The movie IS pretty disturbing, don't get me wrong! Here's, it's playing at the theater that tends to showcase the big Hollywood releases instead of the theater that deals in foreign and arthouse, and that was a big surprise to me, because this is SO not a mass market movie and I think a lot of the shock and pushback is coming from the marketing misrepresentation? I just can't stand shock from seeing something you didn't necessarily want to see being turned into claims that the movie is promoting what it's depicting.

This has been a weird week in film reactions for me - one of my classmates acknowledged the massive racism in the new Sex and the City movie while defending it because "they didn't make up any new racism, just used old racist jokes that we've all heard before" (yeah, I don't know, either), and last night another classmate said that Philadelphia is an important film because it explores "the line between God's law and human compassion" and is about "whether Jesus Christ hates the gay or the lesbian or the acts of the gay or the lesbian". Which is, um, not only a serious misreading of the film, but also the most homophobic thing I have ever heard in a classroom and I grew up in the South. The racist girl was reprimanded via shunning, but the blatant homophobia was met with absolutely no pushback and I sat through the rest of the class wondering if I should have spoken up. So, ugh.