#spoiler alert movie

[deramin2]

"It's time we had queer media do X!"

Babe, I promise you it already exists. Queer media is already doing that. It came out this year. It came out 20 years ago. The only reason you're not aware of it is that queer media always has been mostly indie and people don't watch enough weird indie stuff.

If you only watch queer media made to appeal to a broadly average viewer, of course you're not going to see comedic gay sex, or drag club workplace comedy, or trans men grappling with their interpersonal relationships changing, or romcoms that reject amatanormativity, or 70+ year old lesbian road trips, or Muslim gay coming of age stories, or sham marriage comedies. But these are all in real films and shows.

What's not happening is average straight people paying attention to these wonderful pieces of media, the best films and shows you've ever seen, because they were not made for straight people. They don't talk to straight people, they don't let straight people in on the community jokes and commentary, and they deliberately do things to make straight people uncomfortable. They're more passionate and more messy.

And what you'll almost always get is found family. So if you love that trope there is an entire genre waiting for you to discover.

Off the top of my head that I've watched this year:

Comedic gay sex: Bros (2022), Spoiler Alert (2022), Smiley (2022).

Drag club workplace comedy: Smiley (2022).

Trans men grappling with their interpersonal relationships changing: Rūrangi (2020), Romeos (2011).

Romcoms that reject amatanormativity: Bros (2022), Chutney Popcorn (1999), Badhai Do (2022).

70+ year old lesbian road trips: Cloudburst (2011).

Muslim gay coming of age stories: Naz & Maalik (2016).

Sham marriage comedies: Badhai Do (2022).

[laurastreit-art]

Jim Parsons. The dancefloor killer.

Have you seen this SNL sketch ? 😄

[benjaminaldridge]

✨NEW PHOTO✨

Photographed For Style Magazine

[clark-hailey77]

Ben Aldridge - Attitude Magazine [March / April 2023] Photography by Kosmas Pavlos

[otdderamin]

How Spoiler Alert and Bros Challenge Romance Movie Norms

Spoilers for Spoiler Alert (2022) and Bros (2022)

Thinking about how the romanticized cultural narrative we have about love is that two people meet, some spark connects them, and once they have the courage to let themselves be together, everything is just good forever.

And obviously that's bullshit or there wouldn't be so many breakups and divorces. But we rarely write stories about those. We want our stories to live in the limerence of new relationships where anything seems possible before the complexity of reality sets in.

The audience for allocishet normative media has very strict and often formulaic expectations for romance films. Guy meets girl, they fall in love, all obstacles are overcome through the power of love, and they live happily ever after. That audience really only supports that story.

Queer media comes from a vastly different and more complex tradition of romance. There is almost always a backdrop of the world trying to intervene. Even Big Eden (2000) in all its softness had this. There's a much greater love of messy relationships. There are no guarantees.

Bros flouted the heteronormative love story formula by being about two guys with commitment issues who often project their fears on each other and are sometimes even right. Bobby and Aaron have ideas about what they need to prove in life to show they're fulfilled & can't see past that.

It's a complicated journey to figuring out if they even want to be together. If all the baggage they're carrying can fit with them. And the end, parodying Hallmark endings, is simply an attempt, and not an answer. No pressure that it has to last forever.

Spoiler Alert is about a 13 year relationship that was an audience know from the begging will end in loss. The first act is short. They find each other, they connect, sometimes it's weird and awkward but they know very quickly they want to be together.

It's the middle that makes it profound. Where we flash forward and see the relationship after more than a decade. The complacency, the repeated mistakes, the hurt they've caused each other. Wondering if things have run their course.

And then the illness. The realization that they may not get to choose the end. That under the calcification of little built up resentments are all the reasons they still loved each other. Letting go is also no longer getting in your own way.

There was a realness to that. Things weren't just magically fixed. In many ways it's not sentimental. It's built on all the small moments that make you understand that you are alive in three constant presence of someone else because they've overall made your life better.

Both these films are about love without certainty that doesn't have to last forever to mean everything in its time. They are so deeply, inherently queer beyond being about gay men. They're about deeper realities in relationships normativity pushes aside but we need to talk about.

Either one of these films coming out this year would have been a good year in queer cinema. Both together—the spectrum of romcom and sentimental tragedy—are a landmark distillation of the last century of our media culture. I think both will join the canon of must see queer films.

Before I got into queer media, I would have told you I hated romance movies (even when I thought I was allocishet). If always felt forced worth nothing new to say. Turns out it's because allocishet media is culturally invested in saying nothing new about relationships and love.

But queer media inherently is about love that challenges norms. Love that has to be meaningful enough to risk loss for it. Love that's truely freeing instead of conforming to stale expectations. And so the stories we get to tell are far more interesting and real.

[shewantsitall]

Watching the Spoiler Alert movie and I 110% want a whizzvin fic version of The Smurf Scene except it's Reunion Time and Marvin doesn't want Whizzer to come back to his apartment because he has some kind of ✨collection✨ that he is hella embarrassed about

[queer-shit-posts]

Today I watched spoiler alert the movie. OMG I don’t if I already wanted cry before watching it or it’s a really good movie that made me cry as a baby.

[doriantomybasil]

yesterday i watched the film spoiler alert but i didn’t actually read what it was about, i thought it was just like a romcom but i ended up bawling my eyes out for two hours straight 10/10 would recommend

[deramin2]

If we're going for the definition of Christmas being "Movies that happen around Christmas where that setting frames some of what's happening in the broader narrative," then I have 3 gay Holiday movies to check out.

Directly Holiday Movies:

Bros (2020):

Romcom, 115 minutes

Bobby Lieber is a successful New York City queer history podcaster, failed children's book writer, and rejected screenwriter, who's just won a community award for Best White Cis Gay Man. He announced he will be the first curator of a new national LGBTQ+ history museum in Manhattan.

His new coworkers are deeply passionate about the work but also squabble over everything, escalating it with intra-community discourse squabbling about who's the most oppressed and therefore should be the person that gets what they want. As someone in Very Online queer communities I can't emphasis enough how accurate and real this is and is very well-handled as an affectionate joke from within the community. The subtext is that they aren't wrong and what they're experiencing is real and needs to be factored in, but also they're stopping anything at all from actually happening that could materially help their community because they're too caught up trying to perfect the details.

He prefers Grindr hookups to romantic relationships. He regularly hate-watches Hallheart movies while secretly longing to be truly loved in more than just passing.

Bobby goes to the launch party for his friend's new queer dating app. There he meets Aaron Shepard, a hot but boring estate lawyer and they hit it off and kiss. They ultimately meet up again and the romcom unfolds in unconventional ways.

Bros both play into the romcom genre and resist it, especially how it erases what queer relationships are really like even when the characters are the same gender. It's a queer movie really made for the queer community and not the straight gaze. It's our jokes for us. It has some of the funniest sex scenes I've ever seen. The ending is absolute perfection. Overall extremely funny and intelligent movie.

Holiday connection: Bobby and Aaron celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas together at one point.

Spoiler Alert (2020)

Medical Death Memoir, 112 minutes

Based on the memoir 2017 Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies by Michael Ausiello about his partner Kit Cowan dying of cancer after being together 14 years. (The movie tells you this is the end at the beginning.) It's basically in 3 acts.

Act 1, is a romcom about how Michael and Kit met at a gay club, and instantly connect. It's about the comedy of trying to integrate into each other's lives, insecurities, and weirdness. Like Michael's secret all-consuming fandom. This is the first long-term relationship either of them have had.

Act 2, the relationship 12 years into it and where they are now.

Act 3, Kit is diagnosed with cancer and they reconcile with mortality and running out of time.

This is a very poignant film about love, lost, and how relationships are never as perfect as movies and TV make them seem. One way or another they all end, and you have to reconcile what all those feelings mean. It's about the string of platonic and familial relationships that come along with romantic ones and how important that love is, too. How our networks hold us together. It's about forgiveness and making sure you really talk to the people you care about while you can.

Respect if you can't handle another film about queer medical death. But it's nice to have one that's not about AIDS. It's also a really good study of the reality of cancer for anyone. I found it to be a really powerful film that made me come away wanting to actually live my life.

Holiday connection: Christmas is Michael's favorite holiday that fills him with magic and wonder and the passage of time is marked by Christmases.

Holiday Movie Adjacent:

Big Eden (2000)

Romcom, 117 minutes

One of the first gay romcoms ever, and hugely influential. This isn't a holiday movie, but it's directly engaging with most of the tropes of Hallmark movies, so I think it deserves to be here.

New York City gay artist Henry Hart suddenly leaves his home and career to go to the remote mountain town of Big Eden Montana to care for his ailing grandfather Sam after a stroke.

Through the church gossip he hears his high school crush Dean Stewart has moved back to town with his boys after getting a divorce, and Henry realizes he still has feelings about him.

The widow Thayer offers to help cook for Henry and Sam. The meals are delivered by shy Native American general store owner Pike Dexter, who's been harboring a crush on Henry since high school. He's been ordering Henry's fine paints for him. The general store has a flock of old men who spend the whole day gossiping there.

Widow Theyer's cooking is dreadful 1950s white bread Americana stuff. Pike decides he wants to make things nice for Henry, so he teaches himself gourmet cooking and makes increasingly elaborate meals. Then more romcom stuff happens.

One thing I love about it is that Henry, Dean, and Pike are closeted. Henry and Dean both express fear about coming out. But everyone in the town is friendly with the open hardware store lesbians. As their being queer becomes more obvious, it's shown that everyone around them would actually love and respect them and would appreciate being let into their inner lives. It's outside societal conditioning and outdated assumptions that's made them scared. In 2000 this message was a big deal. Everything else we had was tragedies about how society hates us. This resisted all of that.

This movie leans into a lot of tropes with so much love and sincerity, but also interrogates them and makes them queer and really has something very intelligent to say about how we deserve to be viewed in stories. Gay Hallmark films attempt to recreate stories like this on the surface, but lack any depth or real queerness and just end up being a warped straight parody. Seeing the real deal makes you really see what absolute garbage lesser films are.

[fangirling-throughlife]

I watched the first half of Spoiler Alert, and I had to stop it abruptly a bit over the hour. By all means, this is proof of how good Ben and Jim are in this movie. It is so heartbreaking that I couldn't bear to continue watching.

[benjaminaldridge]

Ben Aldridge Photographed For The Laterals Magazine

#BenAldridge

[straydog733]

Watching Resolution: Spoiler Alert (2022)

5. A film based on a true story: Spoiler Alert (2022)

List Progress: 1/12

Terminal illness stories are a genre unto themselves, one that tends to be fairly polarizing among audiences. What some will find saccharine, others will find deeply touching. What some will find repetitive, others will find universal. Spoiler Alert, the 2022 film adaptation of Michael Ausiello’s 2017 memoir, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, will not change anyone’s mind about terminal illness stories, but it does add nuance and heart and a personal touch that can be missing in these stories. For anyone in the mood for a good cathartic cry, Spoiler Alert will do it.

Spoiler Alert tells the story of television journalist Michael Ausiello’s fourteen year relationship with his partner Kit Cowan, before Cowan died of neuroendocrine cancer in 2015. Ausiello (played here by Jim Parsons) lost both parents at a young age, and contextualizes events in his life through the lens of the tv shows he used to watch with his mother. Looking back at his childhood, he imagines a laugh track as they exist on the set of a sitcom, and he reflects how much easier losing Kit would be if they existed in the sweeping drama of a soap opera, not in the messy realities of life. This theme isn’t pushed quite far enough, as those two examples are the only ones, with some subplots never touching on it, but it does add some good structure to the film, with Ausiello as a narrator commenting on his relationship with television.

The part of the film that feels like it breaks the most expectations of the genre is in Ausiello and Cowan’s relationship status. While the audience sees their meeting and the blossoming of their romance, the movie then skips forward thirteen years. They have built up resentment and anger over the years, and by the time Cowan is diagnosed, they are taking a therapist-recommended break and living apart. Neither of them are angels, and their problems do not go away when Cowan gets sick, though they do become much smaller in the face of the disaster. It feels so much more real than a lot of these stories, where the ill loved one seems too pure for this sinful earth.

The inclusion of Cowan’s parents doesn’t work quite as well; while they were probably important figures in both Ausiello and Cowan’s lives, they do not offer much dramatic potential for how much screen time they have. After an early coming-out scene, they do not have many real conflicts with either of the men, and it’s unclear if the Cowans ever know that their son and his partner are partially-separated when the health crisis strikes. Combined with Sally Fields chewing a lot of the scenery as Kit’s mother, and their scenes don’t resonate as much as the central couple does.

Spoiler Alert is a well-crafted tearjerker, with just enough unique nuances to make it stand out among its tearjerking peers. The film does not pretend to be anything other than a cancer story, down to the title giving away the inevitable ending, but for those interested in engaging, it achieves its goals well and wrenches all the right guts.

Would I Recommend It: A tear-stained “yes”.

[lgbtally4ever]

THIS LOOKS LIKE EVERYTHING A MOVIE SHOULD BE!

(Spoiler Alert: I cried watching the trailer)!

[deramin2]

OFMD should definitely do this, but I feel obligated to point out that Bros (2022), Spoiler Alert (2022), and Smiley (2022) all have comedic gay sex scenes, so please just watch more queer media because this and every other trope you want are currently happening in films and series getting less attention because they're even more overt.

The world is ready for a comedic gay sex scene and Our Flag Means Death is the show that should do it. gimme fumbling middle-aged men trying to figure out how to kiss like they actually care about each other while overly-aggressively shoving each other into furniture and exchanging banter in a storm on the sea with things flying around the room and hitting them

[jaewritesfic]

Everlasting Trio Nobody Knows AU DP x DC Part 4

Part 3

(Tim POV! This is a long one 😅)

 Tim almost has it. He's so close to cracking this file he can fucking taste it. He's been fighting this thing for two weeks. It's the most incomprehensible and infuriating code he's ever faced off against, which is fitting considering who gave it to them.

The engineer. THEIR engineer. The engineer they didn't ask for and Tim still isn't sure how they got, and the single biggest mystery in Tim's fucking life right now.

See, a significant amount of Bat gadgets at this point are Tim's brainchildren. He imagines them, he designs them, he workshops and tests them.

A few months ago, he'd had a pouch on his utility belt full of experimental pellets meant for slowing down fleeing vehicles. They were designed to break when run over and the compound inside would expand into durable, sticky foam that would ensnare tires.

He'd tested them in the cave.

He had not been prepared to take one hit to that side and have to frantically divest himself of that pouch before he became Gotham's latest foam based cryptid. 

His family had laughed themselves silly at him even as he broke off in pursuit of the drug runners he'd been fighting.

When Tim had doubled back expecting a mess to clean up and pellets to rework? It had been gone. All of it. The foam, the pellets, the pouch of his utility belt.

A serious problem, because who knows who got their hands on that?

Then it had shown back up.

That is to say, Gordon had called them because he found a pouch with a note labeled ‘for Red Robin’ sitting on the stand of the Bat Signal and didn't dare touch it.

After making sure it wasn't a bomb or some kind of biological weapon, Tim had opened the pouch - his own belt pouch - and found pellets. New pellets. Different pellets.

The note just read, “As funny as that was to watch, I fixed them for you. No more premature sploogage on the job. :3 P.S. here's a recipe for solution to dissolve future intentional discharges.”

They'd been right, too. The new pellets were tested (in case THEY were a bomb or biological weapon) and they'd been just strong enough to safely transport but still break when under the pressure of tires. Even the foam was more effective, and the spray Tim synthesized from that stupid recipe had worked like a dream.

What. The fuck.

This person not only improved his design and came up with a dissolution agent from scratch in days, they'd been watching without him knowing and made off with the original pellets without anyone noticing.

This was either a rogue in the making or someone they wanted on their side, and either way they needed to be found.

So Tim had done the obvious.

He'd put together a lockbox of money for the product they'd been given, loaded it with no less than ten (10) bat trackers and a note thanking their mysterious benefactor and requesting to meet up. He'd exploded a foam pellet on a rooftop and left the box on it in the hopes they'd notice and find it, then hung around far enough to not be seen and close enough to beat feet as soon as the trackers started moving. 

They did not start moving. They all went offline simultaneously. 

Tim has never moved so fast in his life, and yet by the time he got to the rooftop there was a pile of foam and nothing else. Not even a trace of whoever took the lockbox.

The next day, there was a ping of one (1) tracker that led them to a note thanking him for the money, refusing to meet, and asking if they'd considered certain improvements to their grapples with schematics for said designs.

Thus started the most bizarre and infuriating chase through notes, money, helpful designs and disappearing trackers Tim has ever been a part of.

Last time, the engineer had left them a USB stick and a note claiming that since they really wanted to know about him so bad, they could have the information on the USB if they could crack the encryption on the zip file inside.

Obviously they screened heavily for viruses or backdoors, but long story short Tim has been trying to crack the fucking thing for two weeks and refuses to let Oracle help. It's personal. It's a matter of pride. 

He could swear the code itself has actively been sabotaging his attempts to hack it, which is, you know. Impossible. 

Ping!

Tim blinks, looking over at the map on another monitor of the Bat computer. 

“Motherfucker-”

He taps into Duke’s comms. This is the first time this has ever happened during the day shift, he wasn't expecting it.

“Signal! I need you on the roof of the warehouse on the corner of Fifth and Everest - a tracker just came online.”

Another thing that infuriates Tim. You can't just turn Bat trackers on and off. They're activated, and then they either stay active or they're destroyed. They can't be turned off and then reactivated.

And fucking yet.

Duke groans, but his own tracker starts making its way in that direction.

“Dude. He's gonna be long gone by the time I get there. He always is.”

“He can't run from me forever,” Tim insists. “I'm almost in this damn file, and I am going to find him and dangle him off a roof from his ankles for giving us this runaround, so help me God.”

“Uh huh,” Duke deadpans. “Sure you are. I'm almost there, and- oh look! A note. What a surprise!”

Tim hears Duke touch down on the rooftop, eyes on the code on his screen while his brother clears his throat and reads aloud.

“Ahem- ‘Good morning, sunshine!’ - guess that's me - ‘I hear some bats and birds have been murdering tires at an alarming rate with the way they drive their bikes-’”

Tim freezes. He's not listening anymore.

“Signal.”

“‘- and that just can't be good for business. Nobody wants a bald tire ruining a chase. So boy do I have the thing for you-”

“Signal!”

“What?”

“I got it.”

“Huh? Got what?”

“I cracked his file. I got it.”

Tim is staring, wide eyed and full of a mixture of elation and trepidation at the contents of the zip file. It's a single text file titled, ‘Wow! You did it!’

“Oh, shit? Well? What's in it?”

Tim swallows, mouse hovering over the file. He takes a deep breath, then double clicks.

The file opens.

Tim blinks.

“Red Robin? What's in it?”

Tim scrolls slowly down, disbelief and horror dawning across his face. “Oh my God.”

“What? Come on, man, talk to me.”

Tim scrolls further.

“Oh. My God.”

“Red? Red Robin, you're scaring me, man.”

Tim puts his face in his hands. Voice muffled, he responds.

“Duke.”

“...Red? You okay?”

“No.”

“No?”

“It's the entire Bee Movie script.”

Silence reigns for a solid five seconds before Duke breaks and descends into raucous, hysterical laughter.

Even muffled by his own hands, Tim's scream of rage scares the bats in the cave into a tizzy.

Part 5

Masterpost

[clark-hailey77]

Ben Aldridge - Attitude Magazine [March / April 2023] Photography by Kosmas Pavlos