Partway through watching My Tutor on DVD, I remembered I'd seen it in the theater when it first came out. Back then I had the same reaction I do today: this movie could have been a whole lot better than it is.Bobby Chrystal (Matt Lattanzi) has failed his high school senior year French finals. This means he won't be able to get into Yale, a situation intolerable to his overbearing Yaley dad (Kevin McCarthy, best known for playing the main character in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Dad hires beautiful blond Terry Green (Caren Kaye) to be Bobby's summer live-in French tutor. If Bobby can pass a makeup French test at school, all past educational shortcomings will be forgiven and the halls of Yale pre-law beckon. However, Bobby learns a whole lot more from Terry than French as she becomes his first lover.That bare description of plot sounds like it could make a sweet romantic comedy. And it could - it just doesn't. To start with there's the sub-plot of Bobby's friend Billy (Clark Brandon) and his repeated, unsuccessful efforts to get his younger brother (Crispin Glover) and Bobby laid, including a trip to the most dysfunctional brothel on God's green earth, hooking them up with a trashy waitress with a biker boyfriend, etc. These episodes simply aren't funny. Bobby, the main character we should like, is a whiny punk. The acting by all concerned is frankly not that great. There's not much in the way of chemistry between Lattanzi and Kaye, especially early-on. Rather than real people who find each other attractive, they come across like beautiful actors reading their lines - badly. (They do get better as the movie progresses.) The way the two characters hook up - not to give away too much of the scintillating plot - is unbelievable. We don't see the relationship develop through time, from attraction to liking to, eventually, sex. Toward the end of the movie, after Bobby's treated Terry quite decently during the relationship, it's back to acting like a whiny punk when it becomes obvious they're not going to last. You just want to slap this guy upside the head.There are a few good things in My Tutor. In-between the unrealistic start of the relationship and Bobby acting like a baby toward the end, there's some genuinely sweet stuff as Bobby and Terry pillow talk in bed. It's nice. And Billy's comeback to a girl at a party who refuses to dance with him is one of the funniest things I've ever heard in any film. I really want to like this movie for the few things it does right; unfortunately they're not enough to counterbalance the many things it does wrong.In my mind I contrast My Tutor to Coach, the 1978 Cathy Lee Crosby/Michael Biehn movie also dealing with a 30-ish woman in a sexual relationship with a high school student. Coach doesn't have quite the production values of My Tutor, it's not as slick and glossy, and its sub-plot of the upcoming "big game" basketball championship is frankly ridiculous, but at heart it's a much more successful film. Because (a) the acting is better - come on, we're talking Cathy Lee Crosby and Michael Biehn here, (b) the relationship seems much more real, not to mention healthy. The characters have great on-screen chemistry, it's believable these two people like each other, as well as find each other attractive. They spend time getting to know each other over numerous dates, talking for hours on end, before nature finally takes its course. You know, all the things My Tutor doesn't do.The "extras" on this DVD are really lame. Of special note, the "Animated Bios" consist of still pictures of three of the cast (Kaye, Lattanzi, McCarthy) and sketchy bio text "animated" in that it scrolls up the screen. The one neat thing here is the "Naughty Bits Guide," a separate chapter menu for all the movie's "naughty bits," i.e. those featuring nudity/sex. This is such an inventive and fun idea I'm almost tempted to give My Tutor one more star just for that.