MQFF – the Melbourne Queer Film Festival is on! Lots of great films on show, including its centrepiece film, the highly acclaimed Love, Simon. Check out the films if you can. Tickets are available here. And a review of Love, Simon, via the NYT:
For the most part, “Love, Simon” is an amiable, slick, silver-tongued teen romantic comedy. Set in a particularly idyllic Atlanta suburb, replete with lifestyle wish-fulfillment production design, it’s the kind of movie in which the filmmakers signal their exquisite taste by proxy. (Said filmmakers are the director Greg Berlanti and the screenwriters Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker, adapting a novel by Becky Albertalli.) For instance, when Simon, the lead character, needs to choose an email address from which to send a series of love letters to an anonymous subject, he adapts a lyric from the Kinks’ classic album “Something Else by the Kinks.” Which Simon enjoys on vinyl, of course.
The reason for the anonymity is that the high schooler Simon is, like his correspondent, gay. He hasn’t come out largely because he’s not sure how to go about doing so, and his continuing reluctance gets him enmeshed with a thoroughly obnoxious weasel of a blackmailer. The blackmailer’s aim is simple: He wants to gain a romantic advantage with one of Simon’s female friends, and while Simon is in a sense too smart for this nonsense, he reluctantly complies.