BLOOMINGTON Is generally worth avoiding.

Jackie is a former child star trying to fit into college. Almost immediately she meets Professor Catherine Stark (McAtee),a sexy psychology professor with a reputation for bedding female undergrads. After a few stolen glances and a single conversation the two crawl between the sheets. I will admit their first kiss was as HOT as any kiss i've ever seen on screen!!! I just did not know where it came from? After the requisite sex scenes and laughing and cooking together and reveling in all the fun they are having, they (you guessed it) fall in love.

Watching lesbian movies is like having your girlfriend cook you dinner. No matter what it tastes like you are going to love it because you know how much care and effort she put into it. There is the definite possibility that the green bean casserole she just whipped up is going to be pretty awful. The thing is, every once in a while it isn't half bad. This is how I feel about lesbian movies. I watch them the whole time hoping I don't have to cover my eyes for another embarrassing round of boring plot lines, terrible acting and an endless loop of the one Ani Difranco song the producers could get the rights to.

Bloomington starts promisingly but too much of the film is hard to swallow, from the casual way it treats an ethically-questionable sexual relationship between student and teacher to its somewhat anti-climactic ending.

It's not the worst lesbian film I've ever seen. but I struggled trying to figure out why this sexy, smoldering, intelligent professor would go after, I'm sorry, a kid.

I was fortunate to be given a DVD screener of this from a friend. At first i thought i was not going to like it one bit as i am more into action movies, but watched it from start to finish and found it to be quite good acting and also quite a good story. I imagined there was going to be something sinister due to the fact that it is a story about a sexual, or lesbian relationship between -teacher and student and was expecting to see a teacher stalking a young student but that does not happen and Jackie (the student) accepts the first kiss in an isolated area of the school grounds quite willingly.From then on the movie evolves mainly focused on the romance that develops between the two of them. Catherine,(the professor) reminded me somewhat of Sharron Stone when she acted in the movie-Basic instinct.I found this to be light hearted and romantic and the only drama was when Jackie decides to return Home and the relationship is threatened.There is no erotica or nude scenes as some would expect with our modern day films. probably not one you would race to the box office over but i found it quite a relaxing watch.

Though well intentioned and unobjectionable, Bloomington is undone by a fatal lack of believable conflict. For the most part, this film is as emotionally placid as an inland sea with flashes of hurt feelings and argument jammed in out of nowhere. I didn't sit through the movie just waiting for it to be over. My thoughts were more like "Okay, where is this thing going?" Followed after a long while by "Wait…that's where it was going?" There are also several stray threads scattered through the story, making it appear as though these filmmakers were never able to take all the ideas in their heads and fully transfer them to the screen. Such an amateurish quality to the storytelling prevents it from fully engaging the viewer, but the very appealing presence of Allison McAtee and an overall feeling of earnest goodwill also keeps it from ever being annoying.

Jackie (Sarah Stouffer) is a former child star who's gone away to college. She almost immediately hooks up with the scariest professor on campus, Catherine Stark (Allison McAtee). Though she makes an imperious first impression, Stark turns out to be a solicitous lover and an almost motherly companion to Jackie and they blow through flirting to full blown relationship as quickly as The Flash dons the costume he keeps compressed in his ring. Then Jackie gets an offer to be the lead in a movie version of her old series, which results in Stark turning into a rather large bitch. Jackie doesn't return the favor, but does get all bitchy with her seemingly inoffensive mother. Then Jackie and Stark make up but realize they can't be together. Yeah, that's how it ends.

I don't know if writer/director Fernanda Cordoso was unconsciously working out any mother issues with this script, but the way Jackie's relationships with Stark and with her mother flip from sweetness and light to nasty and dark neither fit nor are justified by what's going on in the film. She could merely have realized that her greeting card of a screenplay needed some bite. If that's the case, it comes off like it was all tossed in during a last minute rewrite.

Bloomington also has an awful lot of makeout scenes without managing to have one legitimate sex scene. There are a couple of times where it's indicated that someone is doing something below the waist which the viewer can't see, but that's about it. It's odd because the lack of conflict in the story would fit if this were a classy attempt at erotica. The lack of any bare flesh or sensual writhing therefore only draws attention to the paucity of plot.

Though Sarah Stouffer is technically playing the main character, Alison McAtee owns this motion picture. Her performance is intelligent, tender and very sexy. Unfortunately, that does make it all the more noticeable when Stark gets pounded down with the Almighty Plot Hammer in the last half of the movie. I can't imagine anyone comes away from Bloomington caring more about Jackie than they do about Stark. And the young woman/older woman lesbian dynamic here is distinctly different from what you'd get with a young woman/older man relationship, giving you something to focus on when the narrative flags.

This is a generic coming of age romance. There's been umpteen heterosexual versions of this, so I guess there should be room for a homosexual rendition. Like the straight stuff, though, after you've seen one of these you never really need to watch another.