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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