Myko Olivier and Barrett Crake star as an alternate Hall & Oates in ETERNITY
ETERNITY: THE MOVIE (Ian Thorpe, 2014)
AMC Empire 25
234 West 42nd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Opens Friday, October 17
212-398-2597
www.theeternitymovie.com
www.amctheatres.com
Director Ian Thorpe’s Eternity: The Movie tries to be a good-natured riff on those lame 1980s films like Can’t Stop the Music, Fast Forward, Flashdance, and Xanadu, in which main characters dream of stardom and get their chance to make it, all set to terrible period music. Unfortunately, Eternity is more like those lame 1980s films themselves instead of a send-up of the genre. Barrett Crake stars as Todd Lucas, an eager blonde singer-songwriter who has just moved to Los Angeles from Omaha. He gets a job in “fashion” working at retailer BJ Maxx (yes, that is Eric Roberts playing his creepy boss), where he meets B. J. Fairchild (Myko Olivier) — yes, the BJ jokes are endless — a mustached brunette who specializes in playing jazzy TV cop-show themes on his sax. Todd, who’s looking for true love, and B.J., who thinks of himself as a ladies’ man, both develop a thing for bartender Gina Marie (Nikki Leonti), but when it comes right down to it, they really belong together, as writer Joey Abi-Loutfi and Thorpe continually allude to the clear and obvious gay attraction between them. The story of their rise and fall as lily-white R&B popsters Eternity, who had such synth-heavy hits as “Make Love, Not Sex” and “Sambuca & Cider,” is jaw-droppingly inane; it’s often hard to tell what is intentionally bad from what is just plain bad. Oh, and did we say that the whole thing is a one-note joke about Hall & Oates? Eternity feels like it goes on for an eternity, but don’t expect it to have much of a long life in theaters, DVD, or Netflix.