Mainstream gay film?

[Chris James]

Based on a best selling novel by Brent Harbinger (I believe that's how you spell it)

Gay High School students form a Geography Club. A bit like Glee some claim, but who cares, the guys in the cast are HOT and definitely over 18 so enjoy your fantasies. Due out in mid-November.

http://youtu.be/fhcaYaNdsWY

[colinian]

I "bought" a copy of the Kindle edition of Geography Club when it was a free book. that's right, $0.00. Tonight the U.S. price is $7.49 for the Kindle edition. Shows what making a movie can do to the book price. Anyway, I watched the trailer. In the Geography Club book the protagonist and most of his friends are high school sophomores. 15, maybe even 14 or 16, years old. Not well-over-18 year old actors pretending they're high school sophomores. They don't look anything like my image of what they looked like when I read the story. It's an age shift that ruins the film for me, and maybe others who've read the book.

However, the good thing for the author is that a self-published book, offered in the Amazon Kindle Store (for a while) for $0.00, can be picked to have it made into a movie. Oh, it's not self-published anymore, either. It's been picked up by HarperCollins e-books.

Colin

[FreeThinker]

I've not seen the movie or read the book, but I am curious if this might have been "inspired" by The History Boys (which I absolutely adored)?

[colinian]

If you mean the story by Alan Bennett, it's possible but I don't think so. The teacher in The History Boys: A Play has a major role; there's no equivalent character in Geography Club. Also the plots of the two stories are very different. It's interesting that there's a study guide available for Geography Club; that implies that it's being used in some high school contemporary literature and/or sociology classes.

Colin

[The Pecman]

In the Geography Club book the protagonist and most of his friends are high school sophomores. 15, maybe even 14 or 16, years old. Not well-over-18 year old actors pretending they're high school sophomores. They don't look anything like my image of what they looked like when I read the story. It's an age shift that ruins the film for me, and maybe others who've read the book.

Yeah, that's a standard movie problem that if you have an actor younger than 18, they can only work about 6-7 hours a day -- I think a 3-hour stint with a 1 hour break, then another hour or two for on-set schooling, then another 3-hours on the set. They're absolutely strict about this, too -- huge fines if the production company violates this.

The problem is, you wind up with all these fake high school TV shows with "kids" who are clearly 26-27 years old, and it just don't work. (I'm watching a new one on the CW, The Tomorrow People, which is just wretchedly predictable and silly, plus everybody in it is pushing 30.) Glee is another show where they should have retired most of the cast and replaced everybody with actual 18-year-olds. The kid who died, Cory Monteith, was actually 31 at the time of his death; he was playing 12 years younger than his actual age, and the main teacher in the show is playing about 6 years older, even though he was only 3 years older than Cory in real life! Nutty show.

A few years ago, I worked on the high-school horror movie All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which finally came out on home video a week or two ago. What's funny with that one is that they did a pool-side scene where all the extras were actual local area high school kids. All of them look like children compared to the main cast, which cracked me up -- the age difference is very obvious. Strange movie, but it's got a cult following.

[Bruin Fisher]

I've read The Geography Club, but I haven't seen the movie. I thought the book was good, although I'm not its target audience. I hope teenagers questioning their sexuality or struggling with it will think it's good, too.