Kelly Lamor Wilson, Joey King
“SUMMER ’03” My rating: C+ (Opens Oct. 5 at the AMC Town Center)
95 minutes | No MPAA rating
Mixed up teenage girls are no stranger to our movie screens. In recent months we’ve seen some terrific femalecentric coming-of-age titles like “Eighth Grade” and “The Edge of Seventeen.”
Becca Gleason’s “Summer ’03” isn’t in their league, but it does boast a fine lead performance by young Joey King and has perhaps one of the most honest depictions of teen sex in recent memory.
Tonally, though, it’s a bit out of control.
In the opening moments an old lady (June Squibb) summons her family members to her dying bedside to clear her conscience.
She tells her son Ned (Paul Scheer) that the man he thought was his father wasn’t…that he in fact was the result of his mother’s torrid affair.
Then she lays a whole lot of ugly on Ned’s 16-year-old daughter, Jamie (King). First the aged gal announces that she hates Jamie’s mom Shira (Andrea Savage) for being “a dirty Jew” and confesses that when Jamie was little Grandma had her secretly baptized a Roman Catholic. Before slipping off this mortal coil, the old bag offers a bit of grandmotherly advice: Learn to give a good blowjob.
The members of Jamie’s family are more than a little shook up by Grandma’s revelations. Dad sets out to find his genetic father — halfway through the film he will return with an ancient German who spouts antisemitic slogans.
And whenever Jamie, her mom, and her Aunt Hope (Erin Drake) get together the decibel level spikes. These women interact at one speed: hysterical. Oh, and then there’s Hope’s son Dylan (Logan Medina), a preteen so crazy to drive that he’s become an accomplish car thief.
Joey King, Jack Kilmer
Curious about her newfound status as a nonpracticing Catholic, Jamie attends a church service and is immediately drawn to Luke (Jack Kilmer), a young seminarian about to take the vows of priesthood. With the urging of her much more sexually sophisticated friend Emily (Kelly Lamor Wilson), our heroine cozies up to the soon-to-be-priest.
He’s game. Maybe he sees this as his last opportunity before a life of celibacy. Maybe he hasn’t thought through the whole priest thing very carefully. Perhaps he’s just an asshole. In any case, he has no problem producing a condom when one is required.
Early in the film we meet March (Stephen Ruffin), Jamie’s longtime best boy bud, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see that by the time the movie’s over they’ll realize they’re made for each other.
Gleason’s screenplay has a few explosively funny moments; it also relies way too much on Jamie’s voiceover narration. It’s one thing if that narration is incredibly witty; but here it serves mostly to describe things we’re already looking at. Huh?
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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