Hedwig

We watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch the other night. I really enjoyed; in fact, much more so than I had thought I would. Movies about transexuality, cross-dressing, any kind of gender-bending are always either condescending, patronizing, or embarrassingly pseudo-sincere, dripping with bathos. This was somehow the perfect balance. Something about the way it only barely sketched the notion of a plot, and the way realism was only implied. The characters and the story are so stylized it couldn't be sappy, and they were so gutsy, so unwhiny that it really sucked the viewer into the over the top fun of it all. It's so much better than the outwardly similar camp-romp, Breakfast on Pluto (which, by trying to be slightly realistic and weave in IRA stuff into the plot, totally failed to be either fun or gritty)
The music was quite good, too, much more early seventies glam and punk than Broadway/American Idol. Although there is one sappy acoustic folk-rock ballad that had been an 'our song' in an earlier chapter of my life (Well, she had thought it was). It was very strange to listen to a song that had been represented what someone else had felt about me, and which had failed to move me then, with someone who actually does move me in the way I had mvoed the previous person.