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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