#so anything on netflix or hulu or even prime is good lmao

[dontletdonghaedrive]

does anyone have any good movie recommendations, i need more things to watch

[teddy-stonehill]

hey any gay movie recommendations for a bunch of idiot queer babies in need of gay shit to entertain us

Absolutely! I'll even break them down by streaming service so you can figure out which are available to you.

Netflix

Cloudburst (2011): Road trip romcom about a couple of older lesbians running away to Canada to get married and picking up a hot young hitchhiker on the way. Bittersweet ending but absolutely worth the ride. One of my all time favorite movies.

Dear Ex (2018): A Taiwanese movie about grief and family. After his father's death, a young boy gets to know his dead father's male lover and learns about what their relationship had been like. Incredibly moving. Please watch it.

Alice Junior (2019): A Brazillian movie about a trans girl moving to a new high school. Trigger warning for some intense scenes of transphobia, but overall it's a really fun and heartwarming coming of age film.

Hulu

Breaking Fast (2020): A Ramadan holiday romcom. Very fun and feel-good, and I really appreciate how it explores the different ways that gay people come to terms with the religions they were raised with.

Bound (1996): Extremely sexy and stylish lesbian mob thriller. One of the Wachowskis' early films. Just incredible on every level. This movie deserves to be way more well-known than it is.

Wild Nights with Emily (2018): Extremely fun and funny biopic about Emily Dickinson. It has a lot of laugh-out-loud moments but also makes a really moving point about how people's lives are erased and flattened through the retelling of history. I'm not sure a lot of people liked this movie as much as I did, so your mileage may very, but I really loved it.

Amazon Prime

The Donald Strachey Mysteries: This is actually a series of four movies that all follow various episodes in the life of Donald Strachey, a gay private eye. Based on a series of books which began being published in the late 70s. These movies have the feel of a fun low-budget made-for-tv mystery, so if you enjoy that kind of thing, you'll love these movies. In order they're: Third Man Out; Shock to the System; On the Other Hand, Death; Ice Blues

Uncle Frank (2020): A moving family drama set in the 70s about a gay man returning home for his father's funeral. Has a lot of dark moments, but a happy ending, and a really sweet gay couple at the center.

Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020): Extremely fun gay Bollywood romcom about a man and his boyfriend going to his parents house for his cousin's wedding. I really can't recommend this one enough.

HBO Max

Unpregnant (2020): I've watched a lot of gay bro comedies and this one is by far my favorite. It's like Booksmart if Booksmart was good. It's about two teenage girls going on a cross-country road trip so that one of them can get an abortion. They get in a lot of zany hijinks along the way. Please watch it.

Desert Hearts (1985): Essentially a classic lesbian pulp novel but with a happy ending. One of the earliest mainstream movies to be both openly gay and have a happy (if a bit ambiguous) ending. Plus it's just a genuinely compelling story with some good characters.

Tubi TV

Keep in mind Tubi is 100% free even without a subscription and it has a huge LGBT section so it's a great resource for gay films! It's movies aren't really sorted in any sort of order, though, so it can be a bit daunting to try to find anything on there if you don't already have something in mind.

That said, here's some diamonds in the rough I've already dug out for you:

Ideal Home (2018): This movie stars Paul Rudd and Steve Coogan as a rich asshole gay couple who unexpectedly have to adopt a child. It's very sort of mean-spirited humor for a lot of it but also it's got a surprising amount of heart at it's center and... it's one of my main comfort movies at this point lmao.

An Almost Ordinary Summer (2019): A movie about two older Italian men getting married. Their families are opposed at first and most of the film is focused on winning them over. Also one of my main comfort movies lol

Big Eden (2000): A really sweet gay romcom about a New York artist going back to his hometown in Montana and finding love and community there.

If you're willing to pay for stuff

Unfortunately not all of my favorite movies are currently streaming anywhere, but if you're willing/able to pay to rent or buy good movies, I recommend these ones:

Nina's Heavenly Delights (2006): A delightful lesbian romcom about a woman who returns to her home in Scotland for her father's funeral and ends up trying to win a curry cooking contest to keep her family's restaurant alive. I watched this movie on my first virtual date with my now girlfriend, and she said it was her best first date ever, so... <3

Shelter (2007): Gay surfer film. Also a lot about family and self-acceptance and learning to find a healthy balance between taking care of yourself and being there for others. Great soundtrack. Beautiful cinematography. Once when I was having a hard time I watched this movie every night for like a week straight.

Four More Years (2010): An absolutely hilarious Swedish gay romcom about two politicians from opposing parties falling in love. Another one about older gays (which I always appreciate) and it's one of the most genuinely funny gay romcoms out there.

Okay, I'll put a stop to it there. But if you want to send me any follow-up recommendation requests with more specifics about what kind of movies you want to watch I'm always happy to try to give more personalized recommendations as well. Also feel free to let me know if you have any follow-up questions about any of the movies featured here.

[fedoranonymous]

Infinite List of Beginner-Friendly Anime Recs: Cowboy Bebop

“That's the story. And what was the real lesson? Don't leave things in the fridge."

tl;dr I questioned someone’s recommendation for someone else’s first anime on the basis that people who are unused to anime might like something that’s less than 20 hours long and tells one complete story within the first hour or so, and 20,000 words later I decided to make my own post(s) because I clearly had Feelings

26 x 30 minute episodes + 1 x 115 minute movie | watch it: netflix | hulu | amazon prime | funimation | adult swim

devil-may-care space cowboys track down their next payday in a plausible, lived-in futuristic solar system

Follow the Read More for more convincing and trigger warnings (to my best recollection)

Features: 

a true speculative fiction narrative set after terraforming Mars with cool spaceships and interesting technology

pure anthology storytelling in the first half (and most of the back half tbh)

neat character, background, and spaceship designs

one hell of a soundtrack (Bebop’s a bop, whodathunkit?)

a really high end production with hand drawn artwork to really capture the grit of the aesthetic

“The three things I hate most in this world are kids, animals, and women with attitudes, so why are all three of them on my ship?”(paraphrasing from memory)

This is one of those oddball anime that actually did as good or better in the US as they did domestically pre-streaming, in part thanks to the fantastic dub and the fact that it fit in surprisingly well with the live action sci fi market that was on TV around the same time -- stuff like Farscape, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1 were all on TV at the time, although the closest parallel is Firefly, which came juuuust a bit later. (I used to say that Cowboy Bebop was anime Firefly, but I guess I got it backwards lmao) 

Watch Out For:

General trigger warning for body horror, drug use, violence, crime, some kind of tricky gender shit that defies my knowledge of relevant trigger labels, information privacy fuckery, bigoted characters, and anything else you might expect from an “”edgy“” story about bounty hunters IN SPACE. CB handles most of their subject matter better than most shows tackling the same stuff, but it’s still there and it’s still shitty. 

It’s been a while so I’m probably gonna miss a lot.

The first episode deals with an addictive, performance enhancing drug that is taken via injection TO THE EYE and I... don’t remember being squicked by it? Which is weird because eyes in particular are a kind of body horror I can’t vibe with? But yeah. The show is Not Easy.

Ed can be... a lot. Ed is a absolutely the kind of person that would buy a “RAWR means I Love You in Dinosaur” T-Shirt... for their dog. Their focus episodes include an actual magic mushroom trip. And their official role is “child hacker”, so the gender question is handled differently from episode to episode which is. Annoying! It helps that Japanese is even less gendered than English, which is already pretty genderless as languages go, but it goes from okay to meh. Ed’s overall kind of like if you dropped Spongebob into a Serious Science Fiction Show (tm). Cowboy Bebop is a comedy, though, and Ed gets fewer focus episodes than the rest of the cast, so it ain’t that bad.

Faye though. Oh. Oh Faye.

Faye’s character design is overly sexualized inside and out. She’s the stereotypical femme fatal who uses sex as her weapon. Like even the briefest speaking roles, she’s much more well developed than that, but if you’re the kind of person who finds fanservice (random Pin-Up type shots sprinkled in the middle of the action) cringey or unnecessary, it can be hard to watch her. She isn’t actually treated any better or worse than the woman in the first episode, though, so you’ll figure that one out soon enough.

Faye is also a little bit of an incel? I mean, a girl like that can get laid if she wants to, but like. She’ll be the one spouting lines about Social Darwinism or not needing other people even as she lives on Spike and Jet’s ship and takes a cut from their bounties as well as her own.

(minor spoiler) Some of this m i g h t be because Faye is secretly From the Past (cryogenic freezing or something similar) but if so, it went over my head at age 14 and it probably goes over the heads of the kind of people who think Social Darwinism and the like are Right and Good

Still Faye but of particular note: Faye’s the one who gets Freaked Out by a character who is either trans or, more likely, intersex? Like full on “Which One Are You?” The show came out in ‘98, so dealing with the concept at all was technically pretty progressive, but folks may want to wait to watch episodes 12 and 13 (”Jupiter Jazz”) with a friend (13 more so than 12). Unfortunately, these are some of the few serialized episodes, so you can’t really skip them without detailed wiki-reading to understand what you’re missing, so this may be a deal breaker for some viewers. It was the first time I learned about the concept of gender not being a black-and-white binary experience and it was. Something. Not super positive, gotta say.

The number of people who saw Faye’s, uh, everything and decided that Man Faye was the obvious answer is Great, though. And apparently Netflix is “no, really this time” working on a live action adaptation which is super cool. I wonder if Keanu Reeves is still involved?