The ultimate summer movies
What’s yours?
Maybe it’s just the ceaseless heat in London, where temperatures have barely dropped below 30 degrees celsius (that’s like 90 fahrenheit for our American readers), but the summer has left me fatigued. I haven’t slept properly in what feels like three months, and my typical cool-down techniques no longer work.
I’ve realized that I actually prefer summer at arm’s length—preferably projected onto a movie screen. A cinema is actually a pretty nice place to be when it’s hot like this, and plenty of us have been hanging out there. Just look at the unhinged box office numbers for movies like The Odyssey (a great film, which is turning out to be a controversial opinion over here at i-D towers) and the new Spider-Man (which is good, but skippable for the non-completists—like Marvel lore connective tissue).
We’ve largely decided that the summer movie season ends this weekend, with the release of David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street. I haven’t seen it yet (I had to skip the press screening to be a good friend to someone so don’t fkn @ me) but for so long it was being framed as a surefire flop. It’s a movie about a suburban family inadvertently time traveling back to the dinosaur ages, I think, headed up by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, all of which sounds fun to me.
But it has no bankable box office stars (Hathaway: for every The Odyssey, there’s a Mother Mary), and is based on an original concept from a director whose last movie was a tin-foil hat LA black comedy called Under the Silver Lake that tanked at the box office (I loved it btw). From what I hear, The End of Oak Street is actually a blast—an “old fashioned” summer movie we used to enjoy before we had to pretend to give a fuck about Star Wars spin-offs. If you see it, let me know what you think, and I’ll reply with my thoughts too.
What else have you enjoyed this summer? I liked The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s risqué riff on the romcom. I was big on Backrooms, the better horror breakout for me (sorry Obsession!), and Blue Heron, Sophy Romvari’s stark and sad debut, which only reached UK theaters in June. Over the next couple of weeks, Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is rolling out around the globe. That’s a summer movie with a weird, queer bent to it; a slasher that’s also about having really good gay sex.
The “ultimate summer movie” can sort of mean anything, but I figure it’s about where it takes you: summers are warm, obviously, but also the location of so much nostalgia. So as we wave goodbye to another summer, it feels like a nice time to look back on the films that capture it perfectly, from ’70s classics to indie cult favorites.
Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)
I talk about this beloved classic so much that it’s practically becoming a problem. But it fits here because it aligns almost exactly with my experience of being a preteen kid in a small town finding shit to do during the hot and lazy summer holidays. There is one shot in this film (see above) that I think is maybe my favorite shot from a summer movie ever: the haze of a just-before-sunset sky, the dander and flies in the air, and the stark figures of four friends on a pilgrimage of their own making.
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsey, 2002)
While everyone’s gagging over Samantha Morton in The Odyssey, they should make time for Morvern Callar if they haven’t seen it. A movie about a supermarket cashier (Morton) who comes home to find her boyfriend has died by suicide—only for her to dispose of his body and sell his novel manuscript with her name on it. It’s a film about running away from your problems, and the possibilities that come when you’re freed from a situation that stilts you. Soon after, she leaves her perpetually overcast Scottish port town for Almeria, Spain, and the film develops this Fanta Orange, cheap holiday hue. It’s a masterpiece; in my opinion, Lynne Ramsey’s best.
Kids (Larry Clark, 1995)
This movie has such a gnarly premise, but it sticks in my brain as a summer film because of how sticky and bright it makes New York’s summer look. A gang of skater boys mope around the city’s parks and sidewalks, looking for something to do, all while Chloë Sevigny tries to track down, and stop, their overly promiscuous weirdo leader.
Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
Everyone credits Linklater’s Before trilogy as some of the ultimate movies about summer, but I hold that same fondness for Boyhood. Shot for a few days each summer over 10 years, I remember feeling that weird sense of nostalgia (!!) for the years I was watching on screen, only in a totally brand-new film. I love the journey of it, the sense of small-town, suburban life that bursts into a beautiful trip to a scenic, rugged, sandy state park. It’s a film about becoming someone, and how formative those long, endless summers are when you’re a kid.
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)
A sweet and modest slapstick comedy that introduced Jacques Tati’s beloved character to the world, it captures the singular experience of a beachside holiday hotel. You can still stay at the hotel this film was shot at, if you want the full experience: It’s in Saint-Nazaire, and now owned by a Best Western lol.
A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)
Pool water is the failsafe ingredient in a summer movie, and Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash has a lot of it. His weird psychodrama, about a silent rockstar and her filmmaker husband at war with their interloping house guests, is as picture perfect as the Hockney painting that gave it its name.
Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
Without Jaws, we wouldn’t have the summer blockbuster. This movie literally birthed that concept, when it hit cinemas in June 1975 and audiences in their millions queued around the block to see it. It might be about how splashing about in the sea can lead to you getting your limbs severed by a gigantic great white shark, but it’s also the movie that made me want to experience New England in the summer! Swings and roundabouts, I guess.
My Summer of Love (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2004)
Before he started making cold, steely dramas in his home country, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski made a bucolic lesbian romance starring a young Emily Blunt. Set in Yorkshire, it follows the relationship between a posh, preened woman (Blunt) and a working-class girl (Natalie Press) as they fall in love.
Not to be a simp for movie marketing but the trailer for the restoration of Ken Russell’s The Devils is maybe the best I’ve seen all year.
I’m here in Edinburgh for the film festival, catching a few new and exciting projects. We premiered some photographs from Pretty Babies, the Ashley Benson-starring directorial debut of Tyler-Marie Evans, about two teenagers running away from home to Hollywood in the hopes of becoming stars. Also excited for: The State of Us (last hurrah terminal cancer buddy comedy), Mission (George MacKay reuniting with the director of his best performance in For Those in Peril), Northbound (Julia Fox!), and the first UK screenings of I Want Your Sex, and the Cannes hits Hope and Goodbye Cruel World. You can still get tickets here.
