The seniors of Westwood High in Palm Springs, California are headed into the unknown. It's last day of summer school 1965. Pop's, the local hangout burger joint, is getting demolished for a new mall. Stick (Ricky Schroder) is a surfer heading for Vietnam. Pirate (Dermot Mulroney) wants to find America driving Route 66. Finnegan (Noah Wyle) is Harvard-bound political rebel and forced to take summer school as suspension from the dictatorial principal. Mary Beth (Lucy Deakins) has a crush on him and narrates the movie as an adult. She wants to go to Berkley but her parents insists on the less radical UCLA. Calvin works at Pop's and is the only negro in school. He would often visit his grandmother in Watts and then it explodes in riot. Finnegan is going out with rich girl Tracy. Pirate's girlfriend and Mary Beth's best friend Sunshine (Kelli Williams) discovers that she's pregnant. Babette is desperate to make it as a performer.This is an overflow of '65 standard stories. The Watts Riot is literary a small chapter in this epic wannabe. It's trying to do too much. It's full of the expected characters. Stick's breakdown is the most surprising scene. The actors are solid but the movie doesn't have a cinematic feel. Floyd Mutrux has no cinematic sensibility and it has the look of a big TV movie.

I would consider this movie to be one of the best I have ever seen. The content was very well put together , a well scripted movie. It properly depicts all of the emotions, a few that I could relate to as I promise you will also.

When I spotted that Noah Wyle and Ricky Schroder were in the same movie, I was like, score! I admit, I was eager to see the movie. And I have to say, the first fifteen minutes or so were nostalgic in a way. Then it went all down hill. I didn't expect it to be a dump of politically correct civil rights mumbo jumbo. They took every possible controversial topic and threw it into one stupid story. I was appalled that Noah was involved in anything of the sort, especially his role. Nobody with a fully functional brain would actually accept all that crap about the Vietnam War. If anyone really wants to know how Communism was like, sit down and read a book on it. And not one that praises it or is against it, just the cold hard facts.I only watched a few scenes here and there only because I wanted to see Ricky's body, but that was all that interested me. Everything else about this movie irritated me.

I try not to comment on films that have so little merit, but this one caught my attention. There were many enthusiastic comments, but the overall rating was low, though not low enough.This is a facile, one-dimensional music video about the 1960's. It would be hard to gather from this lighter than air treatment that those issues made the 60's the most important decade of the 20th century. Oh, there's Watts, Berkeley and Viet Nam stirred together in a sickly sweet soufflé', but it was a waste to film this movie in color, since everything comes off so black and white. The teachers, representing the Establishment, are all stupid and wicked. The students are all on their way to Harvard or Princeton, to underscore how much smarter they are than everyone else. And everyone proceeds in a straight line toward their destiny, without any of the internal conflict that makes for good fiction.Dermot Mulroney is pitifully wasted as Pirate, the Free Spirit. Noah Wyle shows the promise of one day rising to mediocrity, with a lot of hard work. And poor little Rickey, or Rick, or Rikki or whatever it is now Shroder. Maybe one day he'll be Richard, fulfilling his potential of becoming as bad an actor in adulthood as he was in childhood. The only thing that made this movie bearable was the great soundtrack provided by rock DJ The Beard, serving as a sort of Greek Chorus to keep this limp litany pumped up as much as possible.If you want a good movie about this era, dust off American Graffiti. If you want a lighter look, you'd probably like Hairspray or Shag. Unless you were in this stinker and wanted to show off to your friends, and even then I'd think twice, don't waste your time on this one.