On the plus side, Joey King and Andrea Savage are both lovely.
But on the negative side, the story is, to be honest, horrific, and worse is that the director doesn't even seem to get that.
The secret to a teenage sex comedy (which is what this appears to be going for) is to understand that everyone at that age is dumb but not malicious, and to set up an unreal environment where dumb behavior has no real consequences. Break those rules and you have a weird mishmash of sex-comedy+tragedy, and no-one wants that.
The problem we have here is that the director doesn't follow these rules, but even worse, doesn't even understand that she is breaking them. She seems to treat the whole "Luke is a trainee priest" issue as a temporary affectation, like Summer 03 he's trying out being a goth, and Summer 04 he'll try out being a jock. I'm not a Catholic or religious, but I'm sensitive enough to get that someone trying for the priesthood is making a big commitment in his life, and for someone to just dismiss that, seduce him, treat him as a sex toy, then have the nerve to get mad when he concludes that he made a mistake, that God means more to him, then to go on to gleefully ruin his life? Seriously, WTF? How can we like a character like that? And how can we treat is as a comedy, that this guy, even apart from the issues he will have with the Seminary, will probably be haunted by guilt for the rest of his life?
Ultimately it's a really strange movie. It could so easily have been a reasonably well-structured standard teenage sex com. Just write the guy love interest, the Luke character as, whatever: a foreign exchange student, a rich kid from another school, a nerd (but one who loves Science Fiction and thinks Harry Potter sucks), so many options with comedic potential without "destroying the rest of his life with guilt and rumors" consequences for the guy...
So why didn't she choose these. Did Ms Gleason seriously not see the implications in her story (and likewise not one single other person involved in this project at an early stage)? Or, even scarier, was she well aware of the implications, and happy to throw them in as some sort of weird FU to men in general, or maybe the Catholic Church in particular?
The secret to a teenage sex comedy (which is what this appears to be going for) is to understand that everyone at that age is dumb but not malicious, and to set up an unreal environment where dumb behavior has no real consequences. Break those rules and you have a weird mishmash of sex-comedy+tragedy, and no-one wants that.
The problem we have here is that the director doesn't follow these rules, but even worse, doesn't even understand that she is breaking them. She seems to treat the whole "Luke is a trainee priest" issue as a temporary affectation, like Summer 03 he's trying out being a goth, and Summer 04 he'll try out being a jock. I'm not a Catholic or religious, but I'm sensitive enough to get that someone trying for the priesthood is making a big commitment in his life, and for someone to just dismiss that, seduce him, treat him as a sex toy, then have the nerve to get mad when he concludes that he made a mistake, that God means more to him, then to go on to gleefully ruin his life? Seriously, WTF? How can we like a character like that? And how can we treat is as a comedy, that this guy, even apart from the issues he will have with the Seminary, will probably be haunted by guilt for the rest of his life?
Ultimately it's a really strange movie. It could so easily have been a reasonably well-structured standard teenage sex com. Just write the guy love interest, the Luke character as, whatever: a foreign exchange student, a rich kid from another school, a nerd (but one who loves Science Fiction and thinks Harry Potter sucks), so many options with comedic potential without "destroying the rest of his life with guilt and rumors" consequences for the guy...
So why didn't she choose these. Did Ms Gleason seriously not see the implications in her story (and likewise not one single other person involved in this project at an early stage)? Or, even scarier, was she well aware of the implications, and happy to throw them in as some sort of weird FU to men in general, or maybe the Catholic Church in particular?