Age of Summer

This will remind everyone of their favorite summer. The movie is beautifully shot in a California beach town and in the ocean in a way that makes you feel you just spent your summer there. The story is universal. Funny and real and surprisingly emotional. The kid actors are excellent. Percy Hynes White is perfect as the kid trying to fit in. Jake Ryan is funny as a nerd. Charlotte Sabina gets her confident but complicated surfer girl character just right. I highly recommend.

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

This movie brought back memories of another movie I watched many moons ago. That movie was called "Lifeguard" and starred a young Sam Elliott. This movie was as enjoyable and as picturesque as that movie and gave me a nice feeling, reminiscing how I once as a teen found my way to fit in. Hard to find the words to describe that feeling we all felt as we were coming of age and turning that corner in life. This movie delivers the goods, great job pulling it off by actor Percy Hynes White!

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.

With such high ratings I was intrigued since I fall into that mid 80's group of teenagers. Unfortunately this was a childish effort which was neither funny nor emotional. The scenes didn't fit together as a symbiotic whole. I don't rate many movies but when I see movie makers blatantly hype up the reviews for the sake of ratings, I try to help out with some real reviews. This can be easily avoided.