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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