Hot Summer Nights (2018)
Directed by Elijah Bynum
In 1991, a sheltered teenager comes of age during a wild summer on Cape Cod, getting rich from selling pot to gangsters, falling in love for the first time, partying, and eventually realizing that he's in way over his head.
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What critics compared Hot Summer Nights to
This is a technique lifted straight from Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (and Sofia Coppola’s subsequent adaptation of it), which is all well and good, except that there’s nothing as succinct or poetic about Hot Summer Nights, no clear idea of what it means to be a young boy that a story like this is passed down to .
Somehow managing to evoke everything from “Rushmore” and “The Virgin Suicides” to “The Sandlot” and “Goodfellas” within the first 10 minutes, “Hot Summer Nights” takes us back to 1991, when (white) America was trying to grow up without letting go of its glory days.
There’s all the grand mythology of youth, too, the stuff that makes works like Stand by Me, The Virgin Suicides, and even Stephen King’s It so irresistibly nostalgic.
While some movies wear their influences, Elijah Bynum’s insipid debut feature wears its out: the sped-up camera moves, whip pans, and cocaine hijinks of Goodfellas and Boogie Nights ; the narration of The Virgin Suicides ; the antisocial doom of Donnie Darko ; a touch of American Beauty and early Wes Anderson.
Monroe is certainly appealing, but the narrator (and every other boy in town) casts on an eye on her like this is The Virgin Suicides .
(Richard Linklater pulled it off beautifully in "Bernie.")