Summer '03 movie review & film summary (2018)
Having just made a memorable impression in Eugene Kotlyarenko’s excellent “Wobble Palace,” Kilmer further solidifies his reputation as a promising talent by playing Luke not as a jerk or stereotypical hunk, but as a confused kid unaware of the consequence of his actions. He claims that he chose a life in the priesthood for its job security, a surefire recipe for disaster, and has no initial qualms with submitting to Jamie’s advances. Gleason takes a refreshing approach to their sex scenes, handling them with tenderness and honesty rather than treating them as a joke, though Jamie’s voice-over gets a laugh when articulating her first impression of Luke’s penis, which she dubs a “fleshy sock puppet.” The encroaching dread of getting caught is effectively conveyed by the sound of police cars ambling nearby.
Jamie’s tendency to smother her words in sarcasm is typical of the shields utilized by teenagers to cloak their inner vulnerability, and though the film’s screwball energy keeps things relatively sunny, neither Gleason nor King fail to take the central protagonist’s emotions seriously. King’s comfort may lie in the realm of comedy, but she has the chops to inhabit characters of all stripes, such as the bully played superbly by her sister Hunter in Amy S. Weber’s “A Girl Like Her,” who awakens to the pain she’s inflicted. If she were merely mugging for the camera, King’s galvanized expressions in the early scenes of “Summer '03” wouldn’t be nearly as hilarious. Setting Jamie’s summer of bad choices in motion is the death of her anti-Semitic grandmother, Dotty, played by June Squibb with the same deadpan outlandishness that made her Oscar-nominated work in “Nebraska” such a delight. One by one, she summons each member of Jamie’s family to her deathbed, were she dispenses insults, offensive advice and buried secrets, creating a cacophony of outrage that enables her to pass on with a smile on her face.
No attempt is made to put a warm and fuzzy spin on this plot thread, and had it not been played for laughs, it could’ve easily turned into “Hereditary”-style horror, with Squibb’s manipulative matriarch wreaking havoc from beyond the grave. After being ordered by Dotty to seek out a gay conversion camp to cure his alleged homosexuality, Jamie’s younger cousin (an underused Logan Medina) steals his parents’ car and nearly gets himself killed in the process. Distraught by his mother’s revelation that he never knew his biological father, Jamie’s dad (Paul Scheer) abandons his family to hunt him down, returning several days later with a cancer-stricken German who spews demeaning slurs at Jamie’s Jewish mother (Andrea Savage). Dotty’s most ardent instruction for Jamie is that she school herself in oral sex, an education her sexually experienced pal (Kelly Lamor Wilson) is only too happy to administer.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46srKallad6cX%2BMa2dqcA%3D%3D