You won't be disappointed!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I myself love the Idea. I think anyone GLBT person who went through the public school system could appreciate the idea of waking up back in High School in a world were we were considered normal. However this very basic Idea is where my love for this movie ends. The first problem the acting was horrible! You could tell from the first few minutes where every character either overacts or underacts his part. The second problem with the movie was the script and the speed of which events took place. The movie was very short and it really showed. You barley see his supposedly horrible lonely life at 40 before the audience is whisked away back to the main characters teen years. Once their things move at super speed. Within 10 minutes of waking up 22 years younger not only does he completely believe that he traveled back in time to a reality where gay is normal( I could see at least a few minutes being spent on thinking this is a trick or a drunken dream)but he runs into his dream guy who is obviously in love with him. Give him at least a few minutes to explore his new environment. Of course within the next few minutes they become boyfriends. Now the next part of the plot wouldn't have been my favorite even in a good movie but I could have accepted it if it had been done well. Again within a few minutes of declaring himself in love with his hunk boyfriend he meets this new girl and immediately falls for her. First have the character spend more than 10 minutes with the guy he has been lusting after for 22 years.I would have liked to see at least half an hour spent on Brad and the main character as a couple. Lastly have a real sexual Identity struggle. In the movie shortly after declaring his love for Brad the main character meets the girl and falls immediately in love. Not even questioning the homosexual feelings he has always had. I'm not saying its impossible for a gay guy to fall in love with a girl, but their is usually a struggle period where the guy questions it. In this movie he falls immediately in love and never even considers Brad his crush for 22 years. Over all I wish they would remake this movie with Hollywood actors, a top notch script writer and a run time of two and a half hours. Overall the general idea is very good and with the right actors, script and time frame in which to display all the segments of the movie realistically and in depth it could be a great film portraying gay rights, gender neutral love and sexual identity struggle. If Hollywood remade it I might consider going to see it again.

Unhappy middle-aged gay man gets transported back to his high school days, and everyone's gay! Including the boy of his dreams. A nifty concept, but it gets derailed halfway through when our hero suddenly falls for a girl, which in itself isn't a problem--but he's been gay the whole time, and suddenly has feelings for a girl, and doesn't even pause to question this sudden 180- degree turn in his sexuality, he just pursues her. The film then wanders off into 80s teen-film land, with moral lessons for all about acceptance.If the film had remained an exploration of this one fellow's problems with his own life, the premise would have worked really well. Too bad it didn't do that.Other strangeness: the auto repair guy with the uncanny ability to find our hero at crucial moments in unlikely places, the two brothers mentioned at the start who never appear except for one at the very end, as he's about to return to his real life, the del sol that is miraculously repaired twice using 1970s junkyard parts. Amazing!

Premise? Brad, a 40 year old college professor, gets propelled back in time to his high school years (paging Peggy Sue). The time machine of choice is an automobile (paging Doc Brown). The twist here is that his past is now a world where same sex relations are the norm and being a 'breeder' is considered 'queer'. Unfortunately, ALMOST NORMAL suffers a bit from adhering to it's 'concept' - showing us a world every gay person has dreamt of, where being gay is the acceptable norm. Some of the character and plot energy is diverted to this noble experiment and thankfully, it eventually pays off. Although an indy in spirit, ALMOST NORMAL looks and sounds pretty slick and manages to be quite winning, despite some apparent flaws. The scenes where Brad and his boyfriend go on an 'ice cream' date and where the hunky boyf eventually proposes marriage are genuinely moving and refreshingly real. The convention of having Brad remain 'different' even in his new world is the film's toughest trick and I'm glad to say it works. The performances are capable and except for a few of the smaller roles, the acting is uniformly pretty good. The score and photography are above the norm for this type of endeavor, generally on a par with a Hollywood effort. The direction is a bit uneven, with a few scenes a bit too farcical and others veering toward the too sentimental. But for the most part ALMOST NORMAL is almost as clever and unique a film as Doc Brown could possibly confabulate.

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.