wow. no one has mentioned transamerica once on this site. amazing. i wonder why that is. i mean, this is a film that received some pretty strong love. at the same time, it’s bad, bad trash, so maybe that’s why. i just watched it, and i had to squirm all the way through. so i’d really like to know what you guys think of it, if anyone watched it, and, above all, how the trans community felt about this very coarse representation of a mtf pre-op transexual who finds herself grappling for the first time in her life with the joys of parenthood just a week before the surgery. felicity huffman does the best she can with a poor script, and, truth be told, she manages to pull off a really dignified performance. still, this film is so predictably, so badly written, and so underdeveloped, and so full of cliches, one feels sorry this most interesting aspect of human reality should have been dealt with this poorly.
and why are at least two transexuals (the most prominent in the film) being played by actors of the”to” rather than the “from” sex? no matter. throw gender dysphoria, unwanted parenthood, alcoholism, drugs, teen prostitution, jewishness, and a hint of incest into a couple of hours of cinema, and you’ve got yourself a really s-u-b-t-l-e film.
we watched it a month or so ago. sunhee liked it a lot more than i did–i thought it was just okay, amusing enough. i held off writing about it because i thought sunhee was going to and then forgot. maybe now that you’ve given it the thumbs down i’ll be able to provoke her into defending the film.
I thought this was quite possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. I can’t think of one redeeming feature it had. I’m agog to hear Sunhee’s defense of it.
it’s a really good title.
I really liked this movie because unlike Gio, I did not think this was cliched or predictable. In fact it didn’t go to where most movies about transexuals go to, which is delving into their psychosis to figure out where they went wrong. The Hoffman character used to be a man, and now he wants to be a woman. There’s no delving into bizaar family history that answers the question about his sexuality. The family is weird in the way many families are and they have to deal with their loved one choosing this lifestyle. Also, where the film really takes a leap is in the character of Hoffman’s son. He’s clearly a fucked up kid and the film doesn’t gesture toward some fake redemptive moment. There’s pain and unalterable consequences, but it doesn’t mean that a meaningful relationship cannot begin to form.
I can’t speak about the transexual community, but a close friend of mine who is gay is the one who told me to see this movie. He thought this was a movie that spoke to the gay community, as opposed to “Brokeback” which he claimed is a gay straight movie. I’m not sure if this represents the gay community’s response to the movie, but at least I saw where he was coming from.