Queen Sized (2008)

I found Hairspray not bad and generally like actors and actresses that are not super slim and super pretty as well every now and then, so I gave this movie a shot.Bit mistake. Nikki's acting is not very good, as is the acting of the others... The worst part though is the whole plot and conversation writing! It's boring, cliché, and negative!I expected it to be a story about a big girl showing the others that bigger people are just as good. Instead this is a movie where the main character cries every 5 minutes, whines, is negative, treats her friends like crap and acts bitchier than all the thin chicks together. Her mom is unlikable, every 2nd word being about 'losing weight'. In the end, the main character still is an undeserving girl, and it all 'turned out well' for no reason what-so-ever.Personally, there was nothing in this movie, nothing at all that I could say I liked... except the Asian guy maybe.

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 saw this movie when it first came on in early 2008, and I have to say that this has got to be one of the most positive movies based on a true story I've ever seen.Being the polar opposite of Nikki's character, I may not have known her plight, but I do know that there is no way a person should ever go through what Maggie did.I have to say that this is a movie that everyone should see no matter your gender, body shape or age.To me, it represents making a seemingly impossible impact, which is what Maggie did, despite the teasing and the backlash of her supporters.It's rare, but my verdict is a 10 out of 10.

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.