The movies that have defined my summer
The family summer movie outing is a ritual I have always loved.
There’s something exhilarating and tribal about heading to a popular or provocative movie on a warm summer night with no expectations other than to share the experience — and should we get popcorn now or gelato after? When my kids were growing up, there were some memorable summer movie outings, good and bad.
There was Air Force One in July of 1997, starring Harrison Ford as a hunky heroic U.S. president (sigh) who does battle with “communist radicals” who hijack his fabled plane and threaten his family. Ford as president naturally outsmarts them all, famously muttering “get off my plane” as he hurls yet another bad guy overboard. What’s not to love?
Two years later, while vacationing on Salt Spring Island, B.C., our two kids hauled us to The Matrix, which had already been out a while but was showing one evening in a community centre.
Imagine their early adolescent disgust when neither their father nor I quite understood what this slavishly adored science fiction extravaganza was about. “But I don’t get it,” I said, apparently one too many times. I actually have flashbacks of cognitive confusion every time I see that picture of Keanu Reeves in a black leather maxi coat.
Flash forward to this steamy summer now drawing to a close, during which — was it also perhaps the lure of the air-conditioning? — four movies qualified for my summer movie ritual, two in perfect pass-the-popcorn mode, and two that required not just gelato but coffee and a serious discussion after.
One Sunday afternoon, a family group of us — all very grown up now — caught Mission: Impossible — Fallout. It was, of course, quintessential summer movie material.
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, even sky diving, seemed finally able to laugh convincingly at himself as he chased all over the world to recover two spheres of plutonium, or as the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane drolly put it, “Ethan has 72 hours to get those balls back. Intellectual discussion will have to wait.”
Best of all, the women in the movie, from Angela Bassett as the CIA boss through Michelle Monaghan as Ethan’s ex, along with agent (and love interest) Rebecca Ferguson and mischievous negotiator Vanessa Kirby all had roles that showed off their courage and smarts. I got to enjoy the spoofy actionpacked fun and have a #MeToo moment of satisfaction.
For a summer date-night movie, what else? Crazy Rich Asians, still mowing down the box office, was romantic, funny, and either screwily stereotypical or bravely groundbreaking, depending on your point of view.
In the end, it was deliciously both. Featuring the muchcelebrated, first all-Asian cast in years, Crazy Rich Asians, starring Constance Wu, Henry Golding and Michelle Yeoh is now a contemporary blockbuster. It’s also one of the most charming rom-coms in recent years. And what we really needed to eat after seeing it was Chinese dumplings.
With spy capers and datenight romance taken care of, but still too many hot nights not to crave that cold theatre air, I also took in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.
The movie — Lee’s best in years — is biting, funny, and always engrossing. It not only catapulted me back to the 1970s as it told an improbable true story of a black cop who infiltrated a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, but it fiercely drew a plumb line from then to now as we contemplate an unleashing of anti-Black racism that has soared during the Donald Trump era.
John David Washington, son of the legendary Denzel Washington, is remarkable in the role of Ron Stallworth, an undercover cop in Colorado Springs who embarks on his own Mission Impossible to impersonate — at least on the telephone — a vile, racist white guy who wants to join the Klan. In a twist of irony, Stallworth sends in a white, Jewish colleague (Adam Driver, also excellent) to impersonate him.
The movie takes us all the way to last summer’s white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Va., during which a woman named Heather Heyer died and many other people were injured when a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Lee movingly dedicates the film to Heyer.
The fourth movie that defined my summer was The Accountant of Auschwitz, a family movie in one literal sense. A well-reviewed Canadian documentary directed by Matthew Shoychet, and written and produced by Toronto’s Ricki Gurwitz (a member of my extended family), the film tells the story of Oskar Groening, who, in his 90s, became one of the last SS officers to be put on trial. It deftly explores the moral ambiguities of his trial in a German town, but it also chillingly lays out the complexities of what it means to be complicit, an understanding we could use now in what can be described as a new era of complicity.
The documentary is premiering in both Montreal and Winnipeg in the coming week, as well as returning to the Hot Docs theatre in Toronto. From Tom Cruise owning the sky to impossibly rich Singapore denizens owning everything else, from a primer on the horrors and idiocy of white supremacy to a moving examination of how long it takes to finally hold people accountable for their unspeakable crimes, my summer movie ritual was one of the best in years.
How about yours?