- 09 Dec, 2025 *
Xaya is running December’s Bearblog carnival on Lavender media that made you feel things. All I do is talk about the ways ladies kissing makes me feel things so I thought maybe I should take a break and talk about men.
Previous to a film I have now watched sixty-nine times, that is conveniently not only my favourite film but simultaneously the best film I have ever seen and The Worst Film in the World, I rated Moonlight as the …
- 09 Dec, 2025 *
Xaya is running December’s Bearblog carnival on Lavender media that made you feel things. All I do is talk about the ways ladies kissing makes me feel things so I thought maybe I should take a break and talk about men.
Previous to a film I have now watched sixty-nine times, that is conveniently not only my favourite film but simultaneously the best film I have ever seen and The Worst Film in the World, I rated Moonlight as the best film I’d seen. Backed up by the Academy Awards.
The acting is phenomenal. The cinematography impeccable. It’s seamless. Trevante Rhodes is superb. Unreal. I’m sure everyone has already seen it. Probably you should go watch it again.
It shows the damage that can be done but also - importantly! - how it can be overcome. Adult Chiron’s restraint and armour. What the world made him. And it’s all laid out so heartbreakingly clearly.
On a very different note... Matthias & Maxime. A Canadian film by Xavier Dolan that came out in 2019, and I watched in 2021. The only bunch of bros I will tolerate are in Matthias & Maxime. This, in itself, was something of a revelation. It also has one of my all-time top ten kisses, notable for being the only one not between two women. It’s set to a great song, which I listened to 730 times that year. Tragically I cannot find a good video clip of it.
120 BPM is a 2017 drama by Robin Campillo about a Parisian ACT UP group in the early 1990s. It’s furious and defiant and alive. There are some great dance scenes, and scenes of their activism, which really encapsulate this. They are like battle scenes, they are battle scenes in their ways.
Something that ties these films together, across a spectrum of angst, is how much joy they contain. 120 BPM juxtaposes this so well. Moonlight is hopeful. Matthias & Maxime is the least angsty, but still a little, and mostly joyous. There’s so much misery in queer media and we could talk about that forever, or we can talk about how it is still possible for films about AIDS, for films about bullying and addiction and neglect, to also show how, and why, we fight for joy.