The Screengrab

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  So screw your courage to the sticking-place, don a boater and a decades-out-of-date swimming costume, and join me for Summer Rental!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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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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In honor of the ten year anniversary of the passing of Ol’ Blue Eyes (and the recent timely release of several DVD box sets of his cinematic output), we here at Screengrab decided to have Frank’s original 1960s casino caper and George Clooney’s 2001 remake face off in the ring-a-ding to see which is truly the heavyweight champ of hangin’-out-with-your-famous-pals cinema. Awright, boys...come out swingin’!

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Whenever I describe the idea of Yesterday’s Hits to someone who’s never read the column, I’m often asked, “why write about movies that aren’t popular anymore?” There are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest has always been a kind of anthropological fascination with the movies to which earlier generations gravitated. In some cases, the reasons behind the films’ blockbuster status are simple- because they craved good special effects, or because the stars were popular at the time. But in some cases, it goes deeper than that, because the film taps into a certain zeitgeist that makes it a must see. Simply put, it’s the right film at the right time. One example of this is Fatal Attraction.

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