Dirty Girl

After the teen runaways pick up a hot, hot hitchhiker headed toward Vegas where he's a male stripper (first, demonstrating his talents by the campfire in the beam of the car's headlights, then in the back seat with the no-longer-miserable fat boy), but before the plucky pair stranded in the middle of nowhere stumble into a rough roadside bar where the mean biker dudes have no interest in the skinny blond chick but go wild for her chubby pal, you'll say to yourself in the empty theater, "Wait a minute, this is a GAY movie!" In a classic marketing bait and switch, Dirty Girl's trailer promises two hours of unapologetic high school slut walk grrrl power circa 1987 Oklahoma, and the film delivers a little lost girl's search for her biological daddy bracketing the real heart of the story, a heavyset gay boy's journey through fear, fabulousness, girl friend fun, first love, first sex, first heartbreak, and finally acceptance. Sure enough, Dirty Girl is written and directed by out and proud Abe Sylvia. The plight of the mothers -- her single mom desperate to catch a man; his repressed mom stuck in a loveless, abusive marriage -- are well-enough drawn and very well played by Milla Jovovich and Mary Steenburgen. Fair warning: the uplifting ending is among the most awful you will ever see. The suits at the Weinstein Co. should have embraced the gay and released this as a queer Muriel's Wedding; it is impossible for the movie to have done any worse at the box office than its current $47,931 gross after three weeks.