Fruit Fly

I just got back from seeing this film at the Montreal GLBT film festival and found it thoroughly delightful and entertaining. The multi-talented H.P. Mendoza is to be congratulated for his clever writing -- especially the songs! (I'm still laughing over "Fag Hag"!!) I missed the credits, so it was a surprise to see HP's head shot posted here at IMDb, and to realize that he also played one of the characters in the movie. Did I say "multi-talented" already? This man does it all...casting, music, lighting, editing, etc.

"Fruit Fly" has something for everyone. There are a lot of laughs and some very tender moments along the way. I would have given it a "10," but some of the acting was weak in parts.

Fruit Fly is very often delightful, especially any scene featuring Mike Curtis (Windy) or H P Mendoza (Mark); both are very talented, sexy men with a whole lot of charisma.

Best of all is a scene in the very middle of the movie in which Windy and Mark meet on an awkward blind date and sing "We Have So Much in Common", by far the best singers singing the best of the movie's many fantastic original songs.

It's a joyously raunchy and brilliant celebration of gay-bar cruising that could easily have been titled "Versatile Bottoms". The movie's star, L A Renigen (Bethesda), is very much less interesting; unfortunately, this is mainly her (boring) story, and she's in nearly every scene.

Aside from Curtis and Mendoza, the other characters are annoying and the actors only marginally competent. A few characters (Gaz, Jacob, Tracy and Dirty Judy) are so obnoxious that I wish they'd been left out entirely; they're expendable, and they could easily have ruined the movie.

But Mendoza's almost two dozen brilliant songs and his and Curtis's on-screen charisma - individually and together - overcome the movie's weaknesses and make it a joy to watch. They're SO GOOD that they raise an otherwise two-star movie to a full eight stars.

So I ended up rewatching Fruit Fly yesterday after last watching it while I was in the middle of high school looking for LGBTQ+ films. I was coming to terms with the fact that I was a gay Asian teen in the American south, and Fruit Fly was one of those first few films I watched that had both Asian American and LGBTQ+ representation in it. From my recent rewatch of it 13 years after first seeing it, I have to say it feels like a cute simulacrum/snapshot/moment-in-time of some of the general zeitgeist issues of the time in that it tackles the funny nuances of gay male-straight female friendships, the search for identity and a home in both artistic and personal ways, and the concept of memory, legacy, and the tension between searching for the past while trying to remain present in the life you have now. And then, at times, these nebulous, large concepts play off of each other in chaotic enjambments that both the musical numbers and the movie's choice of San Francisco (a city that from my limited visitor and tourist's understanding is chock full of chaos and contradictions in itself) tie together and allow for these seemingly disparate topics (i.e. Scenes) to flow into each other. While the film, to me at least, feels like a piece of media from the late-2000s-early-2010s, it uses some clever and delightful ways to make use of the time in a way that doesn't make it feel like it's aged badly. It's of the time, but it makes this viewer remember some of the confusing magic and possibility I felt in the air and desire to still feel these days. It's a warm film that I think is a delightful watch, am glad it exists, and am doubly glad that it's not trying to be any grand statement but is a plucky defiance and stand for the value of art, memory, joy, taking chances, and making the most of the time you have wherever and whenever you are in life.