the breakfast club

I finally got around to seeing Breakfast on Pluto last night.
This was a case where I knew too much about the movie going into it. The reviews I'd read had been largely mixed (or negative), but I wanted to see the film because a) I like Cillian Murphy, even though he's creepy, and b) "King Kong" was again sold out.
And Cillian's performance as Patrick "Kitten" Braden, a spacey transvestite who flees Northern Ireland to find her lost mum in London, almost made it worth the $10 ticket.
Almost, but not quite.
For a straight guy, Cillian certainly gets comfy in a parade of jaw-dropping outfits, from platform heels to a gold-glitter squaw ensemble that made all the nellies in our theater hoot. The problem is with the directing, as well as the writing. It's a little too hard to care what happens to Kitten, and director Neil Jordan can't quite decide if his protagonist is eccentric or flat out insane.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't see the movie. The above-mentioned costuming often wows, and the soundtrack (though a little heavy-handed and literal at times) made me smile. Just wait for video.

Meanwhile, I'm still curious to see Transamerica, the fall's other tranny road pic. It's funny: I can't help but wonder why all these cross-dressing travel flicks seem to touch on common themes. Pluto invovles a transsexual hustler on the road to find her lost mother, and by the end of the movie she's basically adopted a baby. Transamerica has to do with a male-to-female transsexual traveling cross-country with a troubled teenager who may be her son. Even in the classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, another heels-in-the-heartland picture, one of the main drag characters finds out he has a son. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, not quite a road picture but awfully close, also gave us a warped relationship between wig-wearing Hansel and his bitchy mother.

The easy answer might be that this has become a sort of indie-flick cliche: If you're going to have guys wearing dresses traveling great distances, some parent problems are bound to ensue. But I don't buy that answer entirely, nor do I think it's the old "blame-the-mother" excuse.
The whole question of gender assignment and identity hits so close to the reproductive impulse, and writers seem to settle into plots involving parent problems easily.
There's more to it than this, but I haven't yet sorted it all out. Thoughts?