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Starring Kevin Kline, Tom Selleck, Joan Cusack, Matt Dillon, Bob Newhart, Debbie Reynolds,
Wilford Brimley. Directed by Frank Oz.
In small town Greenleaf, Indiana, a sensitive and popular high school English teacher
and track coach Howard Brackett (Kline) has been engaged for 3 years, and is to be married next
weekend to a fellow teacher (Cusack). Everything is peaceful and harmonious, the wedding
preparations are going swimmingly, and on top of that a former graduate Cameron Drake (Dillon)
is up for an Academy Award for a film in which he plays a gay soldier who saves a friend from
dying, and they fall in love (the "clips" from this movie are hilarious parodies of Forrest Gump,
A Few Good Men and Born on the 4th of July). On Oscar night, the whole town is watching,
and Drake wins the Best Actor Oscar, and thanks his high school teacher, Howard Brackett, for helping
him get where he is. Then he mentions that Howard is gay. Of course, Brackett denies it, and the
rest of the film he must face the reactions of the press, family, friends and himself to whether this
is true or not. A tabloid entertainment reporter (Selleck) comes to town to grab a juicy story, but stays
to help Howard discover if he is gay by planting a long and passionate kiss right on the lips.
For an obviously mainstream film, In & Out directly, but humourously attacks phobias and
resistance to acceptance of gay people. There is the usual gay stereotypes of limp wrists, love of
Disco, great fashion sense, neatness and cleanliness, and devotion to Barbra Streisland, but they
are done in a playful way, trying to poke holes in our beliefs of what being gay is. The script is very
funny. There are sly references to current events and celebrities (at the Oscars, Steven Seagal is
nominated for the film "Snowball's Chance in Hell"), and a continual barrage of witty one liners and
jokes. One scene shows Brackett listening to a self-help tape describing how real men do not dance
is a riot. The film also comments, through Cusack's hilarious bride-to-be who lost 70 pounds to marry
the man of her dreams, about changing oneself to meet someone else's expectations in order to be
worthy of love. The rest of the actors are excellent. Kline is very funny, but often touching as a man
slowly gaining self-awareness. Reynolds is very domestic as the mother who tells her son she
doesn't care if he is gay, or is not gay, as long as the wedding she has dreamed of goes through.
Blond-haired Dillon, in an obvious reference to Brad Pitt, skinny girlfriend and all, plays the vacuous
sexy airhead actor to the hilt. And Selleck, as he showed in his recent stint on Friends, is very capable
of handling light comedy. But, it seems making a movie about a well-loved teacher requires, as it
did in Mr. Holland's Opus, a long and excessively sentiment laden auditorium scene, designed to show
the stuffiness and narrowmindedness of the powers that be. As a matter of fact, the witty and fast
paced style of the film ends about two thirds into it, at the wedding, and the rest trowls on the sentiment
pretty well non-stop, marring what had been a whole lot of fun.
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