Love, Simon
Well-meaning and well-cast, LOVE, SIMON offers the high school coming-out tale the world needed a decade or two ago. Today it could settle comfortably into the safe space of movies made for TV (where its openly gay director, Greg Berlanti, shepherds the stable of DC superhero series); but on the big screen—a canvas crying out for more craft and complexity—it plays as a cute diversion. The too-present score of synthesizer sentiment doesn’t boost its credibility…but the likability of the cast (a winning bunch of youngsters, especially Nick Robinson in the title role, plus mom Jennifer Garner and smokin’ daddy Josh Duhamel) makes this rite of gay passage painless, even if its time has passed and we as an LGBTQ community, as even the film itself somewhat acknowledges, are kind of past this. —YSM
Ed Graham; Excellent film, desperately needed for teens and those who care about their life passage in crucial years; somewhat encouraging and amusing.
I suppose when one lives in the gay ghettos of the coastal cities, this would seem passé. However, in the rest of these United States, to have such a matter-of-fact depiction of a coming out story with a matter of fact depiction of a multicultural group of friends is far more bold than you give it credit for. As a high school teacher in fly-over America, I can tell you that this movie will represent a turning point for countless young people in their own coming out process.