Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

If I wanted to go to a rock concert I would do that rather than go to the movies. The music was not that good and even the best song was easily forgettable. Although there was some semblance of a plot it was not very interesting and hardly a revelation. In my view there is little to recommend this show to anyone. In the theater they had the speakers turned up so loud that I definitely felt that I could have been at a rock concert if I closed my eyes. Since the music was not really that good having it played very loud did not improve the experience. Perhaps I may have enjoyed this more if I was in my twenties or thirties and rock was young but it is not something that a sixty year old is likely to be interested in seeing.

I'm at a disadvantage…I'm just not that into musicals. Especially the odd types – still haven't seen 'Moulin Rouge!'But, I appreciate my friends' recommendations. After the second – or is this the third or more? – recommendation to see 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' (4/5 Stars) I finally gave in. I was so unfamiliar with what this was about, aside from the main character being a drag performer and it was a musical, I thought the title ended with: "and the angry ITCH" and thought that made sense.I admit…this one is hard for me to review. It's certainly not mainstream. It's also not black & white. In fact, I hate reviewing movies like these because my mind's going around in circles. (This is certainly above my pay range…but since I don't get paid…thank God, right?)I did like the movie, very much. I loved the music, the songs, the story. The acting of director/writer/star John Cameron Mitchell, aka "Hedwig" was phenomenal. The movie's wildly original and for the most part I could follow it. But…Fine. I admit, I was a bit lost, especially in the absolute finale… This MUST stem from my lack of interest in musicals because I guess I'm supposed to "get" the finale and see where this incredibly interesting character headed when naked down an alley…So, I will be watching this again. It sincerely helps that I loved the music and (pretty tragic) story of a lost boy. And then, perhaps I can answer some questions of mine…(Spoiler alert) …Such as: Who did he end up with? How did he end up with that band? Was his co-lead singer a woman in drag? And finally, why the hell did they select places that went against his/her grain?Hopefully, one – or more – of my friends will answer these questions…but I still want to see it again. With further understanding, perhaps my rating will increase. Either way, I'm definitely ordering the soundtrack soon…okay…ordered. The soundtrack will be arriving between Monday, January 30, 2012 – Tuesday, February 14, 2012. Just in time for Valentine's Day or Arizona's 100th Birthday!

I can't believe that this movie is so little known.Not only has it got pinches of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Tommy", it also plays in the same league as the above. Storywise AND music-wise that is.I saw it at a friend's house just recently and could not believe that I never had heard of it before. When I further discovered, that I was humming "The Origin of Love" the whole next day without even noticing, I ordered the DVD and Soundtrack right away. Since it's a 2001-movie, I got both at a very reasonable price. Can't wait until they arrive and I can see it again in Dolby Surround.It's original, it's witty, the songs are great, why don't you check it out right away? You won't be disappointed!I'd give it a well-earned 10, but I have to deduct 1 for John Cameron Mitchell's unshaved armpits ... an absolute no-go for a "girl".

This has to be one of the most original musicals ever, if not the one most original. It has something to say, and a new way of saying it. For once in a rock movie, content exceeds style, so that there's something to see in every shot, but you have to pay attention to catch it. Since it is a musical, I wish that it had had some dancing in it, apart from the little the band does in its performances. But I can see that the story didn't allow for this.Hedwig isn't totally realized. It's a stage show that has only been half converted into a movie. I recognize that if it had been opened up and broken up any further, it would no longer have been the same piece, and probably would have lost more than it gained. But it has acclimated itself so little to film that the style of the musical numbers, and the charge they must have packed on stage, aren't carried over. The numbers are photographed straight, without resort to crazy angles and flash editing. Perhaps the director saw these as clichés and deliberately avoided them.And perhaps this movie isn't as innovative as I think. I'm not young and hip, I'm old and stodgy; and what I see as new may be old. Anyhow, by the time any piece of culture has found its way into a play, it's at least six months past its heyday (if not its expiration date) and, by the time the play becomes a film, a year farther on towards decrepitude. But within the boundaries of my old and stodgy perspective, I can aver without doubt that I've never seen a movie quite like this one.I happened onto it by looking for something on the order of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but better done. That's a pretty exact description of it. The superiority to the earlier movie is all-encompassing: the music more original, the lyrics more literate, and replete with references to everything under the sun, the book more in touch with cultural and political realities. To be fair, there would never have been a Hedwig without a Rocky Horror to have paved the way. But something like that could be said of virtually all art.Hedwig's most obvious resemblance to Rocky Horror is in its special pleading for an alternative, unrestrictive sexuality. Rocky Horror, in its one half-serious scene, argued on behalf of pan-sexuality (even thirty years later, the sermonish quality of the speech still comes across as a little offensive); the character of Hedwig occupies a borderland state in between male and female, a result of a bizarre surgical accident. This fantastic, or at best extreme, condition serves as a sort of distorting lens through which the movie is able to focus on his dual sexual nature. That takes it beyond camp (which I dislike) into an exploration of his sex, or sexes, which is purposely skewed but, allowing for that, essentially sincere and truthful.The best illustration of the approach is a love-sex scene between Hedwig and his friend-enemy. Hedwig's sexuality, as noted, is ambiguous, but the scene of course is, and is played as, between two males. As such, it's the first male-male love scene I've seen in a mainstream movie (if Hedwig can be called a mainstream movie) that hasn't made me uncomfortable. I always figured my discomfort arose from an old-fashioned preference that movies remain chaste and bourgeois; now I think it wasn't that. This scene has little regard for the proprieties, but it's inoffensive regardless, because for once the people in it are really attracted to each other, want each other, need each other. In other words, it's a love scene that happens to be between men; not a GAY LOVE SCENE without love or sexual feeling, as such scenes formerly have been. (Note: Straight love scenes are the same. But they've been around so long that one accepts them as a convention without examining them closely.) Apart from the sexual reorientation, the most striking quality of the movie is its melancholy. That isn't at all what one expects in a rock musical. It's a Swiftian melancholy, comic in the extremity of its satire, and bitter almost to the point of despair: "My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch," Hedwig sings. To the wanderers in the desert, rock music is pictured as an oasis ("Hold on to each other,...all the misfits and the losers"), and from this perspective all the attributes of the form, from its chord progressions to its musicians' convulsions during performance, fall into place. What looks from the outside like simple rejection is a process of working through life's impositions (like the "angry inch"). In the end, with luck, it leads the sufferer such as Hedwig to an affirmation of himself, his needs of the moment giving way to the deeper need. Behind its graffitied exterior, this movie has a lot of understanding, I think, for the loser, the untouchable, the odd man out. I liked it a lot.