The review:
Elijah Bynum gave me what I wanted with Hot Summer Nights* and also included a bonus side of 1991-era Cape Cod summer.** This is supposedly about a normal teenager who becomes a drug dealer, but really, it’s about showing how much money he and Hunter Strawberry (that was the local drug dealer’s name!) made selling drugs,*** falling in love with a girl, and making some not-great (though age-appropriate) choices. The part where I was supposed to be getting amped up came across as boring, and it’s one of those movies that I spent the next day thinking about all the things that didn’t really make sense,**** but it hooked me up with what I needed on a Friday night and thus was just fine.
The verdict: Good
(barely)
Cost: free via Kanopy, Multnomah County Library’s streaming service
Where watched: at home
Consider also watching/watching instead:
- Kings of Summer
- Adventureland
- Dirty Dancing
Further sentences:
*I had a hankering for a Timothée Chalamet performance, and Call Me By Your Name wasn’t handy
**Plus, I’m betting they didn’t have much money for the soundtrack so it features lesser known (a.k.a. not cliched) music of the time.
***There is not one scene of Mr. Chalamet actually dealing the large amount of drugs they were supposedly dealing
****The narrator is just the omniscient town observer, for instance. Was that just lazy writing? What about main character motivation? Why was Chalamet’s character wanting to continue to expand the business? The questions went on and on.
Favorite IMDB trivia item:
Part of the movie takes place around The Perfect Storm of 1991. William Fichtner (Shep), also appeared in The Perfect Storm (2000), a movie based on the true story of the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing boat that was lost at sea during the storm.
