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.

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.

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

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.