reviews: movies

Yeah, ok, lots of spoilers in this review because I WANT TO WARN EVERYONE NOT TO SEE THIS FUCKING MOVIE!!!!! This is the platonic ideal of the Tragic Lesbian Boarding School Story.

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Bella Distributing is holding a "Scary Good Paperback Sales" lasting through this whole weekend. Check it out for some stupendous deals on lesbian genre fiction--including Daughter of Mystery and The Mystic Marriage! If you've been waiting for a great deal to get caught up with the series in paperback in time for the release of Mother of Souls, it won't get any better than this. (If you want a chance to get caught up in e-book...well, you never know.)

And now, on to the movie review.

OK, let's cut to the chase. GO SEE THIS MOVIE!!!

Phiona Mutesi lives in a Uganda slum, working hard to help her single mother provide for the family. Robert Katende is working for a church youth sports program, with a chess club on the side. When Phiona encounters the chess club she struggles to balance her fascination and love for the challenge with family responsibilities--a struggle that intensifies as her brilliant talent for the game develops. Katende fights for the chance for his best proteges to compete at ever-increasing levels.

When I first saw a trailer for Florence Foster Jenkins, my immediate thought was, “Oh crap!” followed by an immediate 180 when I saw that the project was headed by Meryl Streep. Streep is one of the few people I would trust for sympathetic handling of this superficially ridiculous biography. If that’s an odd beginning for a movie review, let me jump to the conclusion and say that as the credits rolled I was crying and giving a standing ovation. (Not even so much for the movie as for the character.)

My basic take is the same as for Fury Road: if I were an action movie fan, it would not be possible for a movie to target me more forcefully and specifically than this. I'm not an action movie fan, so there are sections where my reaction is, "Ho hum, can we get past the speeding around and blowing stuff up part and back to the interpersonal interactions part?" Ghostbusters had a bit higher people-to-explosions ratio than Fury Road, but they were both exellent in their own ways.

I went to see this sequel to Pixar's Finding Nemo largely because, well, Ellen DeGeneres plus a rumor that there was a lesbian couple somewhere in it. OK, and I have a certain local pride in Pixar, despite their usual tendency to make boy-centered films. (See my review of Up for a discussion.)