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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