BEFORE: I'm back on my original chain, and lined up for Father's Day in a few weeks. My little 2-film detour yesterday means that I'll have to double-up again in early July so I can land on the right film for July 4, but that's been par for the course all year long, which is why I'm 6 films ahead of the day count, here in the 6th month of the year.
Alexandra Shipp carries over from "Straight Outta Compton", replacing the original intended link from "Knives Out". Sometimes I feel like I'm on the right track just because all roads seem to be heading in the same direction, more or less. Of course, I'm the person who designed the roads, so they go where I want them to go, but still, the feeling can be comforting.
THE PLOT: Simon Spier keeps a huge secret from his family, friends and all of his classmates: he's gay. When that secret is threatened, Simon must face everyone and come to terms with his identity.
AFTER: Look, I'm very far removed from high school at this point, so I should probably stop commenting on them as if I know the way that high school works now. I don't, there are all new rules where social interactions are concerned, the whole sexual preference and gender identity thing is a big part of that, but also I went to high school when computers were in a state of relative infancy, we didn't have smart phones or even cell phones, and only a few geeky kids knew what e-mail was. If you wanted to get a message to somebody in those days, you had to call their house, mail them something, or go and find them in person, wherever they might be. It sounds like the Dark Ages when I put it like that.
What's been the effect of all the new technology on personal relationships? I guess it's both good and bad, because as we see in this movie, somebody who's feeling unsure of themselves or alone in the world can go online and connect with other people, or post something about how alone they feel, and maybe they can then find another person who's also feeling that way. But there's a downside, because this high-school has some kind of inner secrets blog that everyone is reading to figure who the gay kid at school is. Not the openly gay kid, because there's no mystery there. It's the closeted gay kid that everyone's talking about, which leads to obvious questions about why the closeted gay kid is posting about being a closeted gay kid, when it seems that he could remain more hidden and anonymous if he just didn't blog about it at all.
Simon's in something of the same boat - he's aware of his sexual preference thanks to some erotic dreams he had about Daniel Radcliffe when he was 13. But he's never acted on his feelings, just made some clumsy attempts to talk to the hunky landscaping guy with the leaf blower who works across the street. This alone feels like a Hollywood cop-out, a way to have a trendy gay character without depicting any potentially controversial gay activity. So it's delay, delay, delay on the major story points, because Simon therefore spends most of the movie trying to figure out who "Blue" is in the real world, only he's wrong several times before he's right. There's a good message in there somewhere, namely that anybody could be the gay blogger, he's one of us and we are all together, but it's buried under this sense of urgency in figuring it out, which seems contrary to the message that people should feel free to come out on their own schedule.
There's also the depiction of Simon coming out to his own parents, which means this film has triple meaning for right now - it's Pride Month meets graduation meets Father's Day - but the relationship between Simon and his dad is awkward at best, and I'm not sure even this topic is handled well here. Simon mentions at one point that his father was a former high-school football star, and then later he says that he's "not very macho" - well, which is it, because those two things seem rather contradictory. Simon's dad naturally assumes that his son is using his computer to look at photos of women in lingerie (lucky kids these days, all I had as a tween was the Sears catalog, no internet) so of course he's disappointed to some degree when his son comes out. This is a really fine line that some actors have to walk these days, because treating someone's sexual preference as bad news sort of sends the wrong message, yet if they immediately displayed acceptance or celebration of this fact, that would probably seem insincere.
Blackmailing someone with the information that they're gay is also wrong, wrong, wrong, yet that's what another character does here. It seems Simon used the school library computer to check his e-mail, and forgot to completely log out after, so this very clueless character (who's in the drama club, yet somehow not gay himself) approaches Simon and tries to trade this information to get close to Simon's friend Abby. Martin seems pretty shrewd for a clueless character, so again, which is it? How can he be pitched as someone with no filter, who's unable to read the room and realize when he's coming off like a jerk, yet he's also manipulative enough to try to trick a girl into falling for him, and then also clueless enough to believe that this plan could work? Right, because women love it when they find out that their boyfriend wasn't confident enough to ask them out directly, but instead blackmailed somebody into setting them up. The battle between the sexes is not a game of Risk, where you convince another player to try to invade a country just to reduce the number of armies in it, so that you can invade on your next turn and have an easier time of it.
Simon goes along with the plan, but that means keeping Abby from dating Nick, and also setting up his other female friend, Leah, with Nick - when it's pretty obvious to everyone but Simon that Leah's in love with Simon himself, to whatever degree that's possible. Leah later asks Simon why he came out to Abby and not her, and it's a very valid question - Simon and the screenwriter have no clear answer for this. Screenwriters also seem to have no idea how to move the action forward in a high-school movie except to have a blow-out party at someone's house with no adult supervision.
As the first major Hollywood studio film to feature a gay teen protagonist, I guess some missteps and growing pains were to be expected. Once again, the music choices in a high-school set film reflect somebody being about 10 or 20 years behind the times - the coming out dream sequence here is set to Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", a song which was 32 years old at the time of release. Something tells me that a gay teen in 2019 would be listening to more current music - but obviously these music choices are made by the adults making the film, not the teen characters appearing in it. (Do kids at a modern Halloween party still listen to "Monster Mash"? I doubt it.). I think maybe we're all a bit behind the times, and the music here reflects that - to get the real inside scoop on today's high-school scene, we'd have to watch films made by current high-schoolers.
Also starring Nick Robinson (last seen in "The 5th Wave"), Josh Duhamel (last seen in "Movie 43"), Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Katherine Langford (last seen in "Knives Out"), Jorge Lendeborg Jr. (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Keiynan Lonsdale (last seen in "The Finest Hours"), Miles Heizer (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Logan Miller (last seen in "Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse"), Tony Hale (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Talitha Bateman (also last seen in "The 5th Wave"), Natasha Rothwell, Drew Starkey (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Clark Moore, Joey Pollari, Terayle Hill, Mackenzie Lintz, Bryson Pitts, Nye Reynolds, Skye Mowbray.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Ferris wheel tickets
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