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So get this. Sadie (the gorgeous Nicole Vicius from “Half Nelson”) is a down and out lesbian freedom fighter who comes across Anna (Melonie Diaz), a receptionist at a plastic surgery clinic who just happened to have been dumped by her girlfriend recently. Anna takes an instant liking to Sadie, who lives life on the wild side and talks like Joey Lauren Adams in “Chasing Amy.”

Sadie then invites Anna to join the CIA, or Clits In Action (see, get that, it’s funny! Imagine what they could get out of the abbreviation of “VAGINA”!), her sleeper cell network, or at least that’s what I’m calling it. Anna also gets to meet her fellow lesbish friends who are also in on the whole “Stick it to the Man” angle. Or so I believe.

The film’s climax involves an attack plot so poorly thought out and executed in that it asks us to believe that two women are able to command an entire television affiliate and run it all by themselves. All the girls in the CIA make it look oh so easy, and let’s just say that one of the concluding images makes light of a particular phallic symbol in Washington DC.

Jamie Babbit is an extremely lovely young woman and a gifted director (I liked her 1999 feature “But I’m a Cheerleader” and her several “Gilmore Girls” episodes, although she was responsible for the dreadful “The Quiet” last year) and no doubt has a strong future ahead. I met Jamie briefly at this year’s SxSW and was still enamored by her talent, and I was about to ask her out if not for the fact she’s been married to a woman for eleven years.

“IBTC” is a movie that is not made for me, plain and simple. I am not saying that this is a flat out awful film; in fact, the film’s rich cinematography (the use of different film formats looked great) and selections of music by Peaches and Sleater-Kinney elevate it a few notches above the mundance. Despite the subject material not working for me, the movie is never boring to look at and fun to listen to.

With that said, there’s no entry-way for a straight, young adult male such as myself who is going to get absolutely nothing out of this, (maybe except to see Nicole Vicius be ridiculously cute for 85 minutes). For the lesbian inside of you, you might find a bit of revolutionary humour in the proceedings, but the way this film alienates everyone else will have it seriously hurt from it being seen by more folks. Pity, that.

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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15831&reviewer=350
originally posted: 03/21/07 16:00:09
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