The good: Very attractive and appealing actors (the two men - the two women are dispensable); extraordinarily positive story, in which the two men (especially Phil, but he practically drags Matthew along with him) don't even question their freedom to be themselves, even though everybody around them is hostile. They don't like the way their friends and families are acting, so they just leave. None of the tiresome old angst of trying to get their families to accept them, thank God.
I've seen practically every gay movie that's ever been made, and I can't think of any other that gives its lead characters such joyous and yet deeply grounded freedom. It's a rare and astonishing gift, even more remarkable in the first TV movie ever made in English about gay teens. It's far better than the much more popular (and later) Beautiful Thing, because it's not a fairy tale. Phil is a marvelous and amazing and yet profoundly believable character.
The bad: The movie's pace is atrocious, with long dead periods and jarring transitions, so that it seems much longer (not in a good way) than its 58 minutes. The director evidently just didn't have any idea what he was doing. So although the movie isn't great, the story is, because Phil is, and Lee Whitlock makes him very real. It's well worth buying the DVD just to see him.
I've seen practically every gay movie that's ever been made, and I can't think of any other that gives its lead characters such joyous and yet deeply grounded freedom. It's a rare and astonishing gift, even more remarkable in the first TV movie ever made in English about gay teens. It's far better than the much more popular (and later) Beautiful Thing, because it's not a fairy tale. Phil is a marvelous and amazing and yet profoundly believable character.
The bad: The movie's pace is atrocious, with long dead periods and jarring transitions, so that it seems much longer (not in a good way) than its 58 minutes. The director evidently just didn't have any idea what he was doing. So although the movie isn't great, the story is, because Phil is, and Lee Whitlock makes him very real. It's well worth buying the DVD just to see him.