Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994)

"I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "No more fucking ABBA!" 

I really hate ABBA. It is an unnatural burning hate. So the fact that I had to listen to it in this movie may have had some impact on my opinion of it. Even though the total run time was only 104 minutes, the movie felt really loooooong to me. After a while, the plot just seemed to drag (pun totally intended!). There were some great one liners and, at first, I found the jokes really funny. As the movie wore on though, all of the drag queen/transsexual material got kind of old and stale. By the end of the film I just wanted to yell, "Yeah we know that you like to dress up as girls and dance around, I get it haha."

While there were definitely some interesting points in the film, overall, the relationships between the characters never truly caught my interest. I thought that the love story between Bernadette and Bob was nice and the idea that Tick had a wife and a son where they were going was an interesting curve ball. It just never quite came together for me and I just ended up being confused as to exactly what kind of statement they were trying to make about these relationships. 

There were, of course, some visually beautiful moments in the film. I loved the moif of the long reams of fabric flying behing the bus as it drives through the desert. Even this though started to wear on me after I had seen it over and over again. The desert theme did not help this feeling (and yes that is what they were going for). It just made me feel somewhat isolated and trapped during the film and in the end I walked away with more of an overall sense of desperation than an idea that everything worked out in the end.

Yes, I liked this film. I didn't love it. I feel that I have seen it before and that I have seen this same idea done better (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). I was very surprised to see that this movie was on the list to be quite honest. I know that it made a big splash in the indy world when it come out but I just don't think that, for me, it ever lived up to the hype. 

7/10