If you are anything like me -- and why wouldn't you be? -- you're a sucker for Christmas.  The arbitrary yet somehow natural-seeming traditions; the carols which somehow only sound right when you've got just enough bourbon-fortified eggnog in you; the extra days off from work; the fact that people give you free stuff wrapped in shiny paper; the way everyone pretends to be nice to each other for a change:  what's not to like?  It's also one of those Western cultural touchstones so universal (suck it, Judaism!) that pretty much everybody gets into the act; despite the bogus claims from pouty conservatives about a "war on Christmas", the birth of Baby Jesus is still commemorated on almost every TV show on the air, and Yuletide is second only to summer as a Hollywood high holy day.

So, in the spirit of this year's Summerfest series -- where I lazily Netflixed a dozen or so movies with "summer" in the title and reviewed them so you'd know what to watch while the pool guy skimmed the drowned crow out of your Jacuzzi -- I present the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, where I get drunk and watch some of the finest Christmas movies that Hollywood has crammed down our throats, and ask:  will this movie fill you with holiday cheer or seasonal depression?

First up is 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, also known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in Disney Digital 3-D, although a more accurate name for it would be Not Actually Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas or even Hi Everybody We're Henry Selick and Caroline Thompson and We Directed and Wrote This Movie Respectively And What Do We Have To Do To Get a Little Credit For That?'s The Nightmare Before Christmas.  While Burton created the lead characters and wrote a poem that served as the movie's inspiration, he had very little to do with making the film itself, and the fact that he's generally given all the kudos for it is a shame, because if nothing else, it proves how other people are capable of taking his quirky, creepy aesthetic and running with it.

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Well, folks, it's the end of the line.  This weekend marks the Labor Day holiday, traditionally the last big weekend of the summer.  School's back in session, long vacations are a thing of the past, and sunshine and beach barbeques give way to gray skies and long commutes.  It's no different in the movie business:  giant blockbuster blow-'em-ups give way to small, quiet pictures whose goal is to make your girlfriend cry.  And just as the summer blockbuster season must end, so too must Summerfest 2008, the Screengrab's hot-weather feature where we analyze one movie a week with "summer" in the title, with the goal of giving you something to do for two hours while your silently dreading having to go back to the office.  But we're not going to just leave you hanging with some cheap piece of junk we happened to notice while scrolling through the IMDB listings; oh, no.  We're going to see Summerfest '08 out with a blast by bringing you a movie we've been excited about since we began this project, a true throwback to the summer flicks of yore where you could sit in a theater with a rapidly melting Slurpee and have a few laughs without feeling guilty about it.  Summer may be over -- and it may be a long four months until we bring you "The Screengrab's Twelve Days of Christmas Movies" -- but  we're going to wave goodbye to it with one of the funniest, most good-natured satires in recent years.  Whether or not you came of age in the 1980s, this is a movie that will make you feel what it was like, and crack your shit up while doing so.  

It's been great spending summer with you kids, but the time has come to pack up your duffel bags and head home to your parents.  But before you do, put on your tightest pair of gym shorts, and join us for 2001's Wet Hot American Summer!

THE ACTION:  Late August, Camp Firewood.  It's the last day of camp, just like it's the last day of the Screengrab, and kids and counselors alike are stricken with a hormone-crazed mix of excitement and regret:  camp is just about to end, but there's still so much to do!  Will the head counselor find love with the unassuming astronomer who lives across the way?  Will our slightly nerdish hero finally draw the attention of his dream girl away from her thoughtless, philandering boyfriend?  Will the lithe, athletic, tennis-playing chap ever get laid?  Will the camp's baseball team ever defeat that snooty bunch from the rich kid's camp the next lake over?  Will the cook overcome his Viet Nam-era post-traumatic stress disorder with the aid of a talking can of mixed vegetables?  And will the fat kid who runs the camp radio station ever take a bath, already?  These questions and more will be answered, sort of, in what turns out to be not only a vivacious comedy in its own right, but an absolutely pitch-perfect evocation of the party-as-a-verb days of the early 1980s and the innumerable shameless sex comedies they brought us.  Ultimately more a collection of moments than an actual movie, Wet Hot American Summer is so riotous and well-meaning, you can't hold its shambolic nature against it.

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Regular Screengrab readers know that I am not one to go for cheap nostalgia.  I don't view the world through rose-colored glasses, and I usuallly think that any line of reasoning that ends with 'things where better when I was a kid' come not from any real aesthetic position, but from an unwillingness to admit that one has gotten older and that the culture has moved along since we were teenagers.  I'm especially not nostalgic about the 1970s; I spent most of that decade being pretty easy to please.  If it came with a cape or a mask, and I could enjoy it while eating a bowl of Apple Jacks, it was okay with me.  However, every once in a while, there's a piece of cultural driftwood that floats past that grips me with a strange sense of longing for the good old days, and today's Summerfest 2008 entry is one of them.  Maybe I'm just becoming a softie because this is the penultimate installment of Summerfest '08 -- a feature in which I profile a movie with the word "summer" in the title that you can use to kill an hour and a half while you're waiting for your car to get detailed -- or maybe there's something deeper at work.  It's hard to say:  the big draws of this week's movie, Corvette Summer, are vintage cars and Mark Hammill, and I'm neither a gearhead nor a Star Wars fan.  Maybe it's just my longtime crush on Annie Potts.  But whatever the case, we're going to plunge head-first, for the second-to-the-last installment of Summerfest 2008, into a movie which represented the very last moment Mark Hamill was given any on-screen presence in anything but a Star Wars movie, and the very last moment Danny Bonaduce was even remotely taken seriously.  

Summer's ending, as all things must.  But with only two more Summerfest screenings to go, we're going to see it out with a bang!  Join me for a look at 1978's Corvette Summer!

THE ACTION:  It's 1978, and like every high school kid in 1978, Kenneth W. Dantley Jr. is obsessed with two things:  hot girls and fast cars.  Being an out-of-it chunkhead, he can't do much about obtaining the former, but in pursuit of the latter, he takes a shop class, and as his final project, instead of building a bird feeder or an ashtray, he comes up wih a custom-designed 1973 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray.  Unfortunately, Kenny is in the habit of befriending ill-meaning douchebags like the weaselly Kootz, under whose care the tricked-out 'Vette is stolen.  Kenny, anxious to get back the car which got him his first-ever A grade, heads off on an epic trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; along the way, he runs into mobsters, lowlifes, ne'er-do-wells, and Vanessa, who describes herself as a "prostitute-in-training" headed to Vegas to hit the major leagues of whoring.  We're apparently meant to find this flattering.  Once he actually arrives in Sin City, he falls in with a bunch of other head-in-the-clouds gearheads and the tone of the movie shifts and becomes less an outrageous teen comedy and more a deadly-dull weekend with the kind of fanatic auto enthusiasts that you find at car shows embarrassing their wives.  It's a testament to the quality of the movie that the star who's lasted the longest is the car itself, which is still shown at classic auto shows all over the country.

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Well, faithful Screengrab readers, we knew this day would come.  When I first set myself the task of creating Summerfest '08 -- the season-long Screengrab movie festival of films with nothing in common except having the word "summer" in the title -- I knew it wouldn't be easy.  I knew that, despite my humble goal of providing you with short, sassy reviews of movies just long enough to watch while your steaks were burning on the grill, I would eventually reach the dog days of August and, having suggested a movie every Wednesday for the last ten weeks, start running out of anything worth watching.  With two weeks to go, Netflix can scarcely keep up with my bizarre demands, and while I'm doing my best to have this series go out with a bang, I'm afrad that by this point, I'm reduced to suggesting movies that are more or less the absolute dregs.  And in terms of 1980s broad comedies, they don't come much dregsier than those movies with the following five words attached:  'a comedy featuring John Candy'.  While the big man was an absolute ace on television (he was far and away our favorite part of SCTV) and could be a winning charmer in mainstream films (see Splash for evidence), his ability to pick good scripts was not honed to razor sharpness.  This left us with a legacy, following his unfortunate demise, of very few characters like Johnny LaRue and Harry, the Guy with the Snake on His Face, and very many movies like Who's Harry Crumb?.  

But we made a commitment here, damn it, and this is no time to flag.  The final days are upon us!  So screw your courage to the sticking-place, don a boater and a decades-out-of-date swimming costume, and join me for Summer Rental!

THE ACTION: In a sure sign we are watching a movie from the 1980s, John Candy plays a burnt-out air traffic controller who is forced to take a summer vacation before he completely flips out and starts steering 747s into one another.  In an additional sure sign we are watching a movie from the 1980s, the whole movie is essentially a collection of gags that weren't quite good enough for a Rodney Dangerfield movie.  The plot, such as it is, involves Candy and his family arriving at a summer beach house which unfortunately has been rezoned as public property, forcing them to contend with rude passers-by at whom they make threatening gestures and Smurf jokes -- yet a third sign that we are watching a movie from the 1980s, since the Smurf jokes are delivered with no apparent irony.  After about an hour of these aimless, plotless jokes, the movie takes a new turn, delivering a brand new set of aimless, plotless jokes, this time revolving around a pointless combat between Candy and an old sea salt who runs a boating company and wants to make Candy's life miserable for no particular reason.  Will the two ever become friends?  Will Candy's kids drive him crazy?  Will this movie seem like it will never end, despite being only 88 minutes long?  Only you can decide, by renting this spectacularly pointless relic from a bygone age.

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We've featured a lot of different types of movies here at the Screengrab during our excting Summerfest '08 feature, in which we endeavour to review a movie a week with the word "summer" in the title that you can watch while you're putting off trying on your new bikini.  We've featured Summer School, a movie that has made people inappropriately nostalgic for the 1980s; we've featured Summer of Sam, a movie in which it is revealed that Satan speaks through us in the voice of dogs, and sounds an amazing amount like John Tuturro; and we've featured Suddenly Last Summer, a movie in which a homosexual predator and his pimp sister wreak havoc on a small European town before he is eaten by the townsfolk.  No, really.  We've featured not one, but two movies starring Freddie Prinze, Jr., which, believe me, was just as painful for me as it was for you.  But while many of these films have inspired us to do a wide variety of things -- become nostalgic for the sight of Kirstie Alley in a bathing suit; go back in time and put Tennessee Williams on anti-depressants; avoid watching any future films starring Freddie Prinze, Jr. -- none of them have actually inspired us to get up off our duffs, get out of the house, and do something other than watch movies all summer.  But that changes today as we take a look at the greatest surfing documentary ever made.  

 

So grab your board, hop in your woodie, and join us on a search for the perfect wave as we enjoy The Endless Summer!

THE ACTION: Mike Hynson and Robert August are surfers.  That's what they do:  surf.  Bruce Brown, who wrote and directed the movie, is a filmmaker, but he's a surfer too.  Surfers are an uncomplicated lot, and they really want nothing more than to bum around all day waiting for the best wave they can possibly get, and then they want to get out there and shoot that son of a bitch for all it's worth.  That's essentially all that happens in this movie:  Hynson and August trek from one end of Africa to another, then to Australia, the South Pacific, and anywhere else they can possibly get to, just looking for a really good curl.  Brown follows them, training his 16mm camera at them for some blurry nature shots and some absolutely gorgeous filmwork out on the water.  The two engage in wacky hijinks, doing very little to dispel the notion that surfers are overgrown, doofy man-children, and Brown provides amiable frat-boy narration, often meandering and nonsensical, to cover the silence of the action scenes (most of the shots had no soundman and hence, no sound).  Then they trudge off in search of another wave, and when they find one, they ride it until they just can't ride it no more.  That's it, in its entirety:  90 minute of three goofy guys bumming around the globe looking for waves to ride.  It's exactly that bad -- and that great.

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Hey, remember Kevin WIlliamson?  Sure you do!  He was the highly paid screenwriter who was going to revolutionize the horror cinema for a new generation with his 'smart' thrillers, starting with Scream in 1996.  Unfortunately, it turned out that by 'smart' he meant 'marginally rewarding for those who had spent as much time watching crappy horror movies as I did'.  His moment quickly passed, and in the 2000s, torture porn and J-horror have become the new touchstones of Fangoria fans, while Williamson went on to a whole 'nother kind of showbiz glory as the creator of the slasher-deficient Dawson's Creek.  Still, he meant well, and about ten years ago, his movies were about the only evidence that could be found that the genre had any life left in it at all.  So why not give the guy a break and make one of his most famous films the subject of an entry in Summerfest '08, the weekly Screengrab feature where we review movies with the word 'summer' in the title to give you something to do for a couple of hours while you're waiting for the potato salad to cool?  If nothing else, we can guarantee you that this week's installment is going to be a bit more fun than the gloomy 1950s psychodramas we've featured for the last couple of weeks.   

So strap on your fisherman's slicker, polish up your favorite boat hook, and join us for a look at 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Julie, Helen, Barry and Ray are a quartet of remarkably photogenic North Carolina teenagers who happily correspond to some of our very favorite big-screen stereotypes (respectively, the good girl, the wannabe starlet, the party boy, and the jock).  On the Fourth of July weekend just after their graduation, they're cruising around one nigher after a fun trip to the beach, and wouldn't you know it, their car just happens to plow into a shambolic wino whom they are forced to leave for dead.  Hey, it's happened to all of us, right?  Let those who have not accidentally run over a wino cast the first stone, that's all I'm saying.  A year later, they find themselves wracked with guilt and unable to fulfill any of their teenage dreams, except the dreams that involve staying drunk all the time.  That's when they get a mysterious missive reading "I know what you did last summer", and a number of their friends start to turn up dead, the victims of sharpened implements wielded by a dead ringer for the Gorton's fisherman.  Which one of them has turned on his or her friends?  Or is it some phantom stranger who has it in for them?  And which horror movie cliches will Kevin Williamson take pokes at while pretending he's above them in his own screenplay?  Only time will tell, or looking at any number of movie spoiler websites.

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Last week on Summerfest '08, we brought you a ripe slice of faux-Tennessee Williams by way of William Faulkner, with the overheated 1958 steamer The Long Hot Summer.  This week, we're cutting out the middleman and bringing you actual Tennessee Williams -- or as actual as Tennessee Williams could get given the restrictive studio censorship of the 1950s -- with Suddenly Last Summer.  As if reacting to a thrown-down gauntlet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a year after The Long Hot Summer debuted, said "Oh yeah?  We'll just see about that!", and brought in an even more dysfunctional cast to film an even more flowery tale of sexual repression with an even more transparently, and yet never explicitly, gay subtext than Hollywood was previously willing to put up with.  If you think all this sublimated gayness, sweaty sexuality, and boiled-over Freudianism is pretty heavy water for a frivolous feature about movies with the word 'summer' in the title to carry, well, blame Hollywood, not us -- apparently there's something about the months from May to September that gets producers and directors all moist and lascivious.  If someone out there has access to a university press, there's probably a good thesis floating around about why, exactly, "summer blockbuster" has transitioned in meaning these last few decades from "steamy romance about forbidden love" to "movie with lots of CGI where stuff gets blown all to shit".  It probably says something profound about our culture, unless it doesn't.

Anyway, let's get on with the latest forbidden fruit in our cinematic basket:  crack open some cognac, find yourself a nice Mediterranean beach on which to lounge, and join us for a viewing of Suddenly Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Catherine Holley (played by a luscious-looking Liz Taylor) has just returned from Europe, where she has gone all wiggy.  Apparently, while she was visiting, her cousin Sebastian, played by nobody because we never see him, was killed under mysterious circumstances, and the whole thing was just too, too unpleasant and caused Catherine to have a nervous breakdown.  Once she starts to recover, she makes cryptic but extremely disturbing comments about Sebastian's demise, which rubs his mom (played by Katherine Hepburn as the wonderfully named Mrs. Violet Venable) the wrong way.  Violet insists that Sebastian was a very nice young man and a deeply sensitive artist and that's all there is to that, and when Catherine insists that there was something peculiar about the lad, she is instructed to shut her yapper or have it shut for her, in the person of professional psychiatrist and lobotomy practitioner Montgomery Clift.  Eventually the truth comes out, or as much of the truth as the producers were allowed to show at the time:  Sebastian was murdered by his neighbors for his predatory sexual practices, and Catherine -- like Violet before her -- was being used by the nefarious fellow as his procurer.  (In fact, what is only hinted at in the movie is made explicit in the play:  Sebastian was a pederast at worst and a seducer of young men at best, who was not only killed by his neighbors, but eaten by them as well.  Creepy!)

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One of the many cool regular columns that we’re running right now on Screengrab is Leonard Pierce’s weekly feature Summerfest 2008. All summer long, Leonard has tasked himself to write about one movie a week with the word “summer” in the title. Personally, I’m hoping he gets around to one of Eric Rohmer’s seasonal classics- either Summer/The Green Ray or A Summer’s Tale- but I realize that at one movie a week, the series will be far from comprehensive. Happily, Leonard has given me permission to help him out on that front, to write up a Yesterday’s Hits that neatly dovetailed with his goal. So to that end, I’ve decided to review a summer-y hit of yesteryear, Robert Mulligan’s 1971 film Summer of ‘42.

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When we started Summerfest '08 a few weeks ago, our goals were simple:  identify a handful of movies with the word 'summer' in the title; figure out which ones were worth popping on to your DVD player while waiting for your watermelon to fully saturate with vodka; make a couple of snotty comments about them; and carry on with the knowledge that we have helped keep you cool for a few hours.  This week's picture, though, falls rather short of that final goal.  Whether you're watching it from a hammock in your backyard or a clean, sleek love seat in the basement, 1958's The Long Hot Summer won't cool you down.  It'll make you hot:  hot like a sweaty southern summer.  Hot like a repressed debutante.  Hot like Paul Newman in an undershirt before his face became synonymous with upscale salad dressings and organic Orio knockoffs.  Reading (and with good reason) like a bizarre mash-up of Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, The Long Hot Summer lives up to its name like no movie before or sense, and if you weren't sweating before you started watching it, you will be afterwards.  Hell, you don't even have to watch it -- although we don't know why anyone would deny themselves the pleasure of watching Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick looking like wilted hothouse flowers, all you have to do is listen to the overblown hotbox noir dialogue in this picture to positively swoon from the torridness of it all.

So mop your face with a handkerchief, push your hat back on your head, order up a tall mint julep, and get ready for The Long Hot Summer.

THE ACTION:  In what is, surprisingly, not the beginning of a porn movie, a young stud named Ben Quick hitches a ride into  a town called Frenchman's Bend, in rural Mississippi.  Ben has a reputation for barn-burning, which is the sort of thing people did for kicks back then while waitig for a new farmgirl to seduce.  Most people are none too happy to see Ben come to town -- most especially Clara and Eula Varner, played by Woodward and Remick, but town patriarch Will Varner sees a youthful reflection of himself in the sweaty hothead.  He also sees a number of qualities lacking in his son Jody (Tony Franciosa), who, this being the 1950s and all, the movie is not allowed to say is  a homosexual.  Gaudy, sexually charged patter ensues.  Eventually, everyone in town erupts in an explosion of damp clothing and meaningful looks, and the barns of Frenchman's Bend will never be the same again.

THE PLAYERS:  The Long Hot Summer is directed by Martin Ritt, a longtime Hollywood pro who directed dozens of pretty decent movies without ever having developed much of a reputation for anything other than reliability.  He does have to his credit the fact that, according to Hollywood legend, during filming of this movie, he became the only person to get the notoriously implacable Orson Welles to behave by driving the great man out to the middle of the Louisiana swamp and threatening to abandon him there if he didn't shape up and start making nice.  While the movie is based on three short stories by William Faulkner ("Spotted Horses", "The Hamlet", and "Barn Burning"), it's written in high noir style by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, a duo mostly noted for their work in westerns, and plays like Tennessee Willliams if he liked girls as much as he liked decadence.  The entire cast, including a shockingly smokin' Angela Lansbury as Welles' mistress, absolutely swelters in the crushing heat.

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Our goal here at the Screengrab for the Summerfest '08 feature is to give you a dozen or so movies, all of which have "summer" in the title, which you can watch to no great pain while you are waiting for your dog to bring back the tennis ball you threw in the ocean.  Unsurprisingly, most movies with the word "summer" in the title – and, indeed, most movies that are about summer, or are set during the summer, or are released during the summer, or in any way have the lemonade-and-sunscreen scent of summer about them, are pretty light, fluffy concoctions, spilling over with good will, gentle humor, and people wearing far less clothing than they normally would.  Today, though, is different.  Today we'll be featuring a movie by none other than Ingmar freakin' Bergman.  Bergman:  the man who single-handedly inspired Woody Allen to become a huge bummer.  Bergman:  the man whose most famous film involves a dying knight playing a desperate game of chess with the personification of Death itself.  Bergman:  the man whose very name is synonymous with incredibly heavy European art cinema.  Could this man possibly direct a breezy summer movie (or, in this case, a breezy sommar movie)?  Could this man, whose movies are stuffed with miserable families, emotional trauma, and metaphysical turmoil, give us, of all things, a fun little comedy?

Grab a chilled bottle of Svedka, book your tickets on Scandinavian Airlines, and join us for some Smiles of a Summer Night!

THE ACTION:  Meet Frederik Egerman.  He's a Swedish attorney and self-involved clothes horse with a gorgeous teenage wife named Anne.  There's one problem with their marriage:  they haven't consummated it yet.  Meet his son (from a previous marriage) Henrik, a recent graduate from divinity school, who faces a serious impediment to entering the priesthood:  he's got a big hard-on for his stepmother Anne – and since she's off-limits, he's carrying on an affair with Petra, his father's maid.  Meet Desirée Armfeldt, an actress that Frederik used to have a crush on and who is seriously envied by Anne.  She lets it be known that she has feelings for Frederik, which pisses Anne off to no end. Desirée is currently seeing another well-off fop named Carl-Magnus Malcolm, whose wife, Charlotte, is a good friend of Anne.  Are you following all this?  No?  Good.  We weren't either, to be perfectly honest with you.  Just take our word for it that wacky hijinks and hilarity are bound to ensue.

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If there's one thing I can't stand, it's critics who look at the world through rose-colored glasses.  The minute I hear someone gassing on about how movies used to be better back in the old days (always, coincidentally, when they were young), my eyes glaze over and my ears cotton up.  Of course, the bitch of it all is that I do this myself.  Everyone does.  In fact, I'm about to do it right now, with the latest installment of Summerfest '08 -- the exciting new Screengrab feature where we randomly select movies from the past with the word 'summer' in the title and review them in order to let you know if it's worth watching for a couple of hours while you're waiting for the guy to show up and fix your margarita machine.  Objectively, there's really nothing better about the crap movies they put out when I was a teenager in the 1980s and the crap movies they put out now; the new stuff may be a tad coarser, in keeping with the tenor of the times, but it sure ain't any stupider.  And, of course, the fact that I must have watched the 1987 Mark Harmon vehicle Summer School a couple of dozen times in my misspent post-high-school doldrums doesn't mean it's actually any kind of a good movie.  But I have good memories of it, and if you're looking for a near-perfect exemplar of a very particular type of feel-good comedy produced in that neon-colored decade, you could do a lot worse.

So let's hand-press our surfer shirts, bleach our teeth, and check out the latest entry into Summerfest '08:  Summer School!

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I knew when I started the Summerfest project, in which I review one movie each week with the word 'summer' in the title in hopes of giving faithful Screengrab readers something to do when it's too hot to wash your car, that there would be sacrifices.  Since my only criterion for inclusion was the presence of the word 'summer' and Netflix availability, I knew that there would be a couple of movies that would be pretty lousy, especially given the sort of movies that come out in the summer.  But I didn't realize until the 2001 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle Summer Catch arrived in the mail that I truly understood to what depths I was willing to sink in pursuit of the project.  A lot of things should have warned me off:  the uniformly negative reviews; the fact that I couldn't find anyone who remembered the movie being released, let alone actually seeing it; the dire circumstances predicted by the words "Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle".  But I made a promise to you people, and I'm not one to break a promise, even one that involves a hundred minutes of Jessica Biel reading inspirational slogans from an insurance company calendar in voice-over narration.  I'm not saying you should watch this movie; I'm not even saying you should go into a room where this movie once sat.  I'm just saying:

Put on your cleats and spit on your hands, because we're about to slide face-first into Summer Catch.

 

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Summerfest '08, as you know, is our feature here at the Screengrab wherein we suggest a way for you to kill two hours while waiting for your grill to heat up.  Every movie we profile on Wednesdays from now until Labor Day comes with our personal guarantee:  these movies may not be essential hot-weather viewing.  They may not even be good.  But we can assure you with complete confidence that they will have the word 'summer' in the title.  This week, we'll be taking a break from our previous diet of decades-old footage of people wearing skimpy beachwear and turning to a more recent effort by the director whose name is virtually synonymous with good-time party movies:  Spike Lee.  Responding to the demands of filmgoers, critics, and studio executives who wanted to know when he was going to produce a summer blockbuster, Lee, over the 4th of July weekend in 1999, brought us a bright, cheery feel-good movie about a fat psychotic whose neighbor's demonically possessed dog ordered him to murder couples in cars. 

Strap it down and get ready for some hot fun in the summertime with Spike Lee's Summer of Sam!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ACTION:  Boyhood chums Vinnie (John Leguizamo, in a stunning 1970s-style performance that recalls the glory days when all our favorite actors were zapped out of their craniums on cocaine) and Richie (Adrien Brody, wearing the world's least-convincing liberty spikes) are reunited after a long separation.  But things are no longer the same between them; Vinnie has picked up the habit of sodomizing his wife (the much-abused Mira Sorvino) in the kind of discotheques Kurt Anderson once described as "fun that isn't", and Richie has become some kind of crazy bisexual punk rocker or something, of the sort once seen on an episode of Quincy.  The suspicious behavior of Richie -- dressing all funny, listening to the Who, dancing with his shirt off, and expressing sympathy for the Boston Red Sox -- immediately triggers in his goombah-heavy neighbors the urge to reenact a pasta dinner theater version of the Salem Witch Trials to determine if he is the infamous Son of Sam murderer. 

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If beers, rock bands and sausages are all allowed to have summerfests, we here at the Screengrab see no reason why movie blogs shouldn't get to share in the fun.  Our Summerfest series will take a look, every Wednesday for fifteen weeks from May until September, at movies with the word 'summer' in the title and some connection, however tenuous, to everybody's favorite bikini party season.  These movies are by no means essential; most of them aren't even any good.  But they will help you kill a few hours when you're recovering form a margarita hangover.  This week, much as we did last week with A Summer Place, we'll be taking a look at a movie that became a huge hit on the strength of a super-cheesy, inescapable theme song and America not wanting to admit it was seeing the movie because it wanted to see sme pretty young things getting it on.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present:  1982's Summer Lovers.

 
THE ACTION:  Peter Gallagher, in the days before he was a leather-skinned, hyper-tanned self-parody, plays a Greco-American schmucko who convinces his hot girlfriend to visit the Greek Isles with him for summer vacation.  His girlfriend is played by a pre-crazy, but unfortunately not pre-bad-actress, Daryl Hannah, who nails the part of the role where she is required to look hot, but not the part of the role where she is required to play an artsy intellectual photographer.  Eventually she gets on Gallagher's Hooksexups, and he starts carrying on with a juicy little archaeologist, played with world-class ennui by the doomed  Valerie Quennessen, who you may remember from...well, nothing else ever, really.  Daryl stomps off to confront this French tart, and guess what happens?  No, really, guess.  The answer will shock and amaze you.

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Summer is one of my favorite times to see a movie.  Growing up in Arizona in the shadows of a shopping mall, going to the multiplex on a hot summer day when I didn't have school and wanted to kill a few dozen brain cells out of the blinding sun and wilting heat was one of my absolute favorite things to do.  Let the cool kids go show off by the swimming pool:  for me it was the air-conditioned comfort and the fulfilling fantasies of the silver screen.  This summer, in between checking out what's new in the world of blockbusters and indie flicks of today, I'll be bringing you a mini-review of 15 'summer' movies of the past, judged by criteria I made up the other day over a couple of watermelon margaritas.  They won't always be good movies, but they'll always bring you a certain summery je ne sais quoi.

Let's start with one of the most famous summer flicks of all time:  1959's A Summer Place.

THE ACTION:  Rich toff Richard Egan totes his snobby, moralistic wife (Constance Ford) and pouty, vine-ripe teenage daughter to a New England resort.  The owner of the resort is grungy failed capitalist Arthur Kennedy and his lovely lady Dorothy McGuire, who run the joint alongside their dimwitted but hunky son, Troy Donahue.  Twenty years prior, Egan had a little thang-thang going with McGuire, and as everyone goes about their summer business, the two rekindle their hot and heavy relationship, as their hormone-crazed children follow suit.  This being the 1950s and all, Ford completely flips out, a shameful divorce takes place, a pregnancy scare ensues, and everyone looks at each other very meaningfully while wearing not particularly revealing swimwear.  You got all that?

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