Love blooms in this coming-of-age/coming-out film about a British prep student who follows his heart into uncharted territories.
(19 votes)
2.
Boy meets boy. Boy likes boy. Boy, oh, boy. Schools out. So is Steven Carter.
There's no time quite as awkward as adolescence. Between the sky-high expectations of parents, the constant scrutiny of peers, and one's own raging hormones, something's got to give. And if, like Steven Carter, you also happen to be gay, navigating your way throuh adolescence can be like hiking through a minefiled!
Ben Silverstone (Adrian Lyne's Lolita) stars as Steven Carter in this charming and compelling comedy that drew raves at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. A cinematic valentine about coming of age and coming to terms with who you are, Get Real "shouldn't be missed. It mingles laughter and tears, and like its hero, is determined to make love soar above everything," (Richard Rayner, Harper's Bazaar).
(19 votes)
3.
Get Real begins with a couple of hedgehogs having sex, and deals with a topic just as prickly: gay love in adolescence. Steve (Ben Silverstone) is a student at a British school where everyone wears classy uniforms, knows he's gay, and is pretty comfortable being so. John (Brad Gorton), a top athlete and all-around admired guy, is just getting an inkling and isn't sure how he feels about it. This, cleverly, is how the movie manages to explore coming-out issues and be over them at the same time. In fact, the whole movie is pretty clever--witty dialogue, deft direction, nimble pacing, and clean editing--in exploring the seriousness of adolescent life without taking it too seriously. The key is in Silverstone's performance; he's a completely convincing mixture of hesitation and recklessness, all the conflicts of high school in one sweet-faced package. As the movie follows Steve and John's relationship--their evasions at school, getting picked up by the police in a park, goofing around in a heated swimming pool, grappling with coming out to the world at large--it lays out a bit of contrast with Steve's best friend Linda (Charlotte Brittain), who's as unapologetically fat as Steve is gay, and who's having an affair with her driving instructor. Excellent performances all around, funny, sexy, charming--if only straight teen comedies were half this good. Get Real even demonstrates the proper etiquette when soliciting sex in public restrooms; what more can you ask for? --Bret Fetzer
(18 votes)
4.
Ben Silverstone's appealing lead performance is the main reason to see this well-intentioned but otherwise bland tale of forbidden teenage love. Steven Carter is 16, lives in leafy, stuffy Basingstoke and is gay. Although comfortable with his sexuality, he knows neither his parents nor schoolmates are ready for the news. Until, that is, he forms an unlikely relationship with John Dixon (played by wooden Brad Gorton, who looks about 25), star athlete and all-round school stud. Wary of damaging his hunky image, John insists the romance remains secret--but Steven finds this easier said than done.
There is no faulting Get Real's tolerance, honesty, trusting yourself and trusting others message. And Silverstone, despite his alarming resemblance to geeky Carry On star Richard O'Callaghan, does his best to make it watchable, His scenes with Charlotte Brittain, as his next-door-neighbour and confidante Linda, are especially fresh and convincing. The film is enjoyable and hard to dislike--but this very inoffensiveness ends up counting against it.
While the gay themes are handled with an admirable lack of fuss, the package they come in is too tasteful, too carefully put together. Director Simon Shore can't be blamed for the script's predictably contrived melodrama--Patrick Wilde adapted his own play--but he might at least have brought it to the screen with a bit of pep. Instead we get TV-flat visuals, scored by creakily old-fashioned incidental music to ram home every point. As a story, it's enjoyable, even admirable, especially given the political controversies over the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools. But as a movie, it's a non-event. Released at around the same time, Swedish hit Show Me Love covered virtually identical ground, but with an intoxicating energy that this picture never comes close to matching. Like John Dixon, it has got the right idea--it just needs to loosen up a bit. --Neil Young
(17 votes)
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