OK, for all you people who came from "smalltown, America" who are complaining about this, you should really think about it. This was a really great movie, that shows that you have it all if you just take a look at what you think you are missing. I grew up in Southern Ca, and i moved to a small town when i was 21, but even growing up in a town just shy of a million people, i got an appreciation for it when i left that i would have never had, had i stayed there. This was a great movie, one i would recommend to anyone looking for a good way to spend an evening. not only does it show that a movie can be good without being raunchy and filled with sex, its worth the time that you spend watching it. I would watch it again.

In 1998, Tim McCanlies had a crazy idea. He made a movie about a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, in which no one gets killed, nothing gets blown up, no one has sex, and there aren't any aliens from outer space. Thank goodness he saw his crazy idea through; the result is a fabulous movie that I saw in the theater in 1998, and I am not sure I have seen a better movie since then. The setting of the movie is the fictitious town of Dancer, located in Southwest Texas, where the counties are bigger than the states in the northeast and the people are outnumbered by rattlesnakes. The movie begins on Friday, when four boys are graduating from high school. We learn that, while they were in junior high school, they made a "solemn vow" that as soon as they graduated, they were going to get on the next bus to California to make their mark on the world. Easy to say when you're in junior high, and graduation is years away. But now it's here, and the bus is pulling out on Monday morning. The question is whether any of the boys will follow through. That's pretty much the plot. What's so special? Simple: the relationships between the boys, between each of them and their family members, and between the folks in the town. This movie, like all great movies, is about the characters' reactions to the circumstances they are in. The characters are real, fleshed out not in bold strokes but in nuances, and their actions, not always predictable, are always believable. Most of us have faced the decision whether to leave the town that we grew up in. It is fascinating to watch these teenagers begin to grow into men -- at an accelerated pace, because of their childhood pledge. Someday, when you are at the video store and you don't know what to get, you will see this on the shelf. Get it. You will be very, very happy.

Though a bit slow at times, it is quite refreshing to watch a movie that doesn't have any box-office ambitions and yet exceed the expectations one would associate with a blockbuster. 4 teenage boys are faced with life-changing choices when they graduate from high school, whether to follow their parents' wishes and stay in small town Texas (as the name implies), or to strike it big in one of the big cities. There are some commendable performances in here, notable that of Breckin Meyer as Keller Coleman, as he tries to come to terms with leaving his only kin, his grandfather, behind alone while he leaves the town with Lusk (Facinelli). Facinelli also puts in a performance better than I expected from his previous films as the son who does not want in on the family business but wishes to strike it out on his own. I wished that there could be plot involvement for Eddie Mills and Ethan Embry though, the other 2 main actors - they did not have much to act on and I for one would have liked them to have a larger role in the story. But I guess there is only so much you can show in 2 hours. Irregardless of any 'faults' this movie might have, it is still a refreshing look at small town life and the choices some of the teens have to take when they come of age.