Product Description: THIS IS THE STORY OF HEDWIG, AN AMBITIOUS GLAM-ROCKER WHO COMES TO AMERICA DETERMINED TO FIND FAME, FORTUNE AND HIS OTHER HALF.
Amazon.com: Sometimes grace and hope come in surprising packages. The title character of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a would-be glam-rock star from East Germany, undergoes a botched gender-change operation in order to escape from the Soviet bloc, only to watch the Berlin Wall come down on TV after being abandoned in a trailer park in middle America. Hedwig gets involved with Tommy, an adolescent boy who steals her songs and becomes a stadium-filling musical act. Suffering from a broken heart and a lust for revenge, Hedwig follows Tommy's tour, playing with her band (the Angry Inch) at tacky theme restaurants. Into this simple storyline, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell packs an astonishing mix of sadness, yearning, humor, and kick-ass songs with a little Platonic philosophy tucked inside for good measure. A visually dazzling gem of a movie. --Bret Fetzer
HEDWIG IS AMAZING ^ I got this movie on NETFLIX and absolutely loved it! Foud it at a great price on Amazon and now I can watch it any time I want! Great price and good delivery time. Thank you Amazon!
Search for Wholeness ^ John Cameron Mitchell's "baby", "Hedwig and the Angry Inch", may be low-budget, but its depth of content makes it a masterpiece. Mitchell's inspiration is clearly Plato's "The Symposium", a group of speeches by ancient Greeks who met at a banquet to "praise Eros". The speeches present different views on the concepts of love and soulmates, and "Hedwig" uses those philosophical examinations as she takes her own journey to find "completion". Stephen Trask's soudtrack perfectly reflects the sentiments presented in "Symposium" but in a quirky, modern way. The centerpiece of "Symposium", Aristophanes creation story, in which he posits that we began as '3 sexes' rather than 2 who were fused together (male/male, female/female, male/female), then cut in half by Zeus' lightening bolt and left to wander around the Earth looking for our "other half", is reflected in the song "Origin of Love", which is the centerpiece of the film. In the movie, Hedwig (born Hansel), has been struggling "her" whole life; her life changes when she undergoes a botched sex change operation in order to move to America with a G.I. When he leaves, Hedwig is again lost, and she eventually finds her way to Tommy Gnosis, with whom she enters a paiderastic relationship: she gives him knowledge, he gives her affection. Since Hedwig can't literally give birth, her babies are her songs; she prides herself on her music. After teaching Tommy her songs, he "runs off with the good stuff", and she's left with nothing. Hedwig thinks she has found her soulmate in Tommy, but he turns out to be more "bad" than "beautiful". In the end, she must learn that she doesn't need "another half" to be complete; she is whole all along. The images are at first shocking, but once you get past the make-up and wig, what is left is a self-examination so vulnerable, so pure, and so beautiful...
Rush Limbaugh Approved ^ Hedwig and The Angry Inch is a humorous right wing conservative comedy that exemplifies wholesome morality. It is encouraging to see Hollywood turn out a performance that is witty and entertaining without lood profanities or ideals.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch dvd ^ Awesome alternative lifestyle film. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (New Line Platinum Series)
The Last Time I Saw You, We'd Just Split In Two... ^ Honesty. Sincerity. Truth. Beauty. Triumph. Art. Love. Meaning. Freedom. Salvation.
If those words speak to you on a deep level, this film is everything your heart has been aching for. No matter how high your expectations may be, the real thing will blow them out of the water - you cannot help but be profoundly changed by this movie, and it can do no less than tear through your chest, grab your heart, and consume it completely.
I was aware it existed for a while, but for some reason had never seen it; I hadn't heard anything about it, and other things were always a higher priority. I'm a huge fan of musicals, I love anything campy, and I owe my life to the LGBTQ community, so it seemed like an obvious pick for me, and when I saw it was available instantly on Netflix I decided to put it on as background noise while I worked on other things. Less than halfway through, I couldn't ignore it anymore. It was nothing like I had expected it to be, and even only hearing and seeing it peripherally, I found myself moved almost to tears. It felt like the first time I had heard Lou Reed, or read Antoine de Saint Exupery, or saw The Science of Sleep or Fight Club or Rent - I don't know what they are for you, but I think that everyone has a few works of art in their life that came along unexpectedly and defined them, and are always capable of somehow cutting through and hitting center. Hedwig and The Angry Inch is one of those things, to an incredibly intense degree. After the first time I saw it, I started to watch it constantly, a few times a day, until it sunk in and became me, and I knew all of the words to all of the songs.
The songs! The songs are incredible. In my opinion, the music can hold it's own compared to any of the greatest bands and musicians in history - these are solid, genius rock songs that could easily have been on an album by David Bowie in his prime. They are not just "musical songs", and can be appreciated without the context of the movie. But within the context, they are so multilayered, meaningful, and perfectly constructed, that you can know more about Hedwig as a character than you'd learn in a movie ten times as long.
The ultimate meaning of the film is, I think, meant for your own interpretation. But it seems to me that ambiguity was an intentional theme, along with paradox and a sense of completeness within the incomplete. Inside each of us are two halves, and we are each ourselves half of something, even if it's only for the sake of the sense of longing that drives us. Even if we are never meant to be whole in the end. Hedwig and Tommy Gnosis are beautifully crafted embodiments of humanity's duality, that both complete and create, and ultimately become, one another. This is a dynamic everyone can recognize, whether you're like Tommy, and believe that there is no mystical design, and no cosmic lover preassigned, or whether you're like Hedwig, and know that there is someone out there who's pain down in their soul is the same as the one down in yours. Maybe both have got it right somehow. Maybe neither does. But you're either one or the other, and each of us is in some ways both. So if you are a human being, Hedwig and The Angry Inch is for you.
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