Reel Hot

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.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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