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Transamerica

Synopsis

Felicity Huffman (from Desperate Housewives) plays Bree Osbourne, a pre-op MTF (male-to-female) transsexual who gets the surprising news she has a 17 year old son. In order to get final approval from her therapist for her operation, she has to confront and deal with this fact. So she helps her son out by bailing him out of jail and driving him cross-country.

What I Thought

Well, it's been a while since I wrote for y'all. It's been a while since I went to see a movie. Not that there isn't anything good out there, but, ya know, I'm closing on a new apartment in two weeks and movies just aren't in the budget these days. But if you, right now, send an email to 400,000 of your closest friends and ask each of them to send me a dollar, I promise to go to the movies EACH weekend for the next five years and start my own review/blog website.

That's not too much to ask for, is it?

I'd send YOU a dollar.

Umm.

I was expecting a drama and was pleasantly surprised that the poster outside the theater labeled it a "comedy" because I really wasn't in the mood for drama. "Save the drama for your mama", is what I always say, those guys from Boot Camp got it from me (the one season reality show where people went to a military-style boot camp).

Felicity Huffman was brilliant playing a pre-op transsexual. I should get back to watching Desperate Housewives just for her, but quite frankly I miss the gals from Sex and the City too much to settle for this knock-off.

Anyway, yes, brilliant. Though a bit odd. You'd think casting would pick an actual transsexual. Sure, she did a brilliant job, but in the end you KNOW she's actually a woman. So really you're lauding her for the bare minimum that the role calls for. It's like saying "wow, that Tom Cruise sure deserves an Oscar (tm) for playing a cardboard cutout of a pseudo-macho 'no no, I'm not really gay let me prove it by dumping my first trophy wife for a barely pubescent chicklet'" I mean, shouldn't that be just assumed with any Tom Cruise movie as a bare minimum?

Isn't it like casting a woman to play a man's role? (Besides, of course, Linda Hunt. Look her up.) If a male actor (not necessarily transsexual) played as amazing a role as Felicity, would we be calling him "amazing" or just "isn't that what you expect of the role"? I guess it depends on how you interpret the Craft but I ain't gonna go all into it.

She was brilliant anyway. Love her.

The movie is your standard road movie with pretty standard plotline. Man has son and doesn't know about it. Man becomes woman. Son grows up. Woman (nee man) helps son. They bond.

Although I feel I shouldn't have to say it in 2006, I'm still gonna say that it's good seeing a movie that doesn't use someone's "otherness" (and transsexualism is pretty "other") as a punch line and treats the characters as human. It reminds me a bit of Napoleon Dynamite, where a gang of misfit people (and that's putting it mildly), though you clearly see their strangeness, are still treated with the utmost respect, humor, and humanity.

Let's all join hands and sing... We aaaare the woooorld, we aaaare the chiiildren...

Two thumbs up.
 

 

All photos and text copyright Ryszard Kilarski, unless otherwise noted. Clip art, drawings, paintings are either free domain or copyrighted by the artists.