Judy Blume Forever

This was great. Not because filmmakers reinvented the documentary wheel. All that stuff is pretty conventional. Interviews with best-selling author. Interviews with famous people. Etcetera. But there’s a running thread through this - people go up to Judy Blume when she’s in her bookstore or out for walks, often in tears, thanking her for learning about their bodies or accepting that sex and masturbation are okay. These moments are incredibly poignant and illustrate how important she is to the culture, after being banned and/or being relegated to the teen/YA category. School was always trying to cram Nathaniel Hawthorne down our throats, and Blume was assuredly much more influential to us. The best, so far, of many documentaries I’ve seen this year.