The Screengrab : summerfest 2008

The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: "The Nightmare Before Christmas"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:20:00 GMT

If you are anything like me -- and why wouldn't you be? -- you're a sucker for Christmas. The arbitrary yet somehow natural-seeming traditions; the carols which somehow only sound right when you've got just enough bourbon-fortified eggnog in you; the extra days off from work; the fact that people give you free stuff wrapped in shiny paper; the way everyone pretends to be nice to each other for a change: what's not to like? It's also one of those Western cultural touchstones so universal (suck it, Judaism!) that pretty much everybody gets into the act; despite the bogus claims from pouty conservatives about a "war on Christmas", the birth of Baby Jesus is still commemorated on almost every TV show on the air, and Yuletide is second only to summer as a Hollywood high holy day.

So, in the spirit of this year's Summerfest series -- where I lazily Netflixed a dozen or so movies with "summer" in the title and reviewed them so you'd know what to watch while the pool guy skimmed the drowned crow out of your Jacuzzi -- I present the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon, where I get drunk and watch some of the finest Christmas movies that Hollywood has crammed down our throats, and ask: will this movie fill you with holiday cheer or seasonal depression?

First up is 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, also known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in Disney Digital 3-D, although a more accurate name for it would be Not Actually Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas or even Hi Everybody We're Henry Selick and Caroline Thompson and We Directed and Wrote This Movie Respectively And What Do We Have To Do To Get a Little Credit For That?'s The Nightmare Before Christmas. While Burton created the lead characters and wrote a poem that served as the movie's inspiration, he had very little to do with making the film itself, and the fact that he's generally given all the kudos for it is a shame, because if nothing else, it proves how other people are capable of taking his quirky, creepy aesthetic and running with it.

Made using a daring, innovating, and highly striking form of 3-D animation, The Nightmare Before Christmas uses the clever (and somewhat underexplored) notion that all holidays are represented geographically in an otherworldly tableau to tell the story of Halloween bigwig Jack Skellington -- voiced by Chris Sarandon, with song vocals by the film's composer, Burton stalwart Danny Elfman. Jack happens upon the existence of Christmastown, and, meaning well but flummoxed -- and slightly jealous -- of the universal love showered on its big shot, one "Sandy Claws", resolves to cut in on his action. Hilarity ensues, lessons are learned, and all that standard Christmassy crap, but filtered through a truly weird visual sensibility.

One thing that director Selick and screenwriter Thompson share with Tim Burton is a sort of whimsical disregard for the conventions of storytelling. Setpieces ramble one to the other, and the story rolls gregariously along without ever making a lot of sense -- you get the idea that the filmmakers were as impatient as some of their younger audience to get on to the next bit of cool stuff. That said, the movie is breathtakingly gorgeous, with incredibly clever and intricate visuals that took as much time and effort as the story didn't. (There's currently an exhibit of some of the models used in the film on display at an art museum here in San Antonio, where I live, and seeing them up close, you get an unexpected sense of how elaborate and careful the building of them was; it's clearly no accident the movie looks as good as it does.) Kids old enough not to be freaked out by some of the jarring elements of the movie will adore its highly successful visual style, which blends cute and creepy in a way rarely seen outside of Japanese animation, and adults will be engaged by the swell performances and the overall intricacy of the movie's design.

Despite the Halloweeny themes and the often shocking visual play, there's really nothing gloomy or depressing about The Nightmare Before Christmas; it's an old-fashioned entertaining all-ages romp like rarely gets made any more, and the songs, while not exactly unforgettable, are loads of fun while you're experiencing them, especially "The Oogie Boogie Song", a monster's rollicking threat towards a kidnapped Santa Claus. In contrast to Burton's own weepy-assed Christmas effort, Edward Scissorhands, the only bummer to be found is that some of the great talents on display in the voice cast -- including Paul Reubens, Catherine O'Hara, and Glenn Shadix -- don't get nearly as much work as their talent deserves.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A solid 8 Maids a-Milking. The story and the script won't stay with you past Christmas morning, but it's a pure good time you can sing along to after you've gotten deep in the punch bowl Christmas Eve -- and you won't even have to chase the kids out of the living room.

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Summerfest '08: A Summer Place

Summerfest '08: Wet Hot American Summer

Summerfest '08: "Wet Hot American Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

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.

THE PLAYERS: Janeane Garofalo shines in her role as the stern head counselor who has everything but the love of a good man, as if to remind skeptical viewers of the fact that she was once very funny. David Hyde Pierce seems a tad out of place among the legions of improvisers and sketch comedy pros in the cast, but he still has a few fine moments as the world's least convincing heterosexual male lead. But the real standouts here are the comic actors who fill out the cast in minor, but often spectacularly funny, parts: co-writer Michael Showalter is only adequate as the longing male lead, but he's absolutely killer in a late-reel appearance as a hacky Catskills comic. Christopher Meloni is appropriately unhinged as the brain-damaged vet who's lousy at keeping his perverse secrets. Amy Poehler is outstanding, alongside Bradley Cooper, as the high-strung type-A director of the camp's talent show. And Paul Rudd, especially, is hysterically funny as a bratty, self-involved lothario who can barely be troubled to listen to his girlfriend when she's talking; he has a scene with Garofalo about midway through the film that may stand out as the funniest temper tantrum ever filmed. Director David Wain (who wrote the script alongside a pre-The Baxter Showalter) shows a steady hand as well as a brilliant touch for period detail.

SUMMER FUN: Wet Hot American Summer doesn't mess around: it gives us the ne plus ultra of summer fun, all crammed into an hour and a half. It takes place on the last day of camp, and, perfectly echoing the film cliche, it features everyone in sight squeezing as much fun out of the summer as they possibly can: hooking up with anyone in sight, driving to town (in a memorable and grimly hilarious scene) to score drugs, breaking out into inexplicable guitar solos, helping their friends get laid, playing Dungeons & Dragons, practicing for the big talent show, and in one of the most subversive twists of any movie parody, prepping for the big Snobs vs. Slobs showdown. Every activity is either turned on its head for sweet subversion or taken completely over the top for maximum laughs.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: From the ringer tees to the polyester shorts to the brace guards to the ample cock-rock on the soundtrack, one thing that Wet Hot American Summer gets spectacularly right is the period detail. And one of the most important details when you're making a movie that hails back to the golden age of 1980s teen sex comedies is the Hawaiian shirt. Only one person wears one in the course of the movie, but he's a big fat party animal, and as Homer Simpson took the time to explain once long ago, big fat party animals are one of the two groups who do their best work in Hawaiian shirts. The big fat party animal in question is Zak Orth as J.J., whose gregarious stoner demeanor here suggests that there's someone ready to step into Seth Rogen's shoes if he every gets tired of being really funny.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: While Janeane Garofalo's still too self-conscious to step into one, bikinis are plentiful in Wet Hot American Summer. A good thing, too, as they're occasionally filled out by the likes of Marguerite Moreau and Elizabeth Banks; in fact, the latter in a bikini inspires a great scene where Paul Rudd gets so distracted from his lifeguard duties that he lets one of his charges drown -- then begins a Death Wish-style crusade to wipe out anyone who saw him do it. Beyond that, there's also knit tops, frosted lipstick, short shorts, knee socks, bra-less t-shirts, and the like for your enjoyment. It's all part of the neon-green cocktail that makes up the movie, which, in the end, plays like the funniest 1980s movie made since 1989. If summer has to end, this is the way to see it out.

Summerfest '08: "Corvette Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:15:00 GMT

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.

THE PLAYERS: Aside form the Corvette, the big star of Corvette Summer is meant to be Mark Hamill. Coming off the huge success of Star Wars, producers were jumping all over him, offering him all sorts of heartthrob roles under the assumption that he was going to be Hollywood's next bankable young star. Our condolences to everyone who didn't know how that was going to end up. Ironically enough given that he was playing a kid totally obsessed with tricked-out sports cars, Hamill's career -- and life -- were almost brought to an end a few months before filming this movie, when he was involved in a serious and nearly fatal car accident. Hammill recovered quickly enough to put Corvette Summer in the can, and he sported the scars in the two Star Wars sequels, so he physically recovered, but his career never did. Elsewhere, the slimy goofball Kootz is played by a post-Partridge Danny Bonaduce, not yet in his transsexual prostitute/celebrity boxing phase, but well into his not-having-a-career phase. The biggest find of the movie -- or so it seemed at the time -- was the young, vivacious, and beautiful Annie Potts, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for best new find, and only five years later would be playing a semi-matronly role in Ghostbusters.

SUMMER FUN: The movie starts out with Hamill still toiling away in shop class, so it definitely makes you earn your summer fun as you have to put up with a good half of its runtime being set in his somewhat dreary southern California high school. As the movie progresses, though, it hits you with the good times one after another, as Hastar wars; ghostbusters; Hamill gets (and loses) his dream 'Vette, runs into a hooker with a heart of gold, takes a road trip to Las Vegas, and gets menaced by a chainsaw-wielding organized crime syndicate thug. You know, all that fun stuff that happened to everyone in high school.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Not surprisingly for a movie that is set for half of its 105 minutes in southern California and the other half in Las Vegas, Hawaiian shirts abound, on big fat party animals and elsewhere. Everyone from shop teachers to parents rock the tropical look, and when the action shifts to Vegas and arriviste Mob thugs and classic car enthusiasts enter the picture, we actually begin to approach the tipping point where we hope that someone in a Brooks Brothers suit wanders on screen just for balance. Even Luke Skywalker himself, who wears a pseudo-Fonzie blue-jeans-and-white-tee combo for much of the movie, once or twice rocks this sort of goofy off-teal Hawaiian number that makes us mistake him for Ralph Malph. I wish he'd hung onto it for Return of the Jedi.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Curiously enough for a movie that is set for half of its 105 minutes in southern California and the other half in Las Vegas, bikinis are very few and far between. We get a few shots of them in generic SoCal beach scenes, and there's also a few walk-ons by spangled showgirl two-pieces during the film's Vegas scenes, but for the most part, bikinis are nowhere to be found. However, Corvette Summer does feature a number of shots of a 25-year-old Annie Potts in a SCUBA wetsuit, which, for my entertainment dollar, is almost as good. Unless you're a total gearhead who likes watching 'Vette porn, Corvette Summer mostly serves as a cautionary tale of what could have been with the pretty young actors, but there are worse ways to spend a Wednesday afternoon in August.

Summerfest '08: "Summer Rental"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:45:00 GMT

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.

THE PLAYERS: Candy isn't exactly at his best here, but at least he retains elements of gregariousness and isn't entirely sleepwalking through the movie like he would the last few pictures he made prior to his untimely death. Unsurprisingly, his big-screen family gives him precious little to play off of, portrayed as they are by professional nonentity Karen Austin, never-was Kerri Green, and supremely irksome one-time heartthrob Joey "Whoa!" Lawrence. But later in the film, director Carl Reiner (yes, that Carl Reiner, several million years removed from his brilliant TV comedy days) brings in tons of good character actors for Candy to bounce off of, and the movie improves to a marked degree when he's trading lines with John Laroquette, Richard Crenna, and, as the film's main antagonist, Rip Torn, who was just then beginning to develop the hammy, over-the-top persona that would mark much of his best work in the 1990s and 2000s. Since the movie is little more than a collection of gags in search of a plot to bounce off of, it's better when those gags are bouncing off the likes of Torn, Crenna and Laroquette than the lives of Kerri Green.

SUMMER FUN: Almost the entire running time of Summer Rental takes place at the beach or on the ocean, and if it isn't fun for poor John Candy's long-suffering Jack Chester, at least everyone else is having fun at his expense. Fishing, sailing, surfing, and numerous semi-successful attempts at big-screen comedy jokes are all in abundance here, even if they're not always done right. At the very least, Candy does a lot of drinking, which is also our advice on how you should get through the movie.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: This being a good-time party movie of the 1980s, and its star being a big fat funster in the person of John Candy, Summer Rental has Hawaiian shirts everywhere you look. Crenna wears a Hawaiian shirt; Larroquette wears a Hawaiian shirt; and Rip Torn practically is a Hawaiian shirt. In addition, even when Candy isn't wearing a Hawaiian shirt, he's wearing something almost as good -- some of the few real laughs in the picture come from his outlandish wardrobe, including an outsized boater, hokey-looking Hollywood sunglasses, and a swimsuit that was made roughly during the Victorian era.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Once again, there are ways in which Summer Rental's being a cheap '80s comedy works against it -- for example, it's not very good, or very funny. But there are ways in which being a cheap '80s comedy works in its favor, and the greatest of these is its plethora of bikini babes. Unfortunately, one of them is Karen Austin, and another is Kerri Green, who, while not technically underage, will just bum you out about liking The Goonies. But another is the supermodel-turned-actress Lois Hamilton, who -- if you can forget that she, like Candy, died an unnatural death at a young age -- provides us with one of the movie's most memorable scenes. She pops up her bikini to reveal her, er, talents to Candy, and asks him, "How do they look?", to which he nervously replies "Similar?"

Summerfest '08: "The Endless Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

We've featured a lot of different types of movies here at the Screengrab during our excting Summerfest '08 feature, in which we endeavour to review a movie a week with the word "summer" in the title that you can watch while you're putting off trying on your new bikini. We've featured Summer School, a movie that has made people inappropriately nostalgic for the 1980s; we've featured Summer of Sam, a movie in which it is revealed that Satan speaks through us in the voice of dogs, and sounds an amazing amount like John Tuturro; and we've featured Suddenly Last Summer, a movie in which a homosexual predator and his pimp sister wreak havoc on a small European town before he is eaten by the townsfolk. No, really. We've featured not one, but two movies starring Freddie Prinze, Jr., which, believe me, was just as painful for me as it was for you. But while many of these films have inspired us to do a wide variety of things -- become nostalgic for the sight of Kirstie Alley in a bathing suit; go back in time and put Tennessee Williams on anti-depressants; avoid watching any future films starring Freddie Prinze, Jr. -- none of them have actually inspired us to get up off our duffs, get out of the house, and do something other than watch movies all summer. But that changes today as we take a look at the greatest surfing documentary ever made.

So grab your board, hop in your woodie, and join us on a search for the perfect wave as we enjoy The Endless Summer!

THE ACTION: Mike Hynson and Robert August are surfers. That's what they do: surf. Bruce Brown, who wrote and directed the movie, is a filmmaker, but he's a surfer too. Surfers are an uncomplicated lot, and they really want nothing more than to bum around all day waiting for the best wave they can possibly get, and then they want to get out there and shoot that son of a bitch for all it's worth. That's essentially all that happens in this movie: Hynson and August trek from one end of Africa to another, then to Australia, the South Pacific, and anywhere else they can possibly get to, just looking for a really good curl. Brown follows them, training his 16mm camera at them for some blurry nature shots and some absolutely gorgeous filmwork out on the water. The two engage in wacky hijinks, doing very little to dispel the notion that surfers are overgrown, doofy man-children, and Brown provides amiable frat-boy narration, often meandering and nonsensical, to cover the silence of the action scenes (most of the shots had no soundman and hence, no sound). Then they trudge off in search of another wave, and when they find one, they ride it until they just can't ride it no more. That's it, in its entirety: 90 minute of three goofy guys bumming around the globe looking for waves to ride. It's exactly that bad -- and that great.

THE PLAYERS: Hynson and August -- both real surfers who play themselves in this engaging mash-up of sports documentary and home movie travelogue -- are nearly indistiguishable: loopy fellas interested in their sport, soaking up some local color, and not much else. There's probably two of them for no better reason than that it takes some of the pressure off of Brown's narration. Brown himself -- a protege of Bud Browne (no relation), the legendary founder of the surf film genre, who died earlier this summer -- comes across as a strong advocate of the kind of pseudo-mystical dudesmanship that would spring up around surfing following the success of this 1966 film and the simultaneous monster success of the Beach Boys. The novelty of the interaction between the three men comes from a sort of primitive jus'-folks exoticism: the coasts of Africa and beaches of Australia where they spend most of their time in the film were, at the time, largely unknown and unvisited by Americans, and held a hint of the mysterious. By today's standards, Brown would offend by saying he wasn't sure if African tribesmen wanted to surf with them or eat them, but the observation is delivered in such a guileless way you can't hold it against him. The movie also features a cameo appearance by a ex-pro wrestler/surfer named Lord "Tally-Ho" Blears, and you know there ain't nothin' wrong with that.

SUMMER FUN: Are you kidding? In case you missed it earlier, this movie is a documentary about three goofball surfers who wander around creation, riding the waves, scoping out the native honeys, and sipping rum-based cocktails with former professional wrestlers. No matter what you're doing this summer, you wish you were doing this instead. There's rarely been a summer movie -- let alone a documentary -- that makes you want to sell your car, quit your job and change your lifestyle as much as The Endless Summer does. Hell, I don't even like surfing, and I was on the internet pricing boards by the time it ended.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Generally speaking, there is more Hawaiian shirtlessness in The Endless Summer than there is Hawaiian shirtiness, but don't despair: there's plenty of luau loungewear in evidence, including a good bit of it on display during an actual stopover in Hawaii. If you've ever wondered exactly what mood the typical fat party guy is trying to conjure when he dons his favorite Hawaiian shirt, this movie is it.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: While there's some bikini action in The Endless Summer, there's not nearly as much as you might expect. Frankly, as loath as I am to admit it, this represents a certain integrity on the part of the filmmakers; Hynson, August and Brown are dedicated to the art and craft of surfing, and the incidental opportunity it offers to take a gander at beach bunnies is strictly an element of chance. You have to respect that sort of demented focus. So, despite a saddening lack of bikini party time in a film set almost entirely on the beach, I highly recommend The Endless Summer as a palliative to however you've been wasting your life since Memorial Day.

Summerfest '08: Summer School

Summerfest '08: "I Know What You Did Last Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hey, remember Kevin WIlliamson? Sure you do! He was the highly paid screenwriter who was going to revolutionize the horror cinema for a new generation with his 'smart' thrillers, starting with Scream in 1996. Unfortunately, it turned out that by 'smart' he meant 'marginally rewarding for those who had spent as much time watching crappy horror movies as I did'. His moment quickly passed, and in the 2000s, torture porn and J-horror have become the new touchstones of Fangoria fans, while Williamson went on to a whole 'nother kind of showbiz glory as the creator of the slasher-deficient Dawson's Creek. Still, he meant well, and about ten years ago, his movies were about the only evidence that could be found that the genre had any life left in it at all. So why not give the guy a break and make one of his most famous films the subject of an entry in Summerfest '08, the weekly Screengrab feature where we review movies with the word 'summer' in the title to give you something to do for a couple of hours while you're waiting for the potato salad to cool? If nothing else, we can guarantee you that this week's installment is going to be a bit more fun than the gloomy 1950s psychodramas we've featured for the last couple of weeks.

So strap on your fisherman's slicker, polish up your favorite boat hook, and join us for a look at 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Julie, Helen, Barry and Ray are a quartet of remarkably photogenic North Carolina teenagers who happily correspond to some of our very favorite big-screen stereotypes (respectively, the good girl, the wannabe starlet, the party boy, and the jock). On the Fourth of July weekend just after their graduation, they're cruising around one nigher after a fun trip to the beach, and wouldn't you know it, their car just happens to plow into a shambolic wino whom they are forced to leave for dead. Hey, it's happened to all of us, right? Let those who have not accidentally run over a wino cast the first stone, that's all I'm saying. A year later, they find themselves wracked with guilt and unable to fulfill any of their teenage dreams, except the dreams that involve staying drunk all the time. That's when they get a mysterious missive reading "I know what you did last summer", and a number of their friends start to turn up dead, the victims of sharpened implements wielded by a dead ringer for the Gorton's fisherman. Which one of them has turned on his or her friends? Or is it some phantom stranger who has it in for them? And which horror movie cliches will Kevin Williamson take pokes at while pretending he's above them in his own screenplay? Only time will tell, or looking at any number of movie spoiler websites.

THE PLAYERS: In aid of his how-much-can-I-get-this-dialogue-to-sound-like-Joss-Whedon-wrote-it script, Williamson (and forgotten director Jim Gillespie) recruited four of the hottest young talents in Hollywood, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself: our quartet of menaced teens aren't some backlot collection of nobodies, but Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze Jr. For the benefit of our younger readers, who are even now shrugging and saying "Who?", let us assure you that those four were the cream of the crop when it came to screamworthy teens ca. 1997. While none of them ended up as huge big-screen names, at the time, you'd have been hard pressed to find a more stellar group of young actors. So what if their careers didn't exactly pan out like they hoped they might? It's not as if, like their characters in the movie, their hopes and dreams for the future were dashed because of the massive guilt they felt at having performed an unspeakble act that left them...hey, wait a minute!

SUMMER FUN: There's all sorts of summer fun going on in this feel-good celebration of murder. We start out with a beach party -- probably the greatest kind of summer fun there is; we move on to some exciting teenage sex, which everybody loves even if you know the poor kids are gonna have to die for it; after that, there's a thrilling car wreck, which always gets your heart racing; and finally, there's a bloody killing spree, which is the way everyone wishes their July 4th weekend could end, even if it's a wish that only comes true for a selectr few people. The movie also features an appearance by a wan, unhinged Ann Heche as the sister of the hapless gent who gets run over early in the film, and you know whenever Ann Heche shows up, somebody's gonna be having a good time soon enough.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Seeing as there are a lot of dudes in this movie, and dudes who, portrayed by latte-sipping left coast elitists as they are, are nonetheless supposed to be swaggering drunken teenagers from North Carolina, I am pleased to report that not only are there a few fleeting glimpses of Hawaiian shirts in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but there are even several incidences of the main male characters wearing shirts that, if they are not actually Hawaiian shirts, at least might as well be Hawaiian shirts. The point needs to be made in this film that several of its principles are good-time party guys, and if there is a better vector for delivery of this message than the Hawaiian shirt, I have yet to encounter it.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Curiously enough for a movie that contains Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt, their breasts, and a beach, there is not really as much bikini action as one would perhaps anticipate, let alone desire. That said, the makers of this film are not idiots, and while they do extract from us the concession that we make do with half-sweaters, denim pimp hats, and whatever else the movie's wardrobe designer was into at the moment for much of the movie, it's not as if we are entirely denied our bikini party time. Which, given the fact that arguably the most important character in the movie spends an inordinate amound of time in a rain slicker, is probably a good thing.

Summerfest '08: "Suddenly Last Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Last week on Summerfest '08, we brought you a ripe slice of faux-Tennessee Williams by way of William Faulkner, with the overheated 1958 steamer The Long Hot Summer. This week, we're cutting out the middleman and bringing you actual Tennessee Williams -- or as actual as Tennessee Williams could get given the restrictive studio censorship of the 1950s -- with Suddenly Last Summer. As if reacting to a thrown-down gauntlet, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a year after The Long Hot Summer debuted, said "Oh yeah? We'll just see about that!", and brought in an even more dysfunctional cast to film an even more flowery tale of sexual repression with an even more transparently, and yet never explicitly, gay subtext than Hollywood was previously willing to put up with. If you think all this sublimated gayness, sweaty sexuality, and boiled-over Freudianism is pretty heavy water for a frivolous feature about movies with the word 'summer' in the title to carry, well, blame Hollywood, not us -- apparently there's something about the months from May to September that gets producers and directors all moist and lascivious. If someone out there has access to a university press, there's probably a good thesis floating around about why, exactly, "summer blockbuster" has transitioned in meaning these last few decades from "steamy romance about forbidden love" to "movie with lots of CGI where stuff gets blown all to shit". It probably says something profound about our culture, unless it doesn't.

Anyway, let's get on with the latest forbidden fruit in our cinematic basket: crack open some cognac, find yourself a nice Mediterranean beach on which to lounge, and join us for a viewing of Suddenly Last Summer!

THE ACTION: Catherine Holley (played by a luscious-looking Liz Taylor) has just returned from Europe, where she has gone all wiggy. Apparently, while she was visiting, her cousin Sebastian, played by nobody because we never see him, was killed under mysterious circumstances, and the whole thing was just too, too unpleasant and caused Catherine to have a nervous breakdown. Once she starts to recover, she makes cryptic but extremely disturbing comments about Sebastian's demise, which rubs his mom (played by Katherine Hepburn as the wonderfully named Mrs. Violet Venable) the wrong way. Violet insists that Sebastian was a very nice young man and a deeply sensitive artist and that's all there is to that, and when Catherine insists that there was something peculiar about the lad, she is instructed to shut her yapper or have it shut for her, in the person of professional psychiatrist and lobotomy practitioner Montgomery Clift. Eventually the truth comes out, or as much of the truth as the producers were allowed to show at the time: Sebastian was murdered by his neighbors for his predatory sexual practices, and Catherine -- like Violet before her -- was being used by the nefarious fellow as his procurer. (In fact, what is only hinted at in the movie is made explicit in the play: Sebastian was a pederast at worst and a seducer of young men at best, who was not only killed by his neighbors, but eaten by them as well. Creepy!)

THE PLAYERS: As if the plot of the movie, with its pedophilia, murder, pimping, lobotomies and cannibalism wasn't a big enough bummer, apparently the behind-the-scenes action was soaked in bad vibes as well. Pretty much everyone involved in the production of Suddenly Last Summer hated each other with a capital H: Katherine Hepburn hated Elizabeth Taylor for stealing her spotlight. Elizabeth Taylor hated Joseph L. Manckiewicz for mistreating her friend Monty Clift. Manckiewicz hated Clift for his alcoholism, bad behavior and unprofessional demeanor. Producer Sam Spiegel hated Montgomery Clift because he was gay. And the screenplay was co-written by Gore Vidal, who basically hates everyone on general principles. Clift had been in a horrible car accident on his way to Taylor's home before filming began, and the treatment he received (and dished out) on the set helped send him into a downward spiral from which he would never recover; and Taylor, on the end of a prolonged stretch as America's sweetheart, gained a reputation for difficulty during the filming of Suddenly Last Summer that would dog her throughout the 1960s and beyond.

SUMMER FUN: There's less fun going on here than in any film we've yet reviewed as part of Summerfest '08. Even Ingmar Bergman comes across as a good-time party happenin' kind of dude compared to the dour demeanours and permanent trauma expressed on screen in this bummer in the summer. Between Sebastian getting eaten by his neighbor and Liz and Kate being posthumously unmasked as gay pimps, no one is particularly enjoying themselves in this movie, not even the normally impish Gore Vidal. The one guy who has something to do in the movie other than feel sorry for himself is the psychiatrist played by Montgomery Clift, who if nothing else has the golden opportunity to run a couple of million volts through Liz Taylor's thinkbox, but even that doesn't seem to get him very excited.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Folks, this movie stars Montgomery Clift as a brain specialist. He ain't wearing no Hawaiian shirts. We never get to see Sebastian, but it's a pretty fair bet he would prefer to have been killed and eaten to wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Albert "Dr. Cyclops" Dekker, who in perfect keeping with the tone of the film was a closeted homosexual who died of autoerotic asphyxiation with hypodermic needles jutting out of his arms and curse words written on his body, appears in Suddenly Last Summer, and while he might conceivably owned a Hawaiian shirt, he's certainly not wearing one here. Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams likely never touched a Hawaiian shirt in their entire lives. This is possibly the least Hawaiian-shirt-friendly summer movie ever made.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Although the film is set in the 1930s, the fashions are all contemporary to when it was made, in 1959. And that's good, if for no other reason than it allows us to take a gander at the lovely Liz Taylor bedecked in a white bikini when seeing Liz Taylor in a bikini was still a very desirable thing. Of course, there isn't much of it -- the movie was made from a stage play, and almost all of the action still takes place indoors -- and she isn't exactly having a party in her bikini as she is sitting around feeling suicidal and blathering on and on about how her gay cousin was killed and eaten by teenagers. Still, in a movie as relentlessly bleak as Suddenly Last Summer, you take what you can get. Party on!

Yesterday's Hits: Summer of '42 (1971, Robert Mulligan)

Paul Clark — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One of the many cool regular columns that we’re running right now on Screengrab is Leonard Pierce’s weekly feature Summerfest 2008. All summer long, Leonard has tasked himself to write about one movie a week with the word “summer” in the title. Personally, I’m hoping he gets around to one of Eric Rohmer’s seasonal classics- either Summer/The Green Ray or A Summer’s Tale- but I realize that at one movie a week, the series will be far from comprehensive. Happily, Leonard has given me permission to help him out on that front, to write up a Yesterday’s Hits that neatly dovetailed with his goal. So to that end, I’ve decided to review a summer-y hit of yesteryear, Robert Mulligan’s 1971 film Summer of ‘42.

What made Summer of ‘42 a hit? After the fall of the Production Code, the newfound permissiveness changed the face of Hollywood filmmaking. But while many filmmakers tried to push the envelope of what was acceptable, Summer of ‘42 took a different approach, injecting sexuality into the framework of what was essentially a nostalgia piece for a more innocent time- the 1940s. It was this period setting- and the tastefulness of the storytelling- that appealed to older audience members who otherwise might not have been interested in an R-rated movie about the sexual stirrings of teenagers. At the same time, it was this same nostalgia which appealed to the children of a more permissive era, who marveled at how naïve the children of the period were, learning about sex from books and hemming and hawing at the idea of buying birth control at the local pharmacy.

But one also shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of the film’s most prominent storyline, the deflowering of the film’s teenaged protagonist “Hermie” (Gary Grimes) by the recent war widow Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill). The older-woman fantasy has long been a popular one among young men, and Summer of ‘42 was one of the first Hollywood films to portray it in any detail. Unlike The Graduate, which pretty much turned its older woman into a predator all the better to hammer home its youth-friendly message, Summer of ‘42 told its older-woman/younger-man story with a tenderness befitting those fantasies held by generations of teenagers. Combine all of these factors with a fresh-faced cast of unknowns and the film became a surprise hit, one of the top grossers of 1971 and an Academy Award winner for Michel Legrand’s bittersweet score.

What happened? Compared to most hits of the day, Summer of ‘42 was fairly small-scale and unassuming, so it didn’t linger in the zeitgeist in quite the same way as, say, contemporaneous fellow Yesterday’s Hits selections The Way We Were and Love Story. For one thing, the nostalgia Mulligan’s film offered paled in comparison to the melodramatic pull of Love Story, and its low-wattage cast couldn’t compare with the pairing of Streisand and Redford. Finally, while the sincerity of the film’s portrayal of 1940s sexual innocence originally appealed the audiences, it became less relatable as the years passed, to the point where the famous condom-buying scene was parodied in an English television commercial. Like so many films, both in the past and today, Summer of ‘42 just wasn’t made to withstand the passage of time.

Does Summer of ‘42 still work? Kind of. One of the most charming aspects of the movie is its time-capsule quality, both of the 1940s and the 1970s’ concept of 1940s life. In our more sexually-frank age, it’s hard to remember a time when sex wasn’t just a mouse-click away, but Mulligan and writer Herman Rauscher portray this time with warmth. At the same time, the movie gets a lot of more universal details right, especially the way young men always try just a little too hard to impress women, to say nothing of those tentative grope session in the back row of the local movie house- a detail that rings just as true when the movie is Now, Voyager as when it’s Iron Man.

But there’s always something that has stuck in my craw about the older-woman fantasy, both in the film and in general. Namely, what does the older woman think? In Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien- currently the benchmark for onscreen portrayals of this premise- the question was answered by making the older woman the central player in the story. By contrast, in Summer of ‘42, Dorothy exists almost entirely to be admired by Hermie- first from a distance, then up close, then closer still. After Dorothy’s husband ships off to war, she befriends the kid, and the same day she finds out her husband has been killed, she responds by sleeping with him. After that, she disappears forever. To quote the Church Lady, “how conveeeeeeeeeenient!”

In the end, Summer of ‘42’s nostalgia is too rose-colored by half. The film was based on the real-life experiences of screenwriter Herman Rauscher (note the protagonist’s name), whose memories of the actual events were surely smoothed out from almost three decades’ distance. But the reality of one’s teenaged sexual awakening- not only Rauscher’s but practically everyone’s- is almost never this tidy. Most of the time, it’s fraught with anxiety and more than a little shame, two factors that can’t be dealt with simply by staring meaningfully into the distance as Hermie does in the film. By downplaying this emotional prickliness, Summer of ‘42 became a favorite date movie for 1971 audiences, but had the film kept more of this, it could very well have become a true-blue classic.

Summerfest '08: "The Long Hot Summer"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT

When we started Summerfest '08 a few weeks ago, our goals were simple: identify a handful of movies with the word 'summer' in the title; figure out which ones were worth popping on to your DVD player while waiting for your watermelon to fully saturate with vodka; make a couple of snotty comments about them; and carry on with the knowledge that we have helped keep you cool for a few hours. This week's picture, though, falls rather short of that final goal. Whether you're watching it from a hammock in your backyard or a clean, sleek love seat in the basement, 1958's The Long Hot Summer won't cool you down. It'll make you hot: hot like a sweaty southern summer. Hot like a repressed debutante. Hot like Paul Newman in an undershirt before his face became synonymous with upscale salad dressings and organic Orio knockoffs. Reading (and with good reason) like a bizarre mash-up of Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, The Long Hot Summer lives up to its name like no movie before or sense, and if you weren't sweating before you started watching it, you will be afterwards. Hell, you don't even have to watch it -- although we don't know why anyone would deny themselves the pleasure of watching Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick looking like wilted hothouse flowers, all you have to do is listen to the overblown hotbox noir dialogue in this picture to positively swoon from the torridness of it all.

So mop your face with a handkerchief, push your hat back on your head, order up a tall mint julep, and get ready for The Long Hot Summer.

THE ACTION: In what is, surprisingly, not the beginning of a porn movie, a young stud named Ben Quick hitches a ride into a town called Frenchman's Bend, in rural Mississippi. Ben has a reputation for barn-burning, which is the sort of thing people did for kicks back then while waitig for a new farmgirl to seduce. Most people are none too happy to see Ben come to town -- most especially Clara and Eula Varner, played by Woodward and Remick, but town patriarch Will Varner sees a youthful reflection of himself in the sweaty hothead. He also sees a number of qualities lacking in his son Jody (Tony Franciosa), who, this being the 1950s and all, the movie is not allowed to say is a homosexual. Gaudy, sexually charged patter ensues. Eventually, everyone in town erupts in an explosion of damp clothing and meaningful looks, and the barns of Frenchman's Bend will never be the same again.

THE PLAYERS: The Long Hot Summer is directed by Martin Ritt, a longtime Hollywood pro who directed dozens of pretty decent movies without ever having developed much of a reputation for anything other than reliability. He does have to his credit the fact that, according to Hollywood legend, during filming of this movie, he became the only person to get the notoriously implacable Orson Welles to behave by driving the great man out to the middle of the Louisiana swamp and threatening to abandon him there if he didn't shape up and start making nice. While the movie is based on three short stories by William Faulkner ("Spotted Horses", "The Hamlet", and "Barn Burning"), it's written in high noir style by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, a duo mostly noted for their work in westerns, and plays like Tennessee Willliams if he liked girls as much as he liked decadence. The entire cast, including a shockingly smokin' Angela Lansbury as Welles' mistress, absolutely swelters in the crushing heat.

SUMMER FUN: No one goes to the beach, but everyone's having fun, if you know what we mean. Volleyball is likewise in short supply, but Newman's Ben Quick seems to be having a great time trying to decide which of the two innocent flowers of southern maidenhood he's going to trample into the dust first. Orson Welles is a holy terror in this movie, overacting like there's no tomorrow and no doubt making everyone else on the set wish that Ritt had shot him a few times before dumping him in the swamp; but he seems to be having a good time despite the fact that it was so hot during filming that the big honking prosthetic nose he wore as Will Varner kept falling off of his face. The only person who isn't having any fun (at least until the movie's tacked-on happy ending) is the relentlessly abused Tony Franciosa. who everybody else yells at.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: It was once a fashion truism that the south was always ten years late on picking up any new fashions, and this was certainly true at the time; while denizens of the West Coast had been rocking jazzy Aloha shirts just after WWII, in the Louisiana of The Long Hot Summer, it was the kind of garment that only someone like Tony Franciosa would wear, if you get catch the drift. Newman, however, permanently etched himself in the libidos of America's women by parading around in nothing but a fedora, an undershirt and a few strategically placed sweat stains, and Orson Welles was kind enought to refrain from sporting a fat-guy Hawaiian until his Muppet-era films. The kind of fun being had in this movie was far too nasty and naughty to lend itself to the cheap signifier of Nylon with Polynesian patterns.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Sadly -- almost unforgivably, given that this is a movie that contains not only a young Joanne Woodward but Lee Remick as well -- there are no bilkinis to be found anywhere in The Long Hot Summer. However, that's understandable; with no cooling sea breezes on their way from the humid Gulf Coast, they probably wouldn't have been all that comfortable; and with a guy like Ben Quick (which one hopes merely describes his method of seduction and not its end result) around, bikinis would probably just get in your way. In the end, the movie is a bit overripe, far too determined to be Tennessee Williams with too little Valium, and not as deep as it should be given the Faulkner pedigree. But it's hot as hell in that partcular southern-Gothic way, it's reasonably well-acted, and it's got enough snappy dialogue to choke Orson Welles. Of whom Newman says: "I respect him. I admire his manners and I admire the speeches he makes and I admire the big house he lives in. But if you're saving it all for him honey, you've got your account in the wrong bank". Now that's hot.

Summerfest '08: "Smiles of a Summer Night"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:45:00 GMT

Our goal here at the Screengrab for the Summerfest '08 feature is to give you a dozen or so movies, all of which have "summer" in the title, which you can watch to no great pain while you are waiting for your dog to bring back the tennis ball you threw in the ocean. Unsurprisingly, most movies with the word "summer" in the title – and, indeed, most movies that are about summer, or are set during the summer, or are released during the summer, or in any way have the lemonade-and-sunscreen scent of summer about them, are pretty light, fluffy concoctions, spilling over with good will, gentle humor, and people wearing far less clothing than they normally would. Today, though, is different. Today we'll be featuring a movie by none other than Ingmar freakin' Bergman. Bergman: the man who single-handedly inspired Woody Allen to become a huge bummer. Bergman: the man whose most famous film involves a dying knight playing a desperate game of chess with the personification of Death itself. Bergman: the man whose very name is synonymous with incredibly heavy European art cinema. Could this man possibly direct a breezy summer movie (or, in this case, a breezy sommar movie)? Could this man, whose movies are stuffed with miserable families, emotional trauma, and metaphysical turmoil, give us, of all things, a fun little comedy?

Grab a chilled bottle of Svedka, book your tickets on Scandinavian Airlines, and join us for some Smiles of a Summer Night!

THE ACTION: Meet Frederik Egerman. He's a Swedish attorney and self-involved clothes horse with a gorgeous teenage wife named Anne. There's one problem with their marriage: they haven't consummated it yet. Meet his son (from a previous marriage) Henrik, a recent graduate from divinity school, who faces a serious impediment to entering the priesthood: he's got a big hard-on for his stepmother Anne – and since she's off-limits, he's carrying on an affair with Petra, his father's maid. Meet Desirée Armfeldt, an actress that Frederik used to have a crush on and who is seriously envied by Anne. She lets it be known that she has feelings for Frederik, which pisses Anne off to no end. Desirée is currently seeing another well-off fop named Carl-Magnus Malcolm, whose wife, Charlotte, is a good friend of Anne. Are you following all this? No? Good. We weren't either, to be perfectly honest with you. Just take our word for it that wacky hijinks and hilarity are bound to ensue.

THE PLAYERS: Hard as it is to believe, Smiles of a Summer Night – which plays, alternately, like an Oscar Wilde comedy of manners and a more subdued, highbrow version of Three's Company – was written and directed by none other than Ingmar Bergman, the grand old man of highly cerebral and incredibly depressing Swedish art films. The movie that started out as Sommarnattens Leende isn't exactly the strongest film in his oeuvre, aesthetically speaking, and tonally, it's a bit jarring to think that this is what he produced just prior to making the deep, masterful The Seventh Seal. Still, despite its novelty value as a light, sunny comedy – or perhaps because of it – it's become a favorite of Bergmanophiles the world over, with Woody Allen essentially rewriting it as A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Stephen Sondheim launching his own adaptation with A Little Night Music. The 1955 production (set, uncharacteristically for Bergman at the time, in a contemporary milieu) also features an all-star cast of the director's favorite actors, including the legendary Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and Ulla Jacobsson.

SUMMER FUN: Generally speaking, there isn't a lot of summer fun in Ingmar Bergman movies. Sure, characters sometimes go to the beach, but it's usually to have nervous breakdowns, sexually traumatic encounters, or existential crises stemming from their incestuous affairs. They don't got to drink banana daiquiris and snap each other with towels. While Smiles of a Summer Night is, indeed, based during the four days of the calendar year that pass for summer in Scandinavia, it's frightfully low on frat-boy hijinks and authority figures falling into swimming pools. There is a certain element of summer fun, but it's typical Bergmanesque stuff for the overeducated clove-smokers in the back row: going to the opera, falling into mud puddles, and having ever so delightful romantic misunderstandings.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Despite its contemporary (well, contemporary for Sweden in the mid-1950s) setting and alleged comic tone, there is not a Hawaiian shirt anywhere to be found in Smiles of a Summer Night. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that there is not a Hawaiian shirt anywhere in any of the films of Ingmar Bergman. Given that the two main characters are unrepentant fops, it is likely that if they were to even encounter someone wearing a Hawaiian shirt, they would have him arrested and imprisoned. The closest anyone in a Bergman movie comes to wearing a Hawaiian shirt is when Max Von Sydow dresses up in a gaudy Fu-Manchu-from-Mars getup in Flash Gordon. And, just to head this question off at the pass, assume that there are no scenes where people do body shots as Boston plays over a CD jukebox.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: There's no denying that Sommarnattens Leende is stuffed with beautiful women. Although its approach to sexuality is pretty strait-laced (not surprising for the times, but it's a bit mild for Bergman), the ladies are lovely to look at, especially Ulla Jacobsson as Anne and Eva Dahlbeck as Desirée. However – and I do not wish to alarm you here, but it is my duty as a movie reviewer to tell the unvarnished truth, no matter how unpleasant – there is not a single bikini in the entire movie. This would be inexcusable enough in what is essentially a romantic summer comedy, but lest we forget, this movie was made in Sweden – the home of the world-famous Swedish Bikini Team! Despite this inexcusable lapse (what, Bergman couldn't have gotten one lousy off-season Bikini Team member to play the maid or something?), we'd still recommend this uncharacteristic but rewarding film by the master of Swedish cinema; if nothing else, it'll help you feel smarter and classier after a viewing of Summer Catch.

Summerfest '08: "Summer School"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

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!

THE ACTION: Freddy Shoop, a proto-slacker gym teacher who was once a quarterback at UCLA and managed to avoid getting all his perfect teeth knocked out, is looking forward to taking summer off at Ocean Front High School and spending the next three months gaping slack-jawed at surfer girls. Unfortunately, he is assigned to take control of a remedial English class, made up of a wide selection of teen-movie stereotypes (the loser, the slut, the nerd, the foreign exchange student, the pregnant girl, and so on). If he doesn't succeed in getting them to pass, the Earth will be hit with a meteorite and all life will be forever extinguished, or something. Will he be able to somehow inspire this ragtag group of misfits to apply themselves to their studies? Will they manage to serve a healthy dose of comeuppance to the stuffed-shirt principal? Will the disdainful, straight-laced lady teacher somehow overcome her disdain for Freddy and fall in love? Will hilarity ensue? The answer to these questions depends on whether or not you have ever seen a movie before.

THE PLAYERS: The man behind the camera here is veteran TV funnyman Carl Reiner, which is probably why the whole thing plays more like a good-natured sitcom that's been stretched out to triple length than it does a movie. Mark Harmon plays the male lead; he was actually a big TV star in 1987, for reasons that are lost to the mists of time. Kirstie Alley, looking lovely in her pre-Fat Actress days, plays his love interest as the two gleefully cavort around on screen just as if their careers aren't about to completely vanish. One of the teen stereotypes (that would be the slut) is played by a nubile young Courtney Thorne-Smith, whose TV career had not yet begun; it's sort of entertaining to watch her goof around in that period when she had no TV career thanks to not yet having had a big break rather than thanks to her career having dried up. Dean Cameron is the real standout here, stealing the show as Chainsaw, as much as this is a show capable of being stolen.

SUMMER FUN: One thing you cannot fault this movie for is a lack of summer fun. This movie is all about summer fun. It is virtually a primer in summer fun as interpreted by Hollywood screenwriters of the 1980s. Wearing sunglasses, playing cheeseball rock music (including a handful of choice tracks from the likes of Blondie, Rick James, and Oingo Boingo), driving around in fast cars, going to beach, getting a tan, making fun of one-dimensional authority figures, and re-enacting scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: it's all here. There's even some extremely mild sex and a dog wearing a lei. Someday, when our civilization has crumbled to dust, aliens will land on our dead world, and they will use this movie as Exhibit A in an outer space museum of history exhibit about Calfornia.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: In previous installments of Summerfest '08, Hawaiian shirt action has been, I am sad to say, sorely lacking. No so with Summer School, my friends. Mark Harmon is not big and fat, but he certainly is a party animal, and his Freddy Shoop is almost always clad in a Hawaiian shirt. But not just any Hawaiian shirt, oh goodness no! This is a genuine Duke Kahanamoku model he's sporting, of the exact same sort worn by Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity. Harmon liked it so much he added it to his personal collection, and can be seen on his somewhat more haggard frame in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fifteen years later.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: One of the subplots of the movie involves Courtney Thorne-Smith becoming homeless and shacking up with Harmon's character. Of course, she is forever trying to lure him into the sack, and of course, he is a noble fellow who would never dream of taking advantage of his innocent young charge, but for those of us in the audience who aren't quite so noble, we are treated to a number of shots of the ripe Ms. Thorne-Smith bikinied like there's no tomorrow. Additionally, goofball losers Chainsaw and Dave hatch a school project that involves going to the beach for the express purpose of seeing foreign exchange student Anna-Maria Mazarelli (played by former Miss Teen Italy Fabiana Udenio) in the latest swimwear. Hey, folks, it ain't Shakespeare, but as a sort of Platonic ideal of '80s summer-fun movies, Summer School is as good as it gets.

Summerfest '08: "Summer Catch"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

I knew when I started the Summerfest project, in which I review one movie each week with the word 'summer' in the title in hopes of giving faithful Screengrab readers something to do when it's too hot to wash your car, that there would be sacrifices. Since my only criterion for inclusion was the presence of the word 'summer' and Netflix availability, I knew that there would be a couple of movies that would be pretty lousy, especially given the sort of movies that come out in the summer. But I didn't realize until the 2001 Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle Summer Catch arrived in the mail that I truly understood to what depths I was willing to sink in pursuit of the project. A lot of things should have warned me off: the uniformly negative reviews; the fact that I couldn't find anyone who remembered the movie being released, let alone actually seeing it; the dire circumstances predicted by the words "Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle". But I made a promise to you people, and I'm not one to break a promise, even one that involves a hundred minutes of Jessica Biel reading inspirational slogans from an insurance company calendar in voice-over narration. I'm not saying you should watch this movie; I'm not even saying you should go into a room where this movie once sat. I'm just saying:

Put on your cleats and spit on your hands, because we're about to slide face-first into Summer Catch.

THE ACTION: Freddie Prinze Jr., who looked like he might have a career at one point until he kept making movies like Summer Catch, plays a hotshot local playing in the prestigious Cape Cod baseball league. (Much as lame platitudes stand in for dialogue, and Jessica Biel in a bikini stands in for a plot, North Carolina stands in for Massachusetts in the film.) He's got a chance to make it to the big leagues as a pitcher, but first he must overcome a variety of challenges: his dad and his coach, who alternate between telling him that he's the greatest thing since Walter Johnson and telling him that he's the worst thing since Jaime Navarro; his rival, who is heavily tattooed and is an arrogant jerk (well, the rest of the players are arrogant jerks too, but they don't have a lot of tattoos or a demeanor that makes it seem like they're on their way to tie Polly Pureheart to a railroad track); and his complicated love life, which requires him to choose between Brittany Murphy, who does an interesting trick involving beer, and Jessica Biel, who does an interesting trick involving wearing a bikini.

THE PLAYERS: Directed by the guy responsible for Radio and written by the guy responsible for The Temp, Summer Catch clearly wants us to pay no attention to the men behind the curtain. Instead, all of our energies are meant to be devoted to the young hunks and beautiful babes on screen, but in the case of the lead actors, it's difficult, because Prinze has no personality and Biel has a bad personality. Some decent character actors, including Fred Ward and Brian Dennehy, are brought in to class things up a little bit, but both of them are both looking off camera a lot to get a high five sign from their accountants that the check cleared and don't really bring anything to their roles. As for the rest of the cast, this is a movie where guys named Marc, Christian, Corey, Wilmer and Gabriel play guys named Miles, Dale, Rand, Auggie, and Calvin, or something like that, and it's really hard to keep track of which one is which. They're all supposed to be wacky, though. I think.

SUMMER FUN: Although Summer Catch is built around the all-American summer sport of baseball, it's really about the all-American summer sport of attractive teenagers making out with each other. Oddly enough, though, it fails to satisfy on both counts: the baseball action is pretty tissue-thin and there's not enough at stake that you really give a shit whether any of these dufuses make it to the bigs or not, and, by the same token, the supporting characters are all so obnoxious that you begin to actively hope that none of them ever get laid, either. The class conflict angle is undersold and the romantic leads are terminally boring, so the script tries to distract us with the wild-and-crazy antics of Prinze's teammates. Unfortunately, the movie's idea of high-larious comic action is making one of the players an unrepentant chubby-chaser, leading to some highly dignified scenes of him seducing fat girls for comic effect. Oh and also there's the guy who keeps farting in an umpire's face.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Unfortunately for all of us, this is a very different era than the 1980s, and no teenager is going to pay nine bucks to see James Van Der Beek or Freddie Prinze Jr. wearing a Hawaiian shirt. There was a time when they would have made one of the ballplayers a fat guy and let him wear a Hawaiian shirt, but in a movie like this, the only people who are exempt from being blindingly attractive are the fat girls that Marc Blucas uses as slumpbusters a la the ever-classy Mark Grace. It's slightly possible that Brian Dennehy's character, the irascible baseball coach, owns a Hawaiian shirt, but he hasn't worn it in several decades because he's been too busy crushing the dreams of impressionable teenagers.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: By this point, I think I may have already mentioned that Summer Catch features footage -- and rather extensive footage, at that -- of Jessica Biel crammed semi-successfully into a bikini. I'm not going to lie to you folks: if all you're looking for in a summer movie is Jessica Biel in a bikini (and I will by no means condemn you if that is in fact what you're looking for), then Summer Catch will give you what you want in spades. However, that will have to be all you're looking for, because it ain't going to give you anything else, unless you're a devotee of dumb voiceovers, half-baked inspirational speeches, and Freddie Prinze Jr. standing around looking awkward. And while both Biel and Murphy are fun to look at, their characters' first names are Tenley and Dede, which is just upsetting. My advice to you is to search the internet for the images of Ms. Biel in her two-piece (which are plentiful), download them, and look at them for one full minute. Then do this one hundred times, and you will have had a more enjoyable experience of watching Summer Catch than I did. See you next week, summer movie fans!

Summerfest '08: "Summer of Sam"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

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.

THE PLAYERS: Spike Lee directed this one, apparently in an attempt to prove that he was physically capable of making a movie about white people, albeit coked-up, rough-tradey, and serial-killerish white people. He even has some laughs with this conceit, appearing in the movie as a TV reporter who gets chastised by black residents of Brooklyn for never paying any attention to them. The screenplay -- co-written by Sopranos fixture Michael Imperioli -- gives some awfully hokey dialogue and characterization to Adrien Brody, who is to punk rockers what Maynard G. Krebs was to beatniks, and the rest of the cast, all of whom are quite accomplished actors, are still saddled with being heavily unlikable. It doesn't say much for the people we're supposed to be empathizing with that at the end of the movie, the person we feel sorriest for is that sick fuck David Berkowitz.

SUMMER FUN: Summer of Sam is heavy on the summer and light on the fun. Vinnie tries to have fun, but blowing coke through his every orifice and forcing his wife into omnisexual threesomes proves to be a lot more taxing than he anticipated. Richie seems to be having fun converting the neighborhood strawberry into a Kmart version of Nancy Spungeon, but his bogus English accent, bizarre hustler scenes, and uncanny ability to evoke a time traveler from 1987 Los Angeles is no fun for the rest of us. Even the witch hunt is really a lot more depressing than it is entertaining, though Lee does get plenty of comic mileage out of a scene where the locals consider the possibility that Reggie Jackson is in fact the Son of Sam, and debate whether or not they should turn him in, given that they're going to need him for the World Series. Once again, Berkowitz seems to have more joie de vivre than anyone else on screen.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: A few of the the local Italian-Americans embrace the way of the Hawaiian shirt, and you get the sneaking suspicion that Detective Lou Petrocelli, portrayed with gusto by Anthony La Paglia, has at least a few of these coconutty numbers in his wardrobe for the Fraternal Order of Police barbeques. But mostly, it's hideously overdone polyester suits, second-hand wifebeaters, and whatever Rip Taylor version of punk fashion that Adrien Brody is rocking that stands out here. The lesson of this highly meaningful movie -- other than that Spike Lee's powerful visual sensibilities as a director can overcome any number of deficiencies at the script level -- is that having some nut running around pounding peoples' skulls open with a .44 can really throw cold water on your summer fun.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Everyone seems to be having sex in this movie -- hell, the robust lustiness with which an uncredited John Turturro imbues the talking dog that tells David Berkowitz to kill people implies that even he's getting some -- but hardly anyone seems to be enjoying it. It's a highly Catholic movie where having too much of a good time gets you stuck with an angry spouse who wants to divorce you, an angry mob who wants to lynch you, or an angry lunatic who wants to shoot you in the face. Although there's lots of pretty women in the movie (including Sorvino, Bebe Neuwirth, and Jennifer Esposito), all of them end up crying, and none of them wear a bikini. All that said, it's a damn good movie despite its reputation as a lesser Spike Lee effort, and it has one of the highest occurences of the word "fuck" of any movie ever made. Which, if you've had some of the same kind of summers that we've had, is perfectly appropriate.

Summerfest '08: "Summer Lovers"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

If beers, rock bands and sausages are all allowed to have summerfests, we here at the Screengrab see no reason why movie blogs shouldn't get to share in the fun. Our Summerfest series will take a look, every Wednesday for fifteen weeks from May until September, at movies with the word 'summer' in the title and some connection, however tenuous, to everybody's favorite bikini party season. These movies are by no means essential; most of them aren't even any good. But they will help you kill a few hours when you're recovering form a margarita hangover. This week, much as we did last week with A Summer Place, we'll be taking a look at a movie that became a huge hit on the strength of a super-cheesy, inescapable theme song and America not wanting to admit it was seeing the movie because it wanted to see sme pretty young things getting it on.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present: 1982's Summer Lovers.

THE ACTION: Peter Gallagher, in the days before he was a leather-skinned, hyper-tanned self-parody, plays a Greco-American schmucko who convinces his hot girlfriend to visit the Greek Isles with him for summer vacation. His girlfriend is played by a pre-crazy, but unfortunately not pre-bad-actress, Daryl Hannah, who nails the part of the role where she is required to look hot, but not the part of the role where she is required to play an artsy intellectual photographer. Eventually she gets on Gallagher's nerves, and he starts carrying on with a juicy little archaeologist, played with world-class ennui by the doomed Valerie Quennessen, who you may remember from...well, nothing else ever, really. Daryl stomps off to confront this French tart, and guess what happens? No, really, guess. The answer will shock and amaze you.

THE PLAYERS: Writer/director Randal Kleiser -- yes, folks, this is another auteur-theory bikini movie -- certainly had a strange career. Coming up from TV with The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, he made a huge splash with his first two major films -- Grease and The Blue Lagoon. Both of them made a kerjillion dollars and seemed to prove that Kleiser could do no wrong, and so he went ahead and made Summer Lovers to establish that he could do very wrong indeed. After that, he fell into directing a bunch of kid-flicks, and then apparently met his match in being asked to make a movie that starred both Amanda Bynes and Jamie-Lynn Sigler, after which he fell off the face of the Earth. Gallagher and Hannah both went on to have extremely successful careers, but Valerie Quennessen, who is so admirably naked through most of this movie, became co-founder of the 1980s Obscurity Club with Klinton Spilsbury.

SUMMER FUN: The ubiquity of "Hard To Say I'm Sorry (Get Away)" by Chicago, among a bunch of other hits by the Pointer Sisters, Prince, and Michael Sembello, mde this the inescapable soundtrack of 1982, but as someone who lived through it the first time, I'd call listening to that song less "summer fun" than "summer torture that the authors of the Geneva Conventions were too short-sighted to anticipate". Even worse, while the three main characters develop a menage a trois with one another, at no point in the movie are we treated to a scene of Daryl Hannah and Valerie Quennessen making out! This is as unconscionable as making a movie with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and not letting either of them dance. Also, there is way too little lounging around the beach naked, and way too much sitting around talking about people's feelings. The proper ratio of these activities in a movie like this is 100:0.

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: Unfortunately, Peter Gallagher is meant to be portraying a sensitive intellectual and modern male, so there is little room in his weltanschaung for the universal signifier of the big fat party animal. He does spend a lot of time shirtless, which is meant to be a sop to the ladies in hopes that they don't notice what an unbelievably sexist movie this is, what with the two girls servicing his needs all the time and whenever one of them feels a little taken advantage of she gets a lecture on how to not, like, get hung up on the jealousy thing, babe. He also charms Valerie Quennessen by comparing her lovemaking technique to that of a horse.

BIKINI PARTY TIME: If nothing else, Summer Lovers rates very, very high on the Bikini Party Time scale. Shedding all the inhibitions he was forced to observe due to The Blue Lagoon' s underage stars, Kleiser pulls out all the stops here, cramming the movie with as much bikini action as he can possibly conjure up. Even the plot rolls into action with the common observation of tourists who have never actually been to Europe before: look at how uninhibited they all are! They're not, like, all hung up on sex! Therefore, let's screw around as much as is humanly possible. It's pretty stupid, but as '80s softcore goes, you could do a lot worse. Young people would be well advised to watch this movie and realize how desperately bad things were for the rest of us in the 1980s and contemplate how truly far we've come. Everybody needs a little time away...

Summerfest '08: "A Summer Place"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Summer is one of my favorite times to see a movie. Growing up in Arizona in the shadows of a shopping mall, going to the multiplex on a hot summer day when I didn't have school and wanted to kill a few dozen brain cells out of the blinding sun and wilting heat was one of my absolute favorite things to do. Let the cool kids go show off by the swimming pool: for me it was the air-conditioned comfort and the fulfilling fantasies of the silver screen. This summer, in between checking out what's new in the world of blockbusters and indie flicks of today, I'll be bringing you a mini-review of 15 'summer' movies of the past, judged by criteria I made up the other day over a couple of watermelon margaritas. They won't always be good movies, but they'll always bring you a certain summery je ne sais quoi.

Let's start with one of the most famous summer flicks of all time: 1959's A Summer Place.

THE ACTION: Rich toff Richard Egan totes his snobby, moralistic wife (Constance Ford) and pouty, vine-ripe teenage daughter to a New England resort. The owner of the resort is grungy failed capitalist Arthur Kennedy and his lovely lady Dorothy McGuire, who run the joint alongside their dimwitted but hunky son, Troy Donahue. Twenty years prior, Egan had a little thang-thang going with McGuire, and as everyone goes about their summer business, the two rekindle their hot and heavy relationship, as their hormone-crazed children follow suit. This being the 1950s and all, Ford completely flips out, a shameful divorce takes place, a pregnancy scare ensues, and everyone looks at each other very meaningfully while wearing not particularly revealing swimwear. You got all that?

THE PLAYERS: Writer/director Delmer Daves brought to the big screen this adaptation of the biggest '50s potboiler novel this side of Peyton Place, but the real stars here are Donahue and Dee, the resplendent teen idols of the era. Their hot bods and perfect features cast a glare off the screen that you can feel on your brow, and their bad acting raises a stink that overpowers the smell of sea breezes and stale popcorn. Anyone who thinks that vapid, over-exploited, undertalented teen sensations are a recent phenomenon needs look no further than the clunky performances of Troy and Sandra, who became huge stars with the movie's success. (Daves hitched his wagon pretty thoroughly to Troy Donahue's star after this, which is probably why you've never heard of him before.)

SUMMER FUN: If your idea of a good time is hanging around a shabby beach resort and sipping cocktails, this is a real good-time party movie. But it's sadly lacking in any real watusi-and-Bacardi throwdowns, and the ugly shadow of rock and roll never rears itself across the door of the B&B. (Instead, you get Max Steiner's memorable score, which, when recorded by Percy Faith and his orchestra, became a monster hit, and one of the most inescapable tunes of its day.) The adults' idea of fun is sitting around sipping cocktails and making catty comments, along with some fun class resentment over who can afford the better well drinks, and there isn't much surfing to be had around here, so the kids have to follow their parents' lead and fill the long empty summer days with lots and lots of '50s-style fucking. Repressively delicious!

HAWAIIAN SHIRTS: There's not a lot of room for the universal signifier of summer fun here. The movie is set on the east coast, so it leans more towards clamdiggers and outfits that look like they weren't quite formal enough for the tennis court. (Oddly enough, though, the resort where the movie takes place -- designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, no less -- is not in New England, but in Carmel, California. Would it have killed them to throw in one surfboarding sequence, I ask you?)

BIKINI PARTY TIME: Ho yeah! Let those who doubt the awesome power of sublimated sexuality behold rock-ribbed, blank-faced Troy Donahue, lounging around in his tight shorts, vainly attempting to figure out what everyone else in the movie is trying to say. Behold also Sandra Dee, America's favorite symbol of purity, being despoiled before our very eyes, decked out in barely modest beach couture as she frowns out the famous line "Have you been bad, Johnny? Have you been bad with other girls?" Has he ever! A Summer Place is a little too crammed with soap-opera histrionics and Freudian middle-class guilt to be a real good-time summer party movie, but as a prime example of potboiler sex romps and the movie that launched a million shameful teenage boners, it's well worth a look.