An Exercise In Nonsense

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

I was really on the fence about this ambitious yet schizophrenic Lifetime movie. It's equally bold and hesitant, complicated and scattered, sophisticated and superficial. What these filmmakers are trying to do is admirable. The way they do it is largely disappointing. What finally tipped me toward the negative are the visual and audial stylings, which are the worst clichés from every bad MTVesque reality show about high school.Maggie Baker (Nikki Blonsky) is a fat girl in high school who gets nominated for homecoming queen as a cruel joke and decides to take advantage of the opportunity. She embraces the campaign and wins, only to face the tough lesson that she doesn't need to change the way others see her. She needs to change the way she sees herself.There were a lot of very good creative decisions made here. Maggie isn't plump or a little overweight. She's fat to the point where walking briskly is a physical challenge. It makes it so much easier to take the messages of this film seriously because Maggie is actually obese, not just "Hollywood fat". And while Maggie had an overweight father, her own weight isn't excused as genetic. Maggie's so heavy because she's a compulsive comfort eater who turns to secret stashes of food to smother her self-loathing, which is very cleverly represented by a glamorized fantasy image of Maggie's thin mother (Annie Potts) that viciously undermines her again and again. And when Maggie is voted queen and gets a bunch of positive attention, she's unprepared for it and handles it in a poor but quite human manner. I liked all these parts of Queen Sized.On the other hand, the tone and tenor of this whole production is on the level of a cheesy sitcom, just without the laugh track. The main supporting characters, the mom and Maggie's smart mouth best friend Casey (Lily Holleman), are tremendously inconsistent. They vacillate from supporting to enabling Maggie's weakness to representing the face of anti-fat prejudice without there ever being any rhythm or structure to the changes. And even though this is about the popular kids vs. the outcasts, the movie chickens out by making the popular girl in school a good person and relegating all the mean behavior to her hanger-on best friend, who's about as two-dimensionally malevolent as a scrap of Heinrich Himmler's personal stationary. And giving Maggie a hunky Latino guy friend who clearly would have been her boyfriend if she gave the slightest encouragement, then treating the character like an afterthought, was ill considered at best. I did not like those parts of Queen Sized.But it's the relentless use of high speed high school montages, generic guitar riffs and overplayed hit songs that tips things from a split decision to a bad motion picture. There's no purpose served at all by such aggressive, intrusive gimmickry. If the director felt he needed to contribute something, he should have massaged Annie Potts' feet rather than spray such tired editing techniques and sound cues all over the movie.I wish the negatives of Queen Sized didn't outweigh its positives but wishing doesn't make it so. There might still be some value here for a young person dealing with their own body image issues. If you're fine with what you see in the mirror, though, you won't be fine with what you see on the screen.

In our society, being different can be a terrible experience, specially for a youngster who should be enjoying that stage of her life. Being overweight carries a stigma for insecure people. The cruelty of their peers can be devastating for a young person who finds rejection every way she turns.Take Maggie, a girl being raised by her working mother. Because of her size, she is made the butt of all jokes at the high school she attends. To make matters worse, as a prank, she is entered as a candidate for the Prom Queen, something that, as a rule, is reserved for those popular and cute girls whose popularity among the student body assures them of the title. Maggie proves to be an excellent contestant who proves that no matter what size she wears, she still a winner.The film wouldn't be half the fun it is had Nikki Blonsky not being cast as Maggie. As she had shown in "Hairspray", Ms. Blonsky is a talented actress that one hopes will keep on being cast in movies that rely on her bubbly personality to carry the picture. Annie Potts, who we haven't seen in a while, shows up as Nikki's overworked mother. Peter Levin directed with style giving the viewer a nice excuse to watch "Queen Sized".

While this movie did have a few moments of unbelievable moments, it was right on target. I've been reading a few of the posts about this movie and I admire a particular poster who had gone through something similar and made it to the other side.As a girl who is going through something similar, I can identify with this movie. I am just beginning to recognize some of the signs of an addiction to self-medicating food, like Maggie in the movie. This movie made me realize I have to stop while I can. I know it isn't just because it tastes good, Maggie NEEDS it. It's like drugs to a druggie or alcohol to an alcoholic; it's an addiction that is done to make her feel better.This movie addresses a discrimination that is all over this country. We've all heard it: so many Americans out of so many Americans are obese. The ones who aren't obese are scared of being obese, and when they see that in someone else they tear into them -- it's almost like a way of protecting themselves from it.Watch this movie and see it for what it is: an address of an issue that is only getting worse.

Having Nikki B in it was a winning combination for me to watch this movie though I am not the biggest Lifetime movie fanatic. I have to say that though the movie does have some very honest points, it also reminds me why I am not a big lover of life time movies. Nikki B was absolutely charming in this role as an over-weight teenager picked on and prodded by the other kids in her school. Not being the prettiest, not most popular person of any group is always hard and I think that she conveyed that with a style and grace like no other. I even understood and empathized with her in almost ever situation but at times it was a little whiney and slow to move forward with the story and the plot. The movie really didn't need to be the length that it was because sometimes it dragged on and made you more annoyed at the characters, all of them, and I don't think it was trying to. All in all it is nice TV movie with some positive merits-not award winning though by any standard.