Coming out of the same studio that gave us RuPaul's Drag Race, and stacked with a whole crew of former contestants, Stop! That! Train! plays like RuPaul basically taking a bow for the entire franchise she's built. It's not really a gay film in the traditional sense, but with so many drag stars from Ru's shows popping up alongside a few cameos from well known out gay actors, I figured it earns a spot on this blog anyway. The whole thing is completely over the top, packed with GenZ slang, loud flashy visuals, and humor that's constantly winking at you knowing how ridiculous it is. Going in you'd assume it's meant to be a laugh riot, and a lot of critics online seem to be eating it up, but I just couldn't get into it at all. I've never really been someone who vibes with campy silly stuff like this, so honestly my reaction doesn't surprise me one bit. The setup follows Tess and DeeDee, two low level stewardesses who sneak onto the fancy Glamazonian E...
Two chimney sweeps, both in monogamous, heterosexual marriages, find themselves in situations that challenge their perspectives on sexuality and gender norms. One of them has been having a series of dreams in which he is in a passionate relationship with David Bowie who makes him feel like a woman, while the other recently had a sexual encounter with a male client, an unexpected but surprisingly wonderful experience, which gets tarnished as soon as he tells his wife about it. Neither considers himself to be homosexual, but they find themselves slowly questioning their identity as time goes on. The film then continues to focus on how the second guys wife reacts to his husband cheating. He copes with his wife’s intense emotional reaction to an event that he sees as an unexpected blip and they are both chocked by what happened. The story if the first guy is a bit all over the place and doesn't get a proper conclusion. He seems to fall back on cliches that the film can’t entirely explore because he himself doesn’t know how to recognize the heteronormative standards he’s judging himself by.
The two protagonists question their sexual identity and come to terms with their own deviances and the impact these have on their lives going forward. The film is also about how the men’s perspectives on themselves shift because of these events and how their family reacts to them. When the guy tells his friend about the event with another man, he just thinks as a one off thing, no biggie. As soon as his wife responds to the news, he becomes crestfallen because his actions hurt her, and she can’t get past it. And the two get into many conversations on what this really means for both of them, which I thought was interesting but after a while gets to much. It goes into the realm of "There can be sex without intimacy, intimacy without commitment, and not-at-all intimate sex". The other friend's story was a little arbitrary to me and I just couldn't connect with it. The Bowie dream becomes a recurring part of his sleep, but rather than waking up feeling uneasy, he begins to take pleasure in the sensation of being looked at as a woman. I read that the film has a deeper meaning especially with the parallels of sprawling city landscapes, but none of that mattered to me. I wanted to feel, how as a film it makes me feel, and I think it was just average. (4/10)
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