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Too Good to be Forgotten
By Mary Shaffer Summertime cinema is more than special effects and big budget blockbusters. Many films released in the spring and summer focus on the daily events that define generations, time periods and turning points in American culture, including six films being released this year: "Election," "Go," "SLC Punk," "American Pie," "The Wood," and "Just a Little Harmless Sex." This relatively new genre started in the 1970s and has become increasingly popular with the rise of independent films and the willingness of studios to invest in younger filmmakers whose stories appeal to the young summer movie audience. The films have traced each post World War II generation through the American experience. The stories tend to be episodic, follow multiple characters and plot lines, use rock 'n' roll and popular songs from the time and have a nostalgic quality as artists look back at key events that shaped their lives. These small films feature ensemble casts of young, relatively unknown actors and have launched or advanced many careers, including Richard Dreyfuss, Sean Penn and Paul Reiser. Cinema precursors include 1940s war films about young soldiers from divergent backgrounds, 1950s youth classics like "Rebel Without a Cause" and "The Blackboard Jungle," and 1960s brainless "Beach Blanket" surf films. The new genre frequently focuses on youth becoming adults, such as "The Last Picture Show" (1971), Peter Bogdanovich's faithful, brilliant black-and-white film of Larry McMurtry's novel about three 1951 high school seniors trapped in a small Texas town after the Western frontier and its values have passed. Their loneliness, lost innocence and crushed dreams are reflected in empty, dusty streets and abandoned buildings - including the local movie theatre their lives once revolved around - and the plaintive blues of Hank Williams on the soundtrack. Barry Levinson's humorous and authentic "Diner" (1984) looks at six middle-class males in their early 20s who share meals and memories at their favorite diner in the heart of his native Baltimore amid the waning days of the boring, conventional 1950s. They eat, drink, smoke, and engage in easy banter and familiar nightly rituals to avoid such real adult problems as gambling, alcoholism, unhappy marriages, unexpected pregnancy, college, jobs and serious relationships with women. "American Graffiti" (1973), George Lucas' most personal and best film, captures youthful innocence on the last night of summer in 1962, shortly before America's innocence disappeared under the assault of the war in Vietnam, the sexual revolution, political assassinations, Kent State and Watergate. Lucas' teenagers journey through a long night of cruising, racing cars, picking up girls, listening to the radio, dancing, eating burgers, breaking up and making up, and pursuing a fleeting vision of a mysterious blonde in a white T-bird. "Graffiti" defined the genre, costing just $750,000 and grossing $55 million and gave Lucas sufficient clout to make "Star Wars" (1977) whose cultural impact is still felt 20 years later with the phenomenal success of "The Phantom Menace." The kids that flocked to the mythic fantasy of "Star Wars" are the main characters in Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused" (1993), set on the last day of high school in 1976 at the height of America's bicentennial. It reveals a dark side of teenage life: cruel and humiliating initiation rituals, pervasive drug and alcohol abuse, mindless sexual promiscuity and accurately depicts a country and generation numbed by Watergate and Vietnam, capturing a lifestyle that seems strangely alien in today's politically correct atmosphere. The film ends with four young friends riding in a car on an empty highway going nowhere fast. The future is as bleak for young black men in Spike Lee's masterpiece about contemporary racism, "Do the Right Thing" (1989), and John Singleton's impressive directorial debut, "Boyz N the Hood" (1991). In "Boyz," three South Central Los Angeles friends - a scholar, a gifted athlete, and a drop out - face life after high school amid the senseless, routine violence that has randomly taken so many young lives from their neighborhood. "Thing" begins as an affectionate portrait of a mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood whose long-standing social center is a pizza parlor owned and run by an Italian-American. On the hottest day of summer, petty disagreements over racial symbols cause underlying racial tensions to surface and erupt in unexpected violence and tragedy. Lee uses language, color and music to define character and underscore ideas in this highly entertaining yet disturbing film. His characters are symbolic but never stereotyped and provide a running commentary on the film's events. Like "Do The Right Thing," these are the films we will look back on over the years to recall what it was like to live in America in the last half of the 20th Century. Mary Shaffer works for Cal Poly. Jerry Bunin is a staff writer for The Tribune.
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