Age of Summer

Judging by the high ratings (Two 10's? Really?) it looks like the filmmakers have been busy casting their votes here on IMDb. The cinematography is indeed quite good but everything else is fair at best, and quite often grossly deficient.

Starting with the tired old plotline of a kid from the Upper Midwest who's suddenly plopped into the So Cal cool zone (Side Out, Beverly Hills 90210, Tribes of Palos Verdes, et cetera, et cetera...), it begins by rehashing familiar stereotypes and then essentially goes nowhere. The paper-thinness of the characters is perfectly exemplified by the male lead, who nicknames himself "Minnesota" apparently to underscore his newbie-ness to one and all (we never do learn his real name). From there, we're treated to endlessly cringeworthy moments as our hapless, prepubescent-looking and implausibly naive hero tries desperately to be accepted by the "cool kids" while mooning over his unattainable heartthrob Brooke, who is not only "out of his league" as he puts it, but clearly out of his maturity level and seemingly out of his entire species.

The film is set in 1986, for no apparent reason - there isn't much to establish a mid-80s atmosphere, and there are a number of obvious, careless anachronisms (board shorts were not yet in vogue back then, tatted up guys were confined to trailer parks, and nobody had ever heard of a "fist bump"). All in all this has the feel of a vanity project by a writer/director who was most likely a hapless, androgynous Minnesota tweener among surf gods in 1986 Hermosa Beach himself.

But the real victim of this waste of good scenery - aside from the audience - is the LA County Junior Lifeguards, a truly worthwhile summer program that has taught vital beach and ocean skills to generations of kids. Here, it's depicted as a cliquish and exclusory group run by an abusive bully. If this movie were all I had to go on, I wouldn't let my kids anywhere near it.

The soundtrack and cinematography were really good. The story was cliched and and the narrative was poor.

A coming of ager. There are no big moments, but a series of small ones. It's the type of movie in which any of the cast or crew might move onto bigger and better things and you'll look back and say, "yeah, I saw that coming."

I usually like these coming of age summer films, but this was a strange one. The official movie description keeps saying 1986, yet 1983 is written on the chalk board and the newspaper headline in the movie. Who makes this mistake?? Characters are shallow. Are they bulliies? are they friends? Did he cruelly abandon his nerdy friend and why? Shooting the Hawaiian guys and the Rock God, omg!! My family couldn't watch it so I had to finish it alone.

Literally dozens of coming of age movies set on Southern California beaches have been made since the surf culture took off in the 1960's. This one features a 13 year old boy nicknamed Minnesota (Percy Hynes White of The Gifted) who recently moved to LA and is training to be a junior life guard. He struggles to adapt to the rigors of the job and to be accepted amongst the slightly older, cooler locals also training. His fancy bike is stolen and he embarks on a quest to get it back they leads to some interesting if slightly weird plot twists.

There was an annoying niggle with the part Diamaid Murtagh played as the Australian surf lifesaving coach. Having lived 2 years in, and travelled frequently to, Australia, I can tell you that no Australian uses their slang words jammed awkwardly back to back into the same sentence as the script writers manage with this character. It's as if they looked up a book of Aussie slang and inserted a slang word in at every opportunity. It made for a lampoonish dialogue to anyone familiar with Australians.

This is most definitely a B grade movie with only average acting and not a strong plot line. Percy Hynes White does an OK job but comes across as a scrawny fish-out-of-water in the tough physical world of surf lifesaving as does his nerdy friend Woods (Jake Ryan). There is the obligatory awkward first relationship scenes that actually were quite well done. Compared to others in this genre, it's a very average movie.