does though, the universe just keeps shoving him into one intimate situation after another. A lot of these setups are lifted straight from classic love story cliches. The whole point is watching him come up with creative ways to escape his fate and avoid falling for another guy. This season's still got six episodes, each around 23 minutes, and every episode features two of these tropey flags that could tip him into a BL storyline. Season three left off with Mob possibly caught in a love triangle between his ex Kikuchi and Hatano, the younger guy who's still a minor. Turns out that was all a dream sequence, but what hasn't changed is that Hatano is still into him. The first four episodes basically run through ev...

Pantyhose Hero (Cantonese)

Like a lot of movies from the nineties, this goofy action comedy throws a bit of everything at you, wild fight scenes, ridiculous stunts, dumb humor, and some straight up drama mixed in too. It probably landed fine back in the day given how silly it was and honestly how casually homophobic that era's comedy tended to be, but stuff like this just doesn't hold up watching it now. Sitting through it today feels pretty strange. That said, I'll admit there were a handful of scenes I genuinely had fun with just because of how ridiculous they were. The setup is that a serial killer's out there murdering gay men, so two cop buddies get assigned to infiltrate the scene by posing as a gay couple themselves. Neither of them's thrilled about it, but they don't really get a say in the matter. So they end up going through this intense three day crash course on basically how to act gay. Once that's done, they rent an apartment, play it up as a couple, and head off to a gay...

The Butch Factor (Documentary)

This documentary is trying to break down the old tired stereotypes and show that gay men can look like anything, blue collar guys, cops, tough athletes, rodeo cowboys, gym bros who could scare anyone just by walking in the room. It brings in a bunch of different guys talking about what being masculine actually means to them. The guys they interview are pretty honest about their sexuality and how people see them. They talk about the usual butch gay categories, leather guys, bears, rodeo riders, muscle guys, construction workers, truck drivers, cops, athletes, and mix that in with stuff like homophobia, being stereotyped, being called too feminine or too polished, and fashion. A lot of them say they feel kind of alone trying to fit into gay culture as masculine guys, like they don't belong to the "normal" gay scene either. Some talk about just not caring about pop culture or fashion or divas like other gay guys do, worrying if they'd be accepted in a typical tough guy j...

Available Light

Should've known better the second I saw Todd Verow's name attached to this film. That name alone tells you exactly what you're signing up for, his usual brand of weird experimental stuff that definitely isn't for everyone. It sure wasn't for me. There's some nudity scattered in along with a couple sex scenes, but there's really no actual story here at all. Basically the whole film is just a bunch of loosely connected snapshots of gay men in different cities, all trying to outrun their loneliness through love, lust, or some mix of both. It mostly takes place across New York, Paris, and Berlin, the cities people tend to think of as gay capitals. Some of these little segments show characters getting ready to meet someone or coming home after a one night stand, all without a single word of dialogue. Other segments have a bit more talking, but overall there's barely any dialogue at all, it's clearly not the point here. And that's basically the entire ...