030 - Looking: The Movie

It's San Francisco, how hard can it be to meet cool people? Well, if the only people you run into is the cast of the HBO series and movie, Looking, you might have some work to do! This week we tackle the controversial and short-lived HBO series and subsequent moviefilm, Looking, created by writer-director Andrew Haigh. The series followed a group of gay men in San Francisco and their travails in life and love- Patrick (Jonathan Groff), our anxious protagonist with deeeeeeeep mommy issues; Augustin (Frankie J. Alvarez), the tortured "artist" looking for meaning in his work and finding drugs along the way; and Dom (Murray Bartlett), a peri peri chicken lover having a mid-life crisis. Over the course of the series, which only ran for 18 episodes from 2014-2015, we follow this crew and a great cast of supporting actors, including but not limited to Lauren Weedman, Scott Bakula, and sexpot Raul Castillo, as they look for meaning in their lives, with plenty of cringe, Grindr dates, and drunken dancing along the way. The series unfortunately had a short run, but was brought back for one final installment in 2016 with Looking: The Movie. Join Jake and Kevin this week as we talk about the highs of lows of the series and how successful the movie holds up as a final episode. Why did they not cast any gay or queer Asian characters in a show set in San Francisco? Why are the three protagonists so insufferable in the first season? Did Richie and Patrick really get back together in the movie? This and more on this week's episode! PLUS: We dive back to our regularly-scheduled mini-series programming this week! The Criterion Channel (who does not yet sponsor this podcast but we're open to the idea) has a fantastic selection of queer filmmaking, bolstered recently by a collection of queer short films. For the next few episodes, we'll be watching some of these shorts, beginning with the film The Red Tree, directed by Paul Rowley in 2018. This pseudo-documentary short follows a fictional gay man who travels back to the island where Mussolini interred hundreds of gay man in his rise to power in the 1930s.