Summer of Sam (1999)

A Spike Lee Junk

Spike Lee retreads the same old thing - a film with stereotypical Black and Italian-American "types" in "Summer of Sam" as he often does in most of his work (if you can call it that) and that's all you get from this film.

The film sports an all star cast, but aside from Adrian Brody's role, the film falls flat. Lee just is not using his cast as anything more than window dressing for a bad script.

Indeed one feels the paranoia of that summer, however it's way overdone. It would be great from a high school musical but this is supposed to be a feature film. Subtlety is not Mr. Lee's strong suit and it's worn quite thin in this wanna be nostalgia trip. Remove the cursing and you have no sound except for a good sound track - great music. The camera shots are everywhere and no where.

Note too, when the "bad men" enter CBBGs, the band on stage was a 1990s band who were not around in 1977. Who makes a mistake like this? A person whose ego is bigger than his research department.

This movie was painful to watch and the DVD is hardly worth renting much less purchasing. August 24, 2008

S.O.S.

This film, for the most part is great, everything except for the scene that involves an orgy. For the most part though, the cast and crew did great work, and it should of been a hit. Great DVD to own. April 28, 2008

One of the trashiest movies I've ever seen

Spike Lee gets the feel and the look of the late 70s down pat, but this movie ultimately fails as either a thriller or a slice-of-life vignette. To be fair to Spike Lee, he does have a good eye for New York details, and the people in this film are recognizable as local types, but I've yet to come across the White neighborhood here that was entirely made up of druggies, whores, perverts, adulterers, gangsters, rent-boys and generic sub-moronic dirtbags, as Spike Lee depicts the Italians of Throgs Neck. Even in the "bad" old days of Amos and Andy, no White writer would dare portray Blacks in such a racist manner. Can you imagine if a White director portrayed the people of Harlem in this way?

Besides the offensive racist denigration, this movie is sickeningly vulgar, in its language and its depiction of the animalistic sex life of its characters. All of the people we meet in this movie are bestialized caricatures, savage to the core. There's no humanistic sympathy here, just vengeful racial defamation by a bitter Black racist, who convinced a bunch of White Stepin Fetchits to throw crap on their own people. April 27, 2008

This is one dull summer...

I can see where Spike Lee may have been trying to mimic the gritty masterpiece that was David Fincher's `Se7en' but he fails in many areas to capture anything reminiscent of the preceding film. `Summer of Sam' focuses too little on the menacing killer and too much on a group of people we could care less about. What made `Se7en' so brilliant was that while you never saw the killer except in minor scenes you always felt his presence. Here you never feel anything related to the killer. I feel bad for Lee (and Imperioli) because I hear that the original script dealt more with the killer himself but that because of concerns of the victim's family members the script was cut down and rearranged to focus more on this group of Italian-Americans instead of the infamous David Berkowitz. This was a grave mistake in my eyes, grave.

The film centers around Vinny and his girlfriend Dionna, their pal Richie and his love interest Ruby among others. Vinny loves disco and loves cheating on Dionna and Richie seems to love both men and women and strips for money. During the summer of 1977 the friends are all sent into a whirlwind of paranoia as they anticipate the psychotic next move of the crazed killer known as The Son of Sam. There are moments, rare as they are, when we can feel the tension and the paranoia but for the most part the film is so masked over with the social activities of this group of young Italians that we are taken as far away from the killer as can be and thus removed from the very fear we are supposed to feel.

Lee should take a lesson from Fincher for in both `Se7en' and more recently `Zodiac' Fincher was able to take us inside the mind of a killer as well as the paranoid citizens left in the wake of his storm masterfully. Lee failed miserably to do this.

One good thing I can say about this though is that John Leguizamo proved he could act. I never really thought of Leguizamo as a serious actor. He's funny and all that but when he's tackled serious roles (`Empire' anyone) he didn't captivate me the way he should have. Here he blew me away. His performance was outstanding, captivating, commanding and very well rounded. He was funny when he needed to be, dramatic when called for and believable all the way around. As Vinny he became the pillar of the film and quite literally one of the only redeeming points here.

`Summer of Sam' could have and should have been amazing. It wasn't. It has it's moments but in the end it comes off misplaced, choppy, uneven and a tad boring. Even if you never see the killer you should be able to feel him all around you, engulfing you in a wave of panic induced uncomfortable feelings. In `Summer of Sam' the only uncomfortable moments come from realizing that this movie is missing every mark it set out to hit. February 12, 2008

Spike ain't no paisan

I admire Spike Lee's talents. He has made some of the best, yes best, American films of the past few decades. "Do The Right Thing" was seminal. "Crooklyn" was never talked about much because it was not controversial. But it was one of the finest films depicting late 20th century American families, regardless of race. The recent "Inside Man" was a great caper. "Clockers' and "25th Day" were well-made Spike Joints.
Like many talented artists with a viewpoint, Spike has been controversial to say the least. I thought his arguments were weakest when he scolded Tarantino for using too much of the "N" word in his films. Glass houses Spike. But we all know Spike runs the gamut from hero to chump so what was up with "Summer Of Sam"?
Well "SOS" is really Spike laughing at Italians. Let's be honest. I do not believe I am over-reaching. The guineas who keep their manhood in the film haven't a brain cell to share amongst themselves and the two leads are sexually less than what Spike would define as Real Men. One cheats on his wife compulsively and isn't man enough to deal with it. JL's character is also shown to be almost crminally perverse. Adrian Brody's character gets even worse treatment on the manhood scale from Spike. He engages in sexual behavior that would define him as a b-tch. Spike has never portrayed African American men as sexually less-than and that says a lot. The leads' sexual hang-ups are parallaled with the Son Of Sam's and that is a real sneaky and questionable indictment. WE get it Spike. All white dudes, especially Italian and Jewish guys who you know from childhood, are freaks. And not in the cool, Rick James-way. More like in the uber-creepy Jeffrey Dahmer way.
Also, the fascinating subculture of lower East Side NY punk has never been handled more poorly in a film.
The Italian mobsters in "SOS" are cartoonish. They do not have an iota of menace. They do not seem dangerous, as many criminals in Spike's films do.
So we wonder. Did Spike get beat up by Italians growing up in the boroughs? Howard Stern got beat up by blacks growing up and for years he teased black culture mercilessly in retribution. Spike's just a little guy. Maybe Dominic or Paulie slapped him and stole his lunch money when he was a kid. Thus, "SOS" is sweet revenge for Spike. It is also, alas, one of his least accomplished films.
And I can prove it. When the dog begins literally speaking to Berkowitz, the audience howled. I cringed. "No he didn't just have the dog talk!" Yes he did. November 15, 2007

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