by Jamie Babbit, 2000.
Starring: Dante Basco, RuPaul Charles, Eddie Cibrian, Bud Cort, Clea DuVall, Melanie Lynskey, Natasha Lyonne, Joel Michaely, Cathy Moriarty, Kip Pardue, Douglas Spain, and Mink Stole.
Rating: 7/10, 4/10.
Matthew hates this movie so much that just the other day he told me it would probably make his top ten least favourite movies of all time list. And while it’s certainly not anything approaching a good movie, this seems a bit extreme to me.
It’s about Megan (Lyonne), a high school cheerleader. She’s sooooo straight—she has a football player boyfriend, for one thing, and she’s a cheerleader, for god’s sake—but much to her surprise, her family and friends get together and have a lesbian intervention on her behalf. They have some pretty strong evidence: she’s a vegetarian, she listens to Melissa Etheridge, she has Georgia O’Keefe’s vaginal flower patterns on her pillows...hell, she doesn’t even like kissing that football player boyfriend of hers (though, with the way he goes about it, I don’t really think anyone would much enjoy it). She’s not convinced, but her parents (Mink Stole of John Waters film fame and Bud Cort, Harold from Harold and Maude, who has aged almost obscenely poorly) send her off to True Directions, a gay-conversion camp run by creepy old repressed Mary (Moriarty). We go through the process of this so-called "conversion," and along the way Megan meets Graham (DuVall), an angry young lady whose plan is to go along with it all and make sure she doesn’t get caught again. They inevitably fall in love, and then more things happen and there’s a happy ending, basically.
This movie is NOT good. It’s pretty awful, actually. But it’s cute, it’s silly, it’s kinda fun. There’s a kind of childish satisfaction in just looking at the bright pinks and blues that most of the film is done up in. It gets kind of tiresome on repeat viewings, but it’s definitely fun to watch once or twice. Oh, and might I mention the fantastically wonderfully fun fun fun soundtrack?