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I thought it was about the most charming movie I'd seen in a long time. How could anyone, male, female, gay, straight, not fall madly in love with Kevin Kline's performance in this movie? He's witty, handsome, bright, and he tries so hard to do the right thing that he never did sit down and have that very long talk with himself that he should have long ago.
Even Tom Selleck, despite the kind of sleazy character he plays in this film, is likeable. About the only two people you really want to butcher are a couple of the school employees, who display the only out-and-out homophobia in the film. (Some is displayed by a few of the students, but they get over it pretty fast.)
In & Out is a comic gem, one of those great movies that delivers laughs well beyond what they show in the trailer or in the commercials. Kevin Kline and Joan Cusack are hysterical as the couple propelled by advancing age and a pushy mother into a wedding that she really wants and he's willing to go along with.
The movie satirizes all kinds of things related to Hollywood, especially Entertainment Tonight and Forrest Gump. Interestingly, it doesn't satirize small town life that much, except for Howard's relationship with his mother, at the bachelor party, and a little at the end. Small-town life, is, for the most part, played straight.
I do have one big complaint about this movie, and that is its sense of time:
The movie is supposed to begin very close to Oscar time. Anyone who lives in the northern part of the country (as Indiana was in the last time I looked) knows that late March is a very gray time of year. The crocuses are blooming and the leaves haven't hit the trees yet. You can see a few green buds here and there. There's often still ice on the small ponds and bits of snow.
So this movie looks like it was filmed in the middle of summer. Everything is very green and there are flowers everywhere.
It might have driven the point home better about Howards deeply-buried sexuality to have everything look kind of gray and barren, and maybe the flowers start blooming once Howard starts to deal with it.
Further, they have high school graduation happening a few days later! Hello...Hollywood? What public school in America has graduation in the first week of April?
The "graduation" scene didn't need to be graduation at all. It could have been one of these sceneswhere the administration has called a meeting to discuss Howard. The results would have been the same. It was sheer bad planning.
Anyway, other than these nuscances, I did like the movie very much, and congratulate Rudnick, Oz and a wonderful cast for making one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time.