“Lard ass,” that’s what the overweight high school senior Maggie Baker usually hears when she walks past the popular kids in school. Maggie is played by the 19-year-old Golden Globe nominee Nikki Blonsky (Hairspray) who has proved to us once before that big girls don’t give up easily and are able to come on top, before the prettiest girl in school. Queen Sized is a Lifetime Original Movie and inspired by a true story. Before I watched this movie I expected the usual: unpopular girl wants to show the popular crowd what she is made of, so she becomes this cool chick who in the end is crowned home coming queen and ends up with the cutest guy in school. Even though we saw that she became high school royalty in the first five minutes, the movie differed from the usual high school comedy drama. Teen movie conventions have been broken considering there was no real love story (only in the background and it was not the typical sexy quarterback) and the top cheerleader aka the prettiest girl in South Carolina, Tara (Kimberly Matula), was not mean at all. Instead, the mean girl is personified by Tara’s friends, especially her best friend Liz (Liz McGeever) who herself does not have what it takes to be the prom queen and uses Tara for her social status.
Maggie Baker is a fat girl; people make fun of her, when it comes to love, boys tend to ignore her and as soon as she gets back from school she listens to loud music and eats her pain away. Tara’s friends nominate Maggie for homecoming queen as a cruel joke. Unsure about what would be the least humiliating response, Maggie is not doing what everyone expects and decides to run for the crown in order to prove that she is more than just the fat girl. Annie Potts (Joan of Arcadia and Men in Trees) plays Maggie’s caring but worrying mother. A year ago Maggie’s father died from diabetes, since then Maggie started comfort eating. Maggie’s best friend Casey (Lily Holleman) and a few other outcasts at school support the campaign and hope to defeat the usual suspects.
The initial problem is that one finds it difficult to sympathise with Maggie. While it is certainly horrible that she is bullied just because of her size, one soon becomes frustrated due to her self-pity whilst not attempting to change anything. Being a single-mother, Pott’s character, hands a lot of responsibility over to her daughter. She lost her husband a year ago and recognizes her daughter’s problem but does not know how to address the issue with methods other than trying to get Maggie to eat less and move more.
The way the film is edited and Maggie’s delusions of her mum telling her how fat she is, give the film a strange touch. The whole idea of the unpopular girl becoming homecoming queen is not very original as it is the topic of so many chick flicks such as She’s All That (1999). However not all characters are put in the same box as they usually are. For example, Tara who is supposed to be the pretentious, pretty cheerleader is in fact a really nice, smart girl who even votes for Maggie. The storyline is quite long but leaves plot holes. One must wonder how the news station got all the nasty pranks on tape even though there was nobody filming them when they took place.
In my opinion Maggie is dangerously overweight and I wonder what message this will deliver to today’s youth, considering she says that you don’t have to change your appearance. It is understandable to state that one should not change to suit other people’s expectations but when it comes to health issues (especially considering her father died of diabetes), should we not aim to see our 30th birthday? The fact that Maggie is pretty unlikeable during the whole film shows Blonsky’s acting talent. The question remains of why she agreed to star in a Lifetime movie after the success of Hairspray. The Soundtrack includes the band All-American Rejects and Blonsky’s own single "On a High", which is a cover of Duncan Sheik's track.
Overweight individuals are the number one target when it comes to social discrimination. This film is definitely a stand against bullying and intolerance and does deliver the message that people should treat others like they want to be treated themselves and they should not judge people simply by the way they look. Nikki Blonsky herself said in an interview for Lifetime: “It’s all about being who you are and loving who you are, and sharing who you are with the world.”
To sum up, Queen Sized is an average movie made for television. If you’re having a night in and you are in the chick flick mood, give the movie a go.
Nina Redmann
Comments
Post new comment