The indie film, written, directed and produced by a couple of college film professors, is kind of a cross between "Back To The Future" and "It's A Wonderful Life" with a queer twist that can be appreciated by gay as well as non-gay audiences. The cast includes mostly first-time actors and lots of extras from the film school and a local high school, but the film comes off surprisingly polished despite the low budget.
A 40 year old college professor laments entering middle age as a single gay man, and is further depressed by a blind-date-from-hell and an incident where he thinks one of his young students is coming on to him, only to find out he wants to fix him up with his gay father. Unloading his misery on his "fag hag" best friend, he wishes he could start over and just be "normal", and seems to get his wish when a car crash transports him back to his high school days, but into a parallel universe where being gay is the norm, and straights are considered perverts who must seek out each other in incognito "straight bars" downtown. He starts dating the high school jock of his dreams, but a complication develops when he finds he is also attracted sexually to his former fag hag, now a feisty transfer student, making him again not as "normal" as he thought he'd be in that world.
The film has the expected role-reversal puns, including quasi-religious justifications for considering heterosexuals sinners ("If God had intended for men and women to be together, He would have made women to like football!"), but isn't really a comedy or a drama, but an intellectual satire on just how "normal" anyone's sexual orientation is to someone else. In a sense, it becomes a moral lesson about acceptance of anyone who is different than the seeming "norm", whether that be based on sexual orientation, race, religion, attitudes or physical limitations. Despite the gay theme, it would likely earn a PG-13 rating, and is appropriate for mature viewers of that age or higher, and would be a perfect segue for a classroom discussion of diversity.
The one drawback of the film is the complexity which somewhat enables it to chart new grounds for gay cinema, and it must be judged in its entirety rather than take any scene out of context, as less patient viewers would be inclined to do. There seem to be a lot of extraneous details at times, and these are eventually resolved by the film's end, though an average viewer may not catch it all. Personally, I thought it was an ambitious, unique gem of a film, and recommend it highly.
A 40 year old college professor laments entering middle age as a single gay man, and is further depressed by a blind-date-from-hell and an incident where he thinks one of his young students is coming on to him, only to find out he wants to fix him up with his gay father. Unloading his misery on his "fag hag" best friend, he wishes he could start over and just be "normal", and seems to get his wish when a car crash transports him back to his high school days, but into a parallel universe where being gay is the norm, and straights are considered perverts who must seek out each other in incognito "straight bars" downtown. He starts dating the high school jock of his dreams, but a complication develops when he finds he is also attracted sexually to his former fag hag, now a feisty transfer student, making him again not as "normal" as he thought he'd be in that world.
The film has the expected role-reversal puns, including quasi-religious justifications for considering heterosexuals sinners ("If God had intended for men and women to be together, He would have made women to like football!"), but isn't really a comedy or a drama, but an intellectual satire on just how "normal" anyone's sexual orientation is to someone else. In a sense, it becomes a moral lesson about acceptance of anyone who is different than the seeming "norm", whether that be based on sexual orientation, race, religion, attitudes or physical limitations. Despite the gay theme, it would likely earn a PG-13 rating, and is appropriate for mature viewers of that age or higher, and would be a perfect segue for a classroom discussion of diversity.
The one drawback of the film is the complexity which somewhat enables it to chart new grounds for gay cinema, and it must be judged in its entirety rather than take any scene out of context, as less patient viewers would be inclined to do. There seem to be a lot of extraneous details at times, and these are eventually resolved by the film's end, though an average viewer may not catch it all. Personally, I thought it was an ambitious, unique gem of a film, and recommend it highly.