The only consistently outstanding thing about Eternal Summer is the photography. It's gorgeous. There are times when the way the camera moves through a scene is so fascinating, so evocative and sensual, that I neither know nor care what the actors are doing - which is a good thing, because they're rarely doing anything worth watching.
The girl and the boy who plays Shane are pretty good sometimes, and the boy who plays Jonathan is great in the very first scene, when he looks into the camera and smiles before leading us out the door and into the past - his only smile in the whole movie.
The mostly piano score stays comfortably in the background except in crucial scenes, when it swells intrusively and annoyingly in its attempt to force us to be caught up in the drama we see, and succeeds only in detracting from it.
The big sex scene is sweet enough, but it's about as believable as if Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford did one. Some straight actors can pull it off - better than many gay actors - but not these two.
I like the slightly ambiguous ending, but the fact that the whole movie is a flashback means the first scene helps a lot in tying the end together. The story is unusual enough that it could have been interesting, and it actually is, sometimes, but not often enough to carry the movie.
There's nothing new about a gay boy in love with his straight best friend, or about a girl who's in love with the gay but settles for the straight. What IS new is the marvelous extent to which this straight guy is willing to become whatever his friend needs him to be - without at all compromising his strong sense of himself - and with no resentment at all, no holding his nose while he does something that disgusts him, no hint of martyrdom - only love.
That alone makes this movie - despite its many weaknesses and faults - very special. If there actually were even one such straight man on the face of the earth, this world would be a better place.
(The DVD cover is misleading. There is no such scene in the movie, with the three of them lying entwined together in the sand, or anywhere else - not even in the deleted scenes.)
The girl and the boy who plays Shane are pretty good sometimes, and the boy who plays Jonathan is great in the very first scene, when he looks into the camera and smiles before leading us out the door and into the past - his only smile in the whole movie.
The mostly piano score stays comfortably in the background except in crucial scenes, when it swells intrusively and annoyingly in its attempt to force us to be caught up in the drama we see, and succeeds only in detracting from it.
The big sex scene is sweet enough, but it's about as believable as if Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford did one. Some straight actors can pull it off - better than many gay actors - but not these two.
I like the slightly ambiguous ending, but the fact that the whole movie is a flashback means the first scene helps a lot in tying the end together. The story is unusual enough that it could have been interesting, and it actually is, sometimes, but not often enough to carry the movie.
There's nothing new about a gay boy in love with his straight best friend, or about a girl who's in love with the gay but settles for the straight. What IS new is the marvelous extent to which this straight guy is willing to become whatever his friend needs him to be - without at all compromising his strong sense of himself - and with no resentment at all, no holding his nose while he does something that disgusts him, no hint of martyrdom - only love.
That alone makes this movie - despite its many weaknesses and faults - very special. If there actually were even one such straight man on the face of the earth, this world would be a better place.
(The DVD cover is misleading. There is no such scene in the movie, with the three of them lying entwined together in the sand, or anywhere else - not even in the deleted scenes.)