Leaving Normal // Favorite Film
I wasn't a huge fan of Leaving Normal, I thought the film was ironically...normal. Average. Plain. Two women band together, leaving abusive males behind them, as they navigate typical road obstacles that women face en route to self discovery. Almost as though the movie's been done before, except...with plausible characters, and plot development.
Marianne is very quiet, reserved, and passive. In the end she ends up opening up to the public when she's working at the hardware store and teaching the Alaskan natives how to read, and even fell in love with a trucker. This didn't get as much focus as the predictable plot that was entirely overdrawn. A few minutes in, the parallel to Thelma & Louise was evident, and I had pegged everything about the two characters. Their actions and reactions were predictable. The obscure characters they met (...66. Yeah, what?) tried their best to be extreme, but the downfall was once again predictability. I just found it difficult to really enjoy a film that was both bland and predictable.
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My favorite film this semester was Little Miss Sunshine, but it was already a favorite movie of mine. Because of that, the movie I enjoyed the most was Adventures of Priscilla. The flamboyant women in the film were entertaining, from their feuds among one another to the way they handled homophobia. There were personal side plots that helped extend the action beyond the matters directly at hand.
Besides the action and characters in the movie, I think I enjoyed it more than others simply because it brought back fond memories of last summer. The entire drag scene was fantastic, and something I can comically relate to, though that might be a different blog entry in itself.