Reviews

The sweetest thing about this film is the portrayal from a daughter's view of her parents' struggles with who they are and their relationships with each other. The ending dedication of the film is quite poignant. This film is a reminder of the ways our lives are thrown together and how that intertwines with the choices we make. This is a bittersweet love story on more than one dimension.

Honey West was cool, liberated, and above all, sexy. My first love on TV. She went off the tube almost as soon as I'd found her, and I had to subsist on a diet of Donna Reed, Doris Day, and other actresses that didn't have the same erotic spark.

As an "Edna Gladney baby" who has since located some relatives (you know, the Edna who made money and a name for herself in the adoption baby biz), I hyperventilated through this entire hilarious movie. And what a cast. Any average adoptee looking for Mommy and Daddy Goodbar will find this a romp! This film is more than a fabulous farce. Nowhere else can us bastard daughters and sons go to find an irreverent and uproarious look at the uncertainty, confusion, general malaise, and fantasy labyrinth we enter when considering who we are and from whence/whom we came. This film is one of the many other sides to depictions like "Blossoms in the Dust" of Greer Garson fame (based loosely on the Edna Gladney story).

Mel's dilemma is like so many - adoptive mom and dad are strange, and he's not sure where he fits in, but what to do with the unknown, especially after you know it? It's great fun poked at the adoption issue and a must-see for anyone who's out there searching for those pesky DNA-carriers.

A great romantic movie. This is not a slopped-together film for the sake of titillating the hetero male crowd with lesbian sex, nor a cheap, half-baked B-movie for the lesbian audience (I hate it when we settle for less). This is a real film by folks who know what it takes to make a movie (a romance, no less!), deliver a story, and develop its characters. Not since John Sayles' Lianna have I seen a movie of this caliber about a woman coming to terms with her sexuality. It has characters you care about, depth, and a subtle sense of humor. You'll find this movie enjoyable and refreshing, especially if you're tired of the straight movie industry's continued obsession with making gays and lesbians into murderers, psychos, weirdos and laughing stocks, and the gay subculture's portrayal of everyone as tattooed, leathered, and extreme.

As with any Albert Brooks movie, it has its ebbs and flows. But this is great, cathartic stuff for any average yuppie. Brooks' sardonic view of humans, events, and chaotic fate is in full gear with this film.

The therapeutic nature of the quitting scene is not to be underrated. Every couple of three years, I have to rent this movie simply to live vicariously through an on-the-job twist that Brooks' character encounters and his hilarious and wonderful reaction to it. Great fantasy material to survive crummy jobs and bosses.

Okay, so maybe this won't exactly be a film noir for lesbian films, but it's definitely a groundbreaking classic. Yes, it seems kind of stuck in the period it was made, but let's think back to '85 (if we dare). The sexual revolution wasn't that old - we were still adjusting to all the changes the late 60's and 70's brought just for heterosexuals. Desert Hearts was revolutionary because it treated a first lesbian love affair like a basic romance.

The heterosexual audience has had this classic romantic tension story for years - guy doesn't know he needs to settle down, meets girl, gets knocked off his feet and changes his life's direction--sometimes unnerving himself and other people. Okay, it's schlocky, but it's a mainstay. And they did it all to a decent soundtrack with songs everybody recognized. So why not such a movie for us gay gals? Desert Hearts is stylistic, has a basic formula, and can get a bit tedious in places - it isn't a perfect movie. But its ranch is a nice place to relax and fall in love. Thousands of young women have come to recognize themselves in it. That makes it a gem!

John Sayles' ability to get you acquainted with his characters shines again in this study of a wife and mother who is coming to terms with her sexuality. Unlike the tawdry stories that focus solely on the sexual aspect of lesbian relationships, Sayles explores and reveals the complexity of discovering homosexual orientation - what it means to Lianna as her sexuality emerges from repression and what it means to her and others that she chooses to live truthfully with it.

There are some very rare vignettes in this film that bely what it is like to discover the attractiveness of women for the first time. Sayles does such a masterful job at portraying this process of discovery - it is joyful, playful, and exciting. These scenes remind me of Truffaut's "The Man Who Loved Women" (also badly remade in the USA, starring Burt Reynolds), but they seem to have a more natural depth and feel. Sayles' movies are typically populated with real characters, not posing movie stars. This film is true Sayles...so much is at stake for Lianna, and you are drawn into the aspects and dimensions of her life, the complexities and facets of the human sexual nature and of life in general, and what it means to come to terms with being gay.