Summer '03

ghk

Sorry it's not the actors fault. Director should be ashamed. Waste of money.

This movie tried to capture, or encroach upon, the Lady Bird-esque aesthetics of the early 2000's, but went completely wrong with the plot. It is so over the top dramatic, yet the main character is so hateable it hurts. While Joey King was perfectly fine, the melodramatic, rebellious teen cliché was way overplayed, which also helped with the unlikeableness of the protagonist, to a point where the story became laughable. Also, the Harry Potter sex-scene. What compelled them to allow such an atrocity take place? However, i applaud the writers, set personnel, directors and actors for pouring their time and energy to this. With the sound off, the scenes are very pretty and coordinate well with the actor's and actresses'clothes.

I managed to watch this on Amazon streaming movies. I had seen Joey King in a couple of other movies and find that she is a very interesting young actress, probably 18 or 19 during making of this movie. As the movie begins her voice-over states how forgettable summers tend to be. But not this one, the summer of 2003 when her old grandmother died. She plays the role of 16-yr-old Jamie Winkle who is still a mostly good student and obedient daughter. But she happens to be at her grandmother's hospital bed when she dies, but not before revealing a series of "secrets" that she had been holding. This new information throws several things in complete disarray, and that makes 2003 memorable. My only disappointment with the movie is that it closely follows the current trend in "teen" movies, the script is pretty well filled with filthy language and more sex and sex talk than is needed to tell this story. It muddies the main story which has family members reevaluate their relationships, and young Jamie learning about sex in mostly the wrong ways. It could have been a much better movie.

I really sorry, and I am a fan of Miss King, but here the ideas are not clear, you do not know if the director and writter wanted to make a comedy, drama, etc, but here nothing is good, smart or funny, terrible film

Well, this could have been a much funnier movie without all the agenda. Joey King (Jamie in the film) is a very pretty girl and feels very natural on screen. Her family however, not so much. They all were annoying, distracting, and whiny. I'm pretty sure most all of them couldn't have gotten themselves out of a wet paper sack. They all needed help with everything. Grandma's "pearl of wisdom" at the beginning of the film was hilarious yet, for some reason, needed to delivered on top of her anti-semitic feelings about Jamie's mother. That's where all potential for this film unfortunately took a nosedive and it turned into a real Jewwy Jewfest. Even Jamie's "real" Grandfather turned out to be antisemitic. The director seemed to need to throw this dynamic in at every possible moment. Can we say Jew or Jewish a few more times? Or insert being Jewish (or anti-Jewish) into any more scenes in this movie? Ok we get it already... The Jews have claimed to being persecuted since time began. Obviously, that belief is still being perpetuated now, but it'd be really nice if we could have just had a fun "coming of age comedy" without needing to insert that theme throughout the film.

On the plus side, Joey King and Andrea Savage are both lovely. But on the negative side, the story is, to be honest, horrific, and worse is that the director doesn't even seem to get that. The secret to a teenage sex comedy (which is what this appears to be going for) is to understand that everyone at that age is dumb but not malicious, and to set up an unreal environment where dumb behavior has no real consequences. Break those rules and you have a weird mishmash of sex-comedy+tragedy, and no-one wants that. The problem we have here is that the director doesn't follow these rules, but even worse, doesn't even understand that she is breaking them. She seems to treat the whole "Luke is a trainee priest" issue as a temporary affectation, like Summer 03 he's trying out being a goth, and Summer 04 he'll try out being a jock. I'm not a Catholic or religious, but I'm sensitive enough to get that someone trying for the priesthood is making a big commitment in his life, and for someone to just dismiss that, seduce him, treat him as a sex toy, then have the nerve to get mad when he concludes that he made a mistake, that God means more to him, then to go on to gleefully ruin his life? Seriously, WTF? How can we like a character like that? And how can we treat is as a comedy, that this guy, even apart from the issues he will have with the Seminary, will probably be haunted by guilt for the rest of his life? Ultimately it's a really strange movie. It could so easily have been a reasonably well-structured standard teenage sex com. Just write the guy love interest, the Luke character as, whatever: a foreign exchange student, a rich kid from another school, a nerd (but one who loves Science Fiction and thinks Harry Potter sucks), so many options with comedic potential without "destroying the rest of his life with guilt and rumors" consequences for the guy... So why didn't she choose these. Did Ms Gleason seriously not see the implications in her story (and likewise not one single other person involved in this project at an early stage)? Or, even scarier, was she well aware of the implications, and happy to throw them in as some sort of weird FU to men in general, or maybe the Catholic Church in particular?

I had a couple really good laughs with this movie, maybe it was the wacky tobacky, or maybe it was the couple of awkward but hilarious moments, but more probably it was a combination of both, but I had for sure fun watching Summer'03. It started like it was going to be one of those teenager highschool comedies but instead it was a comedy about all kind of day-to-day subjects. The cast was perfect for this movie, with a wonderful Joey King as the main character. She did a really good job as well as the rest of the cast. A movie I will watch again in the future, probably baked again as this worked good this time.

It's the summer of 2003. Jamie Winkle (Joey King) and her family are sent into chaos when her dying grandmother Dotty (June Squibb) unveils a series of revelations. Baby Jamie had been baptized by Dotty without telling her Jewish mother Shira (Andrea Savage). Jamie is taken with Luke who is training to be a priest. March has an unrequited crush on her. Her best friend Emily is a fast girl from L.A. This is a relatively standard coming of age dysfunctional family comedies about a hormone filled teen. This one is about a girl which comes with its own issues. I struggle with Jamie's likeability. She's struggling to know right from wrong and sex and all the big questions. Joey King is a hot girl looking for sex. It's never quite as funny as a geeky guy desperately trying to lose his virginity. Guys look stupid and the audience laugh at them. It's tougher to make girls struggle to have sex. The best that can be achieved is the girls having bad sex and Jamie isn't even doing that. There are still laughs to be had in this movie but whoever this Becca Gleason is, she has to figure out how to get more humor out of her comedies.

This is a comic coming of age film with quirky humor. On her death bed, Grandma Dottie (June Squibb) decides to be brutally honest with the family members one at a time. She tells her favorite son, Ned ( Paul Scheer) he had a different father. Her daughter Hope (Erin Darke) she confesses to having locked her in a closet as a child which is why she is claustrophobic. Her grandson Dylan (Logan Medina) she lets know he is a homosexual, and to get "fixed." However, the film centers around Jamie (Joey King). She tells Jamie she was secretly baptized (mother is Jewish) and the secret to life is to be able to give great oral sex...the same advice her friend Emily (Kelly Lamor Wilson) told her, but she ignored. These epiphanies set off a chain of events that made for eventful summer of laughs. I found the film to be funny. You had to love Dottie and I wish she had lived a little longer. Seems all the kids were involved in heavy underage drinking and no one was batting an eye. Guide: F-word. Sex. No nudity. Contains anti-Semitic remarks.