Friday 15 May 2020

Love, Simon (2018)

Director: Greg Berlanti

Stars: Nick Robinson, Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel...

Genres: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Country: USA

Summary: Simon Spier keeps a huge secret from his family, his 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.

As I'm thinking about all the movies I've seen in the past years in order to review them all by memory, I thought this movie was a couple years older, like 2017 but now I see it's from 2018... Guess it didn't leave that much of an impression on me then, huh.

I am one of the people who read the book first. And I read it so long ago that I barely even remember anything about it except for the characters' fascination with Oreo cookies (if I remember correctly, that was a thing right?). I am not a big fan of YA literature. I used to like it a lot before when I was younger, but I guess I just outgrew it. The story was cute and it's always so nice to see a positive LGBT movie, focusing on happy endings etc. So it's great that exactly this kind of movie was picked up by a major Hollywood studio. It's one of the most popular LGBT movies now. So many people have heard about this and I think a lot of the kids will really love this movie as it brings hope to a lot of them and it makes people feel good after watching, it has that heartwarming feel to it.

Still, I have to say that I felt it (both the book and the movie) to be a bit too sugarcoated for my taste. I know, I know, I'm hard to please. I don't like sad and tragic LGBT movies that deal with real problems and now I also say this is sugarcoated, but listen - this is not exactly a criticism per se. A lot of people like these kind of movies, including me too, but I don't know for some reason I just couldn't identify with this film. I consider myself a Millennial and I think I'm a bit more old-school about movies, music and aesthetic. Somehow I feel that mostly Gen Z kids will identify with this movie and its aesthetic more - from the fashion, relationship between characters, the way of life. Maybe it's just typical Hollywood aesthetic. In that case I wasn't used to Hollywood aesthetic being applied to LGBT movies.

Anyhow, it's not bad. It's a cute movie, but it was so hyped that I might have expected something more. I've seen better gay movies than this one. Still, I definitely support positive films like this and I hope more gay movies get promoted to the big market for more people to know about them.

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