The Screengrab : the blue lagoon

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...

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

PRETTY BABY (1978) & THE BLUE LAGOON (1980)

Europe is a very different place than America, and the seventies were a very different time. From Socrates to Roman Polanski, Europeans have always had a much more, uh, relaxed attitude when it comes to May/December (or even early April/December) relationships. Whether said social mores indicate healthy, sex-positive liberation or sick, twisted perversion, the fact remains: them foreigners sure do make a lot of movies about sexed-up youngsters. In 1971, Louis Malle directed Murmur of the Heart, about a 15-year-old boy who gets hit on by priests and has sex with his mother. A few years later, Malle hit the controversy jackpot with Pretty Baby, the lurid yet turgid tale of a young girl raised by prostitutes whose virginity is auctioned off prior to her marriage to an older man. Brooke Shields, rouged and naked throughout, became the (literal) poster girl for commodified, sexualized “innocence” and a precursor to the sexualization of even younger girls in those creepy JonBenét Ramsey-esque pre-pubescent beauty pageants that Little Miss Sunshine mocked so brilliantly. Two years after Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields lost her virginity again in The Blue Lagoon, this time to a barely legal Christopher Atkins (who would later shake his groove thing for cougar Lesley Ann Warren as a male stripper in the 1983 cheese-whiz classic A Night In Heaven). That Lagoon was such a smash hit in the U.S. had everything to do with the movie’s lush cinematography and wholesome depiction of pure, innocent love and nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that its hot teenage stars were (tastefully!) naked half the time...because, of course, we Americans have superior morals.

PALE RIDER (1985)

In this inflated imitation of his own High Plains Drifter, the director-star Clint Eastwood plays a mystical, supernatural gunslinger who materializes after a 14-year-old girl (Sydney Penny) has prayed for a hero to come and deal with the meanies making things hard for her gold-mining community. Once he's arrived, though, Penny isn't content with having him shoot all the bad guys; she also puts the moves on him, only to have him turn her down, maybe because he's got something going on with her mother (Carrie Snodgress). In a snit, Penny has the bright idea of trying to make him jealous by riding off to where the bad guys are holed up so that Eastwood has to come and collect her before a drooling Richard Kiel can club her and drag her off to his cave. Pale Rider is just one of several films in the Eastwood oeuvre that can make you wonder if, back in the early seventies, Clint left some part of his brain unclaimed on the set of The Beguiled.

THE KID (1921)

The title character in this Charlie Chaplin silent is played by the seven-year-old Jackie Coogan, but the movie features a dream sequence set in Heaven, and in that sequence, Chaplin contrived an attention-getting bit for Lita Grey, an untested young actress who, decades before Nabokov wrote his novel, was sometimes known as "Lolita." In the movie, Gray, looking very cute, and playing a character known as "Flirtatious Angel", traipses out wearing big wings and starts cuddling up to Chaplin like a friendly kitten. She encourages him to chase after her by skipping away and flashing what she would later describe as "a very skinny leg", and he obligingly goes literally flying after her. Chaplin used her again in The Idle Rich and planned to cast her as the female lead in The Gold Rush, but she wound up playing a small role in movie history and a considerably larger one in Chaplin's scandal-plagued personal life; he had to recast her role, and marry her, when he got her pregnant at age 16. (Chaplin was 35.) Their marriage, which produced two children and ended in an ugly public divorce, lasted only three years, and her professional and intimate personal life with Chaplin was over by the time she was twenty.

BULLY (2001)

Larry Clark gets accused of a lot of things by critics. I mean, a lot. In the view of some film writers, he’s second only to Lars von Trier as the filmmaker most likely to be Nosferatu reincarnated. But the most common charge is that he’s some kind of dirty old man – a guy who makes movies for no better reason than to look at attractive young people cavorting in front of his camera lens so he can yell “AROO-GA!”. This charge is not only a tad conspiratorial (Clark lives in New York, a city where it’s pretty easy to get a gander at naked teenagers, and making expensive, highly controversial films would seem to be an awfully roundabout way of doing it), but also pretty fatuous when directed specifically at Clark. I mean, can you name a major Hollywood movie of the last 30 years that didn’t feature an attractive, overly sexualized young man or woman in a leading role? Most critics were pretty indulgent of the alleged Chester-the-Molester qualities of Clark’s 1999 debut feature, Kids, because they bought into its sense of impending moral panic; but by 2001, when the world had decided it had bigger problems than that of 17-year-olds having sex, a lot of people decided that Bully, his loose adaptation of a real Florida murder case, was nothing but a justification for Clark to see pretty young things in their altogether. But then, as now, this charge was ignorant of history and tone-deaf to reality. Clark has always been obsessed with beautiful young people who obliviously hurtle into self-destruction, including himself: he’s a brilliant photographer whose first book, Tulsa, featured his speed-freak friends shooting themselves into early graves, and like his films – Bully in particular – the grim realities of death and insanity gave a distinctively un-erotic charge to even the most beautiful bodies in his photographs. It was also released when he was 27 years old (and many of the photos were taken when he was much younger), exempting him from the charge of simply being a horny old coot. Later photographic works would focus on his own drug addiction, the tragic lives of handsome but damaged Times Square hustlers, and, tellingly, the way that media images of young people shape – and warp – youth culture. Far from being a dirty old man, the artist who made Bully was simply following a path he had been on for over 30 years. There’s no denying it’s a film crammed with prurient interest, but that serves only to solidify Clark’s central obsession: that the ignorant self-destruction of youth is all the more tragic because they are so vibrant and beautiful.

FREEWAY II: CONFESSIONS OF A TRICKBABY (1999)

Society’s moral strictures being what they are, film directors, when they bring to us a movie featuring a bunch of hot young things romping around in their birthday suits, must think of some way to convince us that we’re not watching for the obvious reason. There are many ways to do this: dramatic tension, outright deception, or the pretense of imparting some sort of grand moral lesson. Matthew Bright, the deranged auteur behind the Freeway movies, has discovered a method that’s, as far as we know, unique to him: he wedges his nymphomaniacal teenagers in between a bizarre framework of re-imagined postmodernist fairy tales tinged with a truly surreal sense of humor. The second movie in a proposed trilogy, Freeway II is, believe it or not, a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel”, only with lesbian shower scenes, cannibalistic transvestite nuns, and David Alan Grier. Absent the deranged trappings, it’s unlikely that this movie would ever have gotten made; Natasha Lyonne was of age in the female lead, but she’s meant to be playing an 18-year-old juvenile delinquent, and her partner in crime, the demented serial killer La Ciclona (played by the riveting Maria Celedonio), is explicity, and we mean explicitly, portrayed as being sixteen years old. Were this a mainstream movie aimed at a mainstream audience, it probably would have generated a Senate investigation when Lyonne and Celedonio get it on in a beer-fueled makeout session in a hotel bathroom; but Bright had already set the scene for this sort of nonsense by presenting us with a mass prison vomiting scene (choreographed like a Busby Berkley musical, with the bulimic prisoners as chorines) and a striptease involving a girl with a prosthetic leg. He continues in this vein, ultimately asking us to cope with the image of Vincent Gallo in nun drag trying to bake the hapless Ms. Lyonne into a pie. In the face of all that, there’s simply no room for self-incrimination for ogling teen girls; you just have to sit back and go where the ride takes you.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The 37th Annual Razzies Nominations

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The nominations for the 2007 Golden Raspberry Awards, or "Razzies" have been announced. The awards, which seek to recognize the worst in filmmaking, were created in 1980 by publicist John Wilson. In the first year of their existence, awards were presented to the Village People-Bruce Jenner-Steve Guttenberg vehicle Can't Stop the Music (Worst Picture and Screenplay), Neil Diamond (Worst Actor for his remake of The Jazz Singer, and Brooke Shields (Worst Actress for The Blue Lagoon); the Worst Director prize that year went to the director of Xanadu, Robert Greenwald, who, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, made no more disco-roller skating musicals but instead resurfaced as a specialist in progressive-minded political documentaries. Thus have the Razzies served as a shaper of culture and careers.

One novelty if this year's event is that two performers are up for playing multiple roles in nominated films. Eddie Murphy scored a record five nominations for the Worst Picture Norbit, including Worst Actor, Worst Supporting Actor, and Worst Supporting Actress. (He's also nominated for having had a hand in the screenplay.) The thriller I Know Who Killed Me garnered nine nominations, including Worst Picture and a pair of Worst Actress nominations for its star, Lindsay Lohan; both Murray and Lohan are also, paradoxically, nominated for Worst Screen Couple for their work with themselves. Other nominees for Worst Picture include Bratz, Daddy Day Camp, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, a movie whose trailer had repulsed moviegoers stampeding out of theaters as if a wizened prospector had announced that gold had been struck at the concession stand. The awards are traditionally announced the day before the Academy Awards ceremony. Unlike the Oscars, the Razzies are unlikely to affected by the writers' strike.