Illustration by Jillian Tamaki.
Do The Right Thing (1989)
Even the
brownstone buildings look sweaty
and burnt in Spike Lee’s masterful
portrait of civility melting in the heat. At
the highest pitch of hottest summer, pizza deliverer
Mookie (Lee) buzzes like a fly between the arguments
and stereotypes that fuel endless
conversation on his block of Brooklyn on a single
day. A sex scene with an ice cube lingering over
Rosie Perez’s watermelon mouth is the only respite
from the weather, so it’s only a matter of time
before the heat causes an explosion. The racial
tension that simmers the rest of the year comes
to bright, blinding light in the shop of Italian-American
pizza owner Sal, played by Danny
Aiello. Damn, this movie is good,
and as it ages, it looks less and less like agitprop
from an angry young man (Lee was only 33) and
more and more like one of the most prescient,
visually popping pieces of 20th-century art.
Pauline at the Beach (1983)
While North American teens spend the chasm
between grades reading Seventeen,
drinking Slurpees and preening in front of the
mirror (maybe that was just me), over in France,
13-year-old Pauline sips wine, experiences a
sexual awakening and learns about love from
the cloud of suitors that hovers around her
physically perfect, romantically disastrous
cousin Marion. Set during a beach vacation at
the end of summer, this sophisticated world — plus de fromage with
your Sartre, anyone? — is a fantasy of the intellectual life
as it appears in all of writer-director Eric
Rohmer’s films, but Pauline at the Beach is
so playful and charming that it never feels false.
A coming-of-age film that actually respects female
sexuality.
George Washington (2000)
A small group of children — some black, some
white, all poor and oblivious to such labels
— plod and skip through the North Carolina summer,
drifting along railroad tracks, their bodies
half-hidden by chest-high weeds. “When I look
at my friends, I know there’s goodness,” says
young Nasia, invoking an American pastoral dialect
that 26-year-old writer-director David Gordon
Green nails with astonishing maturity. These
aren’t cute movie kids, but defined and sensitive,
even funny, individuals. At the centre of their
circle is George, Nasia’s love interest, a gentle
eccentric who wears a football helmet to keep
the faulty plate in his head secure. Within the
hermetically sealed universe of a childhood summer,
grown-ups have all the presence of the wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-ing Peanuts teachers;
they are completely absent when tragedy strikes.
Critics cried “Terrence Malick” when George
Washington came out, but this isn’t a rip-off,
it’s a riff.
Sharky's revenge: Beachgoers run from troubled waters in Jaws. AP Photo/Universal Studios.
Jaws (1975)
On set, the shark was named Bruce, which isn’t
scary, and it looked like a large plastic aquarium
toy, which isn’t scary, either. But 30 years
after Jaws defined the summer blockbuster
and made Steven Spielberg a household name, it…
is… so… scary! A great white shacks
up in an eastern U.S. beach town and throws a
damper on fun in the sun. Spielberg betters Peter
Benchley’s bestseller, finding grim humour in
the shark’s casually predatory attitudes towards
every I’ll-get-him cowboy who tries to take on
the big fish. John Williams’ music remains the
soundtrack to a million children refusing to
take baths.
Meatballs (1979)
We now think of Bill Murray as an art-house
genius and muse to Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson,
but at one point, the guy was just an improvising Saturday
Night Live veteran playing a camp counsellor
who facilitates a really gross wiener-eating
contest. Meatballs is crass and adolescent
— oh, Spaz; oh, girl wrestling — but it’s not
actually that dumb. The jokes are fast and plentiful,
and the Animal House plot about an underdog
camp taking on the rich kids at the Camp Olympics
is given a great, unsentimental twist by Murray’s
heart-of-gold, wise-of-ass performance.
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Q: What’s hotter than a chain gang?
A: Paul Newman on a chain gang. Cool indeed,
Newman is Luke, a convict in jail for the super-punk,
don’t-care crime of cutting the heads off parking
meters. One of cinema’s great anti-heroes, Luke
becomes repulsed by the fellow inmates who worship
him. Watching an unbreakable man slowly break
in an unforgiving prison (“What we have here
is a failure to communicate…”), sucked of life
by the southern heat, is as painful as a gradual,
reddening sunburn.
My American Cousin (1985)
The awkward, slightly amateur look
(and acting) of this nostalgic snapshot
of one girl’s pivotal 1950s summer only emphasizes
the film’s innocent temperament. Made in the
John Hughes era of too-clever teens sassing and
sexing, writer-director Sandy Wilson’s soft,
autobiographical love letter treats the arrival
of a hunky American in a small Okanagan Valley
town with nothing less than girlish rapture.
Young Sandy, played by Margaret Langrick, opens
the movie reading a diary entry: “Nothing ever
happens.” But the hunk is her American
cousin, and at last something is happening,
if only in her imagination. Langrick
plays Sandy with eye-rolling teen
shame and the exuberance of a little kid in perfect,
equal measure. Why didn’t she swipe Molly Ringwald’s
mantle and become a star?
Up the creek: from left to right, Ned Beatty, Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox don't get the vacation they bargained for in Deliverance. Photo Warner Bros. Courtesy Getty Images.
Deliverance (1972)
Ah, vacation. Rushing rivers, twinkling
sunlight, campfires and anal rape! It’s not
fair that Deliverance is
now just a cheap punchline (see
above), an excuse for urbanites in
the presence of trees to make fun of hillbillies
and air-banjo. John Boorman’s stealth direction
— nothing flashy required — makes
for a horror movie of the mind. Four professional
guys from the city on a weekend hunting getaway
run into backwoods dwellers with their own idea
of fun. Based on the James Dickey novel, this
thriller about man outside of nature is all the
scarier for what we hardly see: urban humanity
growing as flabby and useless as Ned Beatty’s
gut. Also worth renting for the rare sight of
Burt Reynolds not sucking.
The Swimmer (1968)
Critically disdained upon release, The
Swimmer now looks like something entirely
radical and eerily contemporary,
a great American tragedy hidden in suburbia.
Almost comically virile in his tight swim trunks,
Burt Lancaster plays a businessman who has
been away for the summer and suddenly reappears
poolside at a friends’ tony estate, announcing
over drinks that he is going to swim home,
pool by pool, across the wealthy Westchester
Valley. Each stop brings further revelations
that he is on an epic journey: the fall occurred
somewhere else, in some other time, and he’s
attempting, drink by drink (it’s based on a
John Cheever story, so ice clinking is dialogue),
pool by pool, to swim his way back
to Eden.
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Sunny California was never so cruel. John Garfield
is a drifter — drifting is so much easier to
do in summer — who takes a job at a restaurant
where the proprietor’s bored housewife, played
by Lana Turner, proves to be the ultimate femme
fatale. After sweating up the floor to a Latin
beat, she reels him in with the line, “It’s too
hot to dance.” The moment Garfield watches her
swimming in her white bathing suit is the moment
you know he’ll do anything to get her, even murder
her husband. Sultry without being explicit —
a subtle difference utterly missed by the 1981
Nicholson-Lange remake — Postman is
noir for the brightest season.
Letters:
Some great picks by Katrina for summer movies. I would like to add Summer of 42 with Jennifer O'Neal. It has a great narrative and a storyline that really reflects that change from teenager to adult. It's shot almost entirely outdoors capturing the timelessness of a long, hot summer. And speaking of a long, hot summer, what about Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
John Corcelli
Toronto, Ontario
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