Fire Island

A group of cash strapped gay friends consisting of Noah (Joel Kim Booster), Howie (Bowen Yang), Luke (Matt Rogers), Keegan (Tomas Matos), and Max (Torian Miller) embark on their annual weeklong vacation to Fire Island to stay with their friend Erin (Margaret Cho) who has a house on the island. Noah despite often engaging in hedonistic sex and partying the year's prior decides to put this on hold until he helps Howie find a man for himself. The group eventually come into contact with wealthy gay men Charlie (James Scully) who seemingly hits it off with Howie, and Charlie's friend Will (Conrad Ricamora) whose demeanor initially gets under Noah's skin but overtime a romance develops despite their class disparity.

Fire Island is the latest film from director Andrew Ahn who's become something of an indie darling in recent years with prvious films such Spa Night and Driveways garnering Ahn critical acclaim. Written by comedian Joel Kim Booster, the gay themed take on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was initially intended as a project for the now defunct Quibi streaming service (which is the subject of a joke in film) under director Stephen Dunn of Closet Monster before the series was cancelled along with several other in development or filming Quibi shows. Searchlight Pictures purchased the script roughly 6 months after Quibi shutdown and repurposed the concept as a feature film and Ahn replacing Dunn in the director's chair. Now the movie makes its way to Hulu and Ahn shows himself to be just as steady helming a studio release as either of his indie projects.

Joel Kim Booster does an excellent job serving as writer and star of Fire Island as he takes the basic framework of Austen's story while incorporating various aspects of the real life Fire Island and gay culture into the story to give this classic story of classism and romance a modern day LGBTQ twist. The movie mines a lot of sharp humor from its usage of Fire Island serving as a microcosm of a class divide between upper class gay people and those of lower means and it sticks pretty true to the Austen work. The movie's ensemble does quite well with the relationships between Hoan, Howie, and the others very endearing, and Margaret Cho is lovable as Eri who by her words serves as the "mom" in their surrogate family. Fire Island is quite a sweet movie when it comes to its characters and it helps that not only are they interesting and funny, but there's a strong sense of familial love among the sequences of romance and hedonistic sexuality that keeps the viewer engaged.

Fire Island continues Ahn's solid work in the director's chair and serves as an excellent showcase for Joel Kim Booster as a leading man and a screenwriter. If you're familial with the Jane Austen story Pride and Prejudice you'll have a lot of fun noting the parallels in the story and how well they've been adapted and even if you're not the movie still works on its own terms.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." The opening words of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and this script is a gay spin off of that novel. This is a mostly Asian caste that goes to Fire Island for an annual week's vacation. Enroute they repeat one of the island's mantras, "No Fems, No Fats, No Asians", their group mostly fits that stereotype.

The script isn't perfect, but it's adequate. It's mostly drama school trained actors and it's funny. I enjoyed this more than "Queer as Folk" (2022). Not an exact match up of characters to the Jane Austen novel, but it's close enough.

I struggled with the first hour. It amped up the current-day gay cliches to extreme proportions. The dialogue was solely based around gay men, with gay personalities, talking about being gay, and discussing gay issues which left no space for anything else. On top of that you've got the lead character narrating throughout the entire movie about how we as the audience should feel about gay life. There was a lot of telling not showing.

However, in the moments when the plot positioned the social commentary to the background and had a chance to actually explore gay issues by seeing these men in various situations, as superficial as the exploration may have been, ultimately led to a well-meaning warm-hearted place. There were moments of genuine insight, and occasional laugh out loud moments peppered throughout, and Margaret Cho will never not be a delight to watch.

However the outcome felt a little undercooked and reliant on stereotyped one liners that often didn't land and an idea of what a gay screenwriter thinks what gay men want to see. I would have loved a high comedy version of the HBO TV series 'Looking' type experience where no cliches are allowed and all characters have depth and dimension. This exploration felt a little cynical, mean and lazy in parts.

I can certainly appreciate "Fire Island's" message about how gay Asian men are stereotyped and discriminated against in our community, but the director and writer of this film have managed to pigeonhole all the rest of us in the process. This is yet another film produced by gay men that portrays a group of mostly superficial, vapid 20-something-year-olds whose main interest in life is sex, getting high and finding the next party (oh, and getting a boyfriend, lol!). It's a tired depiction that's becoming more and more offensive, and it's refreshing to see others posting reviews here who feel the same way I do.

There isn't one character in this film who is over the age of 35 (or maybe even 30?), unless you count Margaret Cho's customary reprisal of a fag-hag, another stereotype we've seen over and over again. No one in the film seems to have any political interests or awareness whatsoever, considering the day and age we're currently living in.

The same week this film was televised the Peacock channel also released a "new" version of "Queer as Folk," and it's almost a duplicate of this film in the way it portrays gay life. The only television show I've seen that made a serious effort to represent us as real human beings was HBO's "Looking," produced over eight years ago. That's really dismal, considering more gay people than ever have been given a voice in television the last few years. It may come as a surprise to gay scriptwriters in Los Angeles, but the vast majority of us just don't lead our lives in the way these shows are portraying us, nor do we want to.

The concerning thing is that there are straight people in small communities (who vote) who don't have exposure to gay people other than what they see in films like "Fire Island." These characters only perpetuate their narrow belief that we're a narcissistic community only interested in constant self-gratification and nothing else. It's seriously time for gay filmmakers to start portraying our community a little more responsibly as real human beings and not the same old cartoon characters the public has unfortunately become more than accustomed to.

Some people don't appreciate what they've got. Despite the other comments this is not about marginalized Asians or any race. Most of the characters portrayed are just low-confident, shallow, and way too sensitive. Many are like this in real life, but this could benefit with at least a couple of well-adjusted individuals to balance things out.