Queen Sized (2008)

Fantastic!

best movie i've ever seen.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

I was really on the fence about this ambitious yet schizophrenic Lifetime movie. It's equally bold and hesitant, complicated and scattered, sophisticated and superficial. What these filmmakers are trying to do is admirable. The way they do it is largely disappointing. What finally tipped me toward the negative are the visual and audial stylings, which are the worst clichés from every bad MTVesque reality show about high school.Maggie Baker (Nikki Blonsky) is a fat girl in high school who gets nominated for homecoming queen as a cruel joke and decides to take advantage of the opportunity. She embraces the campaign and wins, only to face the tough lesson that she doesn't need to change the way others see her. She needs to change the way she sees herself.There were a lot of very good creative decisions made here. Maggie isn't plump or a little overweight. She's fat to the point where walking briskly is a physical challenge. It makes it so much easier to take the messages of this film seriously because Maggie is actually obese, not just "Hollywood fat". And while Maggie had an overweight father, her own weight isn't excused as genetic. Maggie's so heavy because she's a compulsive comfort eater who turns to secret stashes of food to smother her self-loathing, which is very cleverly represented by a glamorized fantasy image of Maggie's thin mother (Annie Potts) that viciously undermines her again and again. And when Maggie is voted queen and gets a bunch of positive attention, she's unprepared for it and handles it in a poor but quite human manner. I liked all these parts of Queen Sized.On the other hand, the tone and tenor of this whole production is on the level of a cheesy sitcom, just without the laugh track. The main supporting characters, the mom and Maggie's smart mouth best friend Casey (Lily Holleman), are tremendously inconsistent. They vacillate from supporting to enabling Maggie's weakness to representing the face of anti-fat prejudice without there ever being any rhythm or structure to the changes. And even though this is about the popular kids vs. the outcasts, the movie chickens out by making the popular girl in school a good person and relegating all the mean behavior to her hanger-on best friend, who's about as two-dimensionally malevolent as a scrap of Heinrich Himmler's personal stationary. And giving Maggie a hunky Latino guy friend who clearly would have been her boyfriend if she gave the slightest encouragement, then treating the character like an afterthought, was ill considered at best. I did not like those parts of Queen Sized.But it's the relentless use of high speed high school montages, generic guitar riffs and overplayed hit songs that tips things from a split decision to a bad motion picture. There's no purpose served at all by such aggressive, intrusive gimmickry. If the director felt he needed to contribute something, he should have massaged Annie Potts' feet rather than spray such tired editing techniques and sound cues all over the movie.I wish the negatives of Queen Sized didn't outweigh its positives but wishing doesn't make it so. There might still be some value here for a young person dealing with their own body image issues. If you're fine with what you see in the mirror, though, you won't be fine with what you see on the screen.

I just finished this movie. I'll admit coming in I was skeptical but I figured I'd give it a chance, being a big girl myself. I half wish I had never watched it. It was filled with fat people stereotypes, such as, every fat person has 10 things of junk food hidden around the room, fat people have pictures of skinny people plastered on their walls (some with their heads on skinny bodies), that whenever fat people are upset they freak out and need to run to the fridge, etc. I was so offended by the obvious stereotypes in a movie that was supposed to be about fighting stereotypes that it about made me sick. Sure not all popular people are mean, all jocks aren't jerks, etc. But a fat person has to love food like it's crack. I will say that the movie did have some good inspirational times but they were just shot down by unrealistic moments. I am really disappointed by this movie.

I can't believe I'm watching this three nights in a row but something about it just keeps drawing me back. Being a former geek, especially in grammar and junior high school, I can really relate to Nikki's character. I too would have preferred invisibility over non-stop attention but of the negative kind. I can also relate to coming out of dorkdom but still acting and feeling like a victim, wondering if everyone still perceived me that way. I can't say that I don't still carry my own Annie Potts figure around in my mind at times and found that to be one of the most interesting aspect of the show. The acting, especially by Ms. Blonsky, was uniformly excellent and I found Fabian Moreno to be quite interesting and not hard on the eyes. I also liked that Nikki's character proved to have flaws of her own and that she allowed her fifteen minutes of fame to go to her head. Also interesting was that her competition for homecoming queen proved to be quite nice. I would certainly recommend this movie to anyone looking for something meaningful.

You really have to be plump to understand what heavy people go through. Just like it says in the film, if you denounce a race, you're a racist. What do we call people who show prejudice towards heavy individuals?Nikki Blonsky, of "Hairspray" fame, does a beautiful acting job here detailing what heavy set people go through. Yes, they are literally outcasts in this society.When the vicious in-kids nominate her for "Homecoming Queen," just for laughs, Blonsky decides to pursue the dream. She is running for all the nerds. It's time that we stop stereotyping what we automatically want in a homecoming queen.What makes the film so good is that it's shown that the Blonsky character is without faults herself. The redemption of many of the characters by film's end is just great to watch.We can all learn from this. If it weren't for all those health concerns regarding fat people, we could certainly say that fat is beautiful.