WE DREAM OF MOVIE HIGH SCHOOLS.......LIKE THE ONE IN 'LOVE, SIMON'....

Love, Simon (2018)   You guessed it.......once again, movie night with Beloved Daughter, lover of all Young Adult romances, be they straight or gay, human-vampire, human-alien, etc, etc.....

                 We'll not pontificate on how great it is that the LGBTQ community finally got an honest-to-Instagram, mainstream, major studio teen romance.........true enough......and you can easily read all the hoopla about that on a thousand other movie review sites......

                 Let's put it simply........this movie unfolds like Jeff Sessions' and Mike Pence's worst nightmares.......as we speak, Sessions is probably deploying a Commando squad from his Religious Liberty Task Force to storm the Wal-Marts everywhere and confiscate copies of the film before the stores flood with un-Christian deviates.....

                 What obsessed us most as we watched........not the warm, sweet depiction of  two gay high school boys shyly courting each other online....(deftly handled, by the way and certainly long overdue)......but HOW COME WE HAD TO GO TO A HIGH SCHOOL FROM HELL INSTEAD OF THE HUGE BEAUTIFUL HIGH SCHOOL IN THIS MOVIE??!!

                   Pardon us while we salivate over high schools in Hollywood movies........the one in "Love Simon" looks larger than a shopping mall.......with an exquisite campus, directly off the pages of 'Architectural Digest'........

                   The BQ's high school, whose memory we've struggled to blot out for decades, more closely resembled the prisons depicted in 1940's movies.........(and this is long, long before any lunatic students ever entertained the thought of shooting up the place....)

                    In 'Love, Simon', there's a few bullies skulking around but as for most of the other kids......well, compared to our own high school experience, these kids seem as alien to us as if they came from a faraway planet. Witty, friendly, loving, best friends forever......yada. yada......

                     All we remember from the student interactions of our high school was a never ending barrage of stupid insults and complete shunning from all the members of the various cliques that never, ever recognized anyone outside their limited circle........

                    But Hollywood's still a dream factory after all........and just like those sprawling,  beautiful houses in adult romantic  comedies that we daydream of living in, for an hour and 45 minutes, we could equally hallucinate about attending the "Love, Simon" high school........for the cool kids and the spiffy campus.....

                    So 4 stars (****) for the movie AND the school.......maybe both come across as wish-fulfillment fantasies......but that was perfectly okay with us.