#46 - Fire Island Is Like...So Good
or: you really CAN do a modern romcom really well!!!
Since yesterday I have now watched Fire Island two and a half times.
I love a movie that makes me cheer at my television, I was whooping and clapping and holding my hands in front of my face in pure anticipation and it’s just such a lovely romcom and I’m so glad it exists!!
The jokes? Excellent. The script is a retelling of Pride & Prejudice, so you know what you’re getting going in and WOW did Joel Kim Booster really manage to pull off a fun and charming script. The movie looks great, the actors are all giving it their all, there’s a comfort and eased familiarity with the friend groups, things are tense when they should be, and so full of joy and I feel like it’s just been SO LONG since I watched a movie that was SO FUN!
The script is so set-em-up-knock-em-down that it really reveals how piss poor so many of the recent romantic comedy scripts have been. This movie, uh, really took both of those elements of rom and com seriously as separate entities and then used them to enhance each other in the perfect way. Tiny little ice cream cone is one of my favorite jokes of all time I think?? The comedy is lived in, the friends inside bantery dialogue feels like real jokes and the callbacks are echoed so artfully throughout the movie that it took my second viewing to realize just how much track was laid in the opening scenes.
Fire Island, as a location, is not a place I’m super familiar with and the exposition that brings the audience in is well done, I wish there had been even more historical pictures and things like that throughout the movie, it was really incredible and I love untold histories and shining a light on the communities that society often ignored or pretended didn’t exist at the time. Pictures are so powerful, and it was so cool to get specific history and see how it translates to the Fire Island of today.
Anyway I have so much to say about it but it’s also just a lovely movie and it reminded me of exactly why I love romcoms: the stories they tell are deeply human. This movie has just as much to say about friendship as it does romance and seeing deep and meaningful friendship, community, and found family being depicted is so refreshing and the characters all feel so of this world and it’s just spectacularly done and I really recommend it!!
It’s on Hulu, run don’t walk!