Miles

Small town boy wants to run off to the big city of Chicago and cooks up a scheme to play on the girl's volleyball team in order to secure a sports scholarship to Loyola. There's about 150 subplots, none of which are all that resolved, but that's the big one.

It's not terrible; it's just pointless and bland. Every time you think it'll rise up and make some kind of statement... about life, about art, about sexuality, about anything at all... it just quietly ducks off and goes somewhere else. Molly Shannon (Mom) and Paul Reiser (School Superintendent) do what they can with what they're given, which really ain't much. You just have all these stories — the dead father's mistress, the Mom pretending to be a gay man and having an x-rated convo with a guy online (using AOL, since the film is set in 1999), the potentially lesbian volleyball coach, this, that, the other — and in the centre of it all is a manchild so terminally thin and boring that it wouldn't matter if he were gay or straight or nothing at all. His sexuality really doesn't mean anything in terms of the plot: it's a convenient character add-on no doubt to get this some visibility in LGBT film festivals. Toss in a couple of obligatory film montages — his team tryout, the team winning their games, Mom dancing around the kitchen — and the result is a treacley, tasteless movie that tries to have an inspiring message and comes across as a greeting card about personal courage.

Miles is a 17 yr old looking desparately to get out of his small town. But his dad dies very early in the film, and there goes his college money. His odd ticket out, which doesnt seem to make much sense, is to get Men's volleyball scholarship to a school in Chicago. But, there's onl a girls volleyball time at his school, so he signs up for that. Then much of what follows is drama in a small town that takes its gir's volleyball very seriously. A side drama is that being gay in a small town in 2000 , Mile's only chance for contact w/other gays is online chats. What i loved about this is that altho his small town didn't provide opportuniies for any gay friends, or bf's, being gay is just another trait of him not a defining one. There is no gay angst. I really enjoyed the closeness and support from Mile's mother and several of the townfolk. The small town politics was spot on, very frustrating at times, but no disney villains here. Lastly, I loved Tim Boardman as Miles. very young actor did a great job. Very steady performance. And he just lights up the screen with youthful optimisim as he looks for ways out of his small town, and starting life as he leaves the nest. One caveat, there are alot of low user ratings i would disregard. It's like they saw a different movie, or possibly have some agenda that has no bearing on the quality of the movie.

5/4/18. While I enjoy watching sports-related movies and true stories, this one was only average. It's about a high school boy who wanted to get a sports scholarship to attend college. He wants to play volleyball, but the high school only has a girls team. So, he plays on the girls team and everyone gets hot and bothered about it. There's a side story about the teen being gay, but that doesn't explain anything that is going on. Mothers of some of the girls playing on the time thinks the boy has an unfair advantage. Whatever.

Well produced and well acted. Storyline is just OK. It kind of fizzles at the end and I thought something interesting/surprising or meanginful might happen; it does not. In that regard, it left me a bit disappointed. I didn't hate this ...but expected more from this film.

This movie had potential, it was never gonna be a work of art, but it could have been so much better. It's such a shame we have one more case of a movie building up to something that just barely happens. Then we get a time jump that "resolves" everything with no context whatsoever. It's not about the happy ending it's about telling the entire story.