January 21, 2026

This week we are showing a Double Feature on “Queer Longing and Departed Porn Stars” on Wednesday, January 21st, at 7 PM.

Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!

Sometimes a perfect film program falls right into your lap, as with this week’s pairing of William E. Jones’s Finished (1997) and Akihiro Suzuki’s Looking For An Angel (1999). Not only are both films basically contemporaneous, and just around an hour apiece (perfect for a succinct double feature!) but both deal with a unique premise in fascinatingly divergent, crosscutting ways. In short, both Finished and Looking For an Angel center on people dealing with grief and searching for understanding after a gay porn star suddenly, and seemingly inexplicably, commits suicide.

Suzuki’s film is at some level a narrative piece of fiction, but feels and functions more like an experimental diary film, following a group of friends who travel to their recently deceased compatriot’s hometown to try to understand why he is gone. Ostensibly emerging from the Japanese pinku genre of adult films, Looking For An Angel is a singular experience, free-associating between memories, glimpses of erotica, and nearly-lost conversations. On a visual level, Suzuki crystalizes a lo-fi late 90s aesthetic in hazy sapphire shots composed with barely enough light to make out images. It’s a marvelous film, using the very material of movies to peek into the tender inner workings of a tight-knit coterie and create a collage, a scrapbook of sorts, for their lost member.

William E. Jones’s film could hardly be more different from a formal angle; Finished is an essay film with the propulsion of a paranoid thriller, as Jones recounts his obsession with Alan Lambert, a gay actor in adult films and ads. As Jones finds out more about Lambert, he uncovers a tormented, egomaniacal, and self-destructive personality that the flattening window of the television screen has kept on the periphery. Jones seeks to pierce that screen and piece together the discordant elements of Lambert’s life and self-inflicted death in order to build a cohesive understanding of the beautiful boy he fetishized, a project doomed for folly.

Taken together, these two films outline the intoxicating power of image and exposure, taken to its erotic outer limits—every time we bare ourselves to the camera, we present the fluid mechanics of our body in movement, we tell a story, but that story is left to be reassembled on the other side of the screen. That both of these came out in the late 90s reasserts itself as a time when our digital/visual footprints were more fragmentary, and less self-reflexive, and more open, in the case of those who did give themselves over to the camera’s eye, to that reconstruction.

Looking For Answers On The Flesh of the Screen,

Charlie, Stefan, Stark

PS Horsebag is having our album release show on 1/24 at Turn! Turn! Turn! At 8 PM and we’d love to see you all there.