1) Listening to a podcast I'd never listened to today, Sklarbro Country, they had a comedian, Will Weldon, and asked him what his current favorite joke is in his set. His response is that he has a bit about movies and their treatment of transgender people and how much he hates when a straight male character finds out someone they were interested in used to be a man and they you get the smash cut to them vomiting (see also: the entire climax of Ace Ventura). His fantastic comment: "you know, every girl you've been with used to be a child. Are you gonna freak out that you're a pedophile now?" I was just super surprised to hear about this comedian's perspective on that and that it was his current favorite thing to rant about on stage. Love it. Need to find more of his work.
2) I watched Kinky Boots last night. It's a somewhat-true story of a dude who inherits a failing men's shoes business and, after attempting to save a drag queen being attacked in an alley, is inspired to refocus his factory into making shoes for drag queens. It's pretty decent and actually reasonably respectful of trans people, though perhaps oversexualized as the treatment often is. Still, I have to talk about Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance as Lola, which was just...really amazingly good. A lot of movies about transvestite or transgender people try to make the person in question look uncomfortable or awkward in their chosen gender performance, but Ejiofor just does the exact opposite. He looks so comfortable and at ease as Lola and doesn't miss a beat when dressed as her. It's when Lola is forced to dress down into a man that he does a great job looking very uncomfortable and off somehow. She is Lola, not Simon, and being forced to be Simon is not okay to her. It's really great.
Also, just small bonus points to the movie for having the characters refer to her in the feminine even when she's not dressed up. Just seems right.
And I just learned that it's now a Tony winning Broadway musical and how the hell did I miss that this year? Do want.
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