Boy Movies #29

Another boy movies gift guide of sorts

You’re reading Boy Movies, a newsletter that is supposed to be weekly but is sometimes not. I’m truly heartened by the amount of messages I received last week when I failed to publish a new issue — I’m fine, and Boy Movies isn’t going anywhere! Even in the event of my untimely death, the process of finding my successor will be handled with Logan Roy levels of grave professionalism. While I’m still here, please consider a subscription.

Some housekeeping

To make up for last week’s flopping and so as to not mess with my carefully planned scheduling calendar, this is the first of TWO issues that will be released this week. The second, about a certain highly requested franchise starring a certain mumble-mouthed bald man who is in many ways the face of this publication, should be out towards the end of the week, likely Thursday or Friday, so keep an eye out for that. I can’t promise unexplained disappearances won’t happen again; we’re a very small operation over here and occasionally things happen (in the case of last week, “things” meant minor medical procedures, the Succession finale, and a sabbatical to the great city of Philadelphia) that prevent me from getting a new issue out on time or at all. But guess what? We’ll all live. TWOOOO issues!

Back to your regularly scheduled programming

After the monumental success of the first Boy Movies holiday gift guide this past winter, and at the suggestion of a beloved reader, it’s time for another seasonal gift guide… of sorts. I love and loathe summer; my birthday is in June, something that instills both joy and dread in equal measure. I’m as charmed by the laziness brought on by suffocating heat as I am infuriated by it. Spike Lee once said, “After 95 degrees, motherfuckers lose their mind.” Sometimes that’s a fun thing, full of possibility. Sometimes it just leads to a lot of chafing. In any case, you might as well watch a movie about it.

Look, back in December, it was my hope that when it came time for another gift guide Boy Movies be involved in several lucrative corporate partnerships, but we haven’t gotten there yet. All that really means is that I don’t have any links that I make any sort of commission off of in the manner of a traditional gift guide, but I and some gorgeous contributors do have a few recommendations for boy movies to check out over these next few sweltering months.

A dad movie

Everybody knows summer is the season of dads and grads. Let’s start with dads, a subculture I don’t know much about — mine is dead, you see — though I did go to painstaking lengths to define the dad movie in a recent issue, so I feel like I can speak to this. Whether you’re searching for something to watch with your dad, or you’re just looking to get in the dad spirit yourself, The Color of Money is always a safe bet. My king and yours, Martin Scorsese, directs this sequel to Robert Rossen’s 1961 film The Hustler, though I’m of the opinion that The Color of Money stands alone.

It’s a sports movie that isn’t actually concerned with sports; its primary interest lies in the twisted mentor-mentee relationship between Paul Newman’s veteran pool hustler, Fast Eddie Felson, and his would-be protégé, Tom Cruise’s young, talented, stupid Vincent Lauria. Eddie and Vincent, along with Vincent’s much savvier girlfriend Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), get stuck in a threeway dance of jealousy and manipulation as they stage various scams at various pool halls around the country. Under Scorsese’s watchful eye, the game of pool is gripping, something I absolutely did not know was possible. This is a dad movie in the sense that it’s about an older guy forced to look at the world anew thanks to a plucky young idiot and not quite liking what he sees. It’s a movie for everyone in the sense that Tom Cruise wears a cute little earring the whole time… a cute little earring! Plus, John Turturro is also in it. There is no better feeling than when you go to watch something and learn that John Turturro is in it.

A grad movie

The other side of the coin is, of course, grads. Richard Linklater’s easy breezy Everybody Wants Some!! isn’t so much about grads as it is about people actively attending school, but to me this particular category is more about coming of age. This is a film I’ve been wanting to write about since this newsletter’s inception but I’ve never quite found the right moment, despite the fact that it’s the quintessential boy movie. It is literally just two hours of guys being dudes. I would even go as far as to say that the dudes are rocking. There’s a “plot,” I guess, following college freshman Jake (Blake Jenner — who?) as he moves into a raucous off-campus house with the other members of his school’s baseball team in 1980s Texas. This is a movie about Glen Powell’s hips and Wyatt Russell (one of the nepotism conveyor belt’s greatest outputs) smoking weed and that guy from Teen Wolf wearing crop tops. It’s a movie about male friendship and growing up and all that can change in a year. What does Richard Linklater understand about the human condition and how does he understand it so well? Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but we can keep eating up everything he gives us. Everybody wants some of Everybody Wants Some!!

A movie to watch with the boys

Summer is first and foremost a season for hanging out with the boys. (“Boys,” in this case, is gender neutral; I of course simply mean “besties.”) When I asked my friend (and Harvard’s own… Boy Movies is an academic newsletter…) Erik Baker, associate editor at The Drift, to contribute to this guide, he asked, “Can I write about Enemy of the State?” I was like, “Go for it,” and then he sent me what you’re about to read, which absolutely blew me away. Here’s Erik on why Enemy of the State is the perfect movie to watch with the boys this summer:

Paranoia blossoms in the summer. It’s an apocalyptic season, a foretaste of fire and brimstone. Hearts beat faster and people lose their heads: a pleasant derangement, mostly, but not without its discomforts. In the summer it feels like everything matters, each frothy head cracked open from a cold one with the boys fizzing with secret importance. This is also the joy of conspiracy theory: meaning restored to a disenchanted world. “Wait, when was this movie made?” one of your boys will ask you, maybe twenty minutes into Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State, about an NSA conspiracy to conceal the extent of the agency’s clandestine surveillance of American citizens. You’ll pull out your phone and report that it predates everything you’re thinking of: Chelsea Manning, the PATRIOT Act, even 9/11. It was still the end of history, and yet there’s Jon Voight, faceless NSA bureaucrat, ordering a warrantless wiretap on unfortunate lawyer Will Smith’s home phone.

The entire movie lives in this uncanny register. More questions: Why is this objectively stupid Jerry Bruckheimer production constantly quoting The Third Man, The Conversation, North by Northwest? Is Jon Voight married to Skyler White? Why is Gabriel Byrne in this for exactly one scene? Are we supposed to infer that Gene Hackman’s character was Lisa Bonet’s gay dad? And then, if you watch closely, you will see that Jon Voight’s evil NSA guy character is officially revealed to have born on SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH, 1940, and you and your boys will hoot and holler and ponder jet fuel, steel beams, synchronicity, clairvoyance. Even though your Target box fan is impotent against the heat of a world on fire you will crack open another one and rejoice that you have come close to understanding something, to seeing the big picture at last, and in that moment it will feel like the summer will never end.

A movie to take on vacation

Travel. Escapism. Bus that cannot stop moving or all the passengers, including literally Alan Ruck, will die. These are all things we want from the summer. Jan de Bont’s 1994 breakneck action thriller Speed is one of those films that gets more rewarding upon rewatch; even when you know what’s coming, the rousing joy of watching Keanu Reeves steer that bigass bus around is one that never dissipates. This film is the complete boy movie package, starring Keanu as a cop driving a bus rigged with explosives around LA. If the speed of the bus drops below 50 miles per hour, the bomb will go off, killing everyone inside. The story cuts between the confused commotion happening aboard the bus to the group of cops on the outside trying to figure out how the terrorist (Dennis Hopper) is keeping an eye on them. Only one special boy can save the day! Sandra Bullock is there, too! Speed will take you where you need to go this summer. Speed will take you everywhere.

A summer romance

Summer, as John Travolta and Olivia Newton John once told us, is for lovin’, and who among us wouldn’t be down to throw themselves into a fling with a movie star? Unless you’re a normie who has Notting Hill type luck, this is likely impossible for anyone without a Raya profile to achieve, which means that the next best thing is an absorbing double feature with two films starring the same actor. I have spent many, many summers with Boy Movies board member Cassidy Olsen, and for this guide I asked her to contribute a few words on her ideal boy movie summer romance. Here she is on two from Matthew McConaughey, The Beach Bum and Serenity:

To me, a summer-loving girl who grew up on the Jersey Shore, summer is all about lounging around, keeping it loose and goofin’ off by the beach. So if you’re on the hunt for a boy movie double feature that captures the feeling of eating a big sandwich in the sun and then getting drunk and/or high, look to the King of Summer Matthew McConaughey and two of his four films of 2019: The Beach Bum and Serenity.

The first is an easygoing, life-affirming and stupid funny stoner comedy from Florida’s adopted son Harmony Korine. McConaughey is never so at home as he is here playing sunburnt poet Moondog. He does light drag, eats out Isla Fisher, drinks a lot of margaritas, and makes a strong case for seeking the sublime in the everyday¹. Serenity, on the other hand, is a McConaughey vehicle with such an incredibly silly twist that it must be seen to be believed. It’s a boy movie because it’s about fatherhood and is dumb, and a summer movie because it’s named after a fishing boat on which Anne Hathaway wears a wide brim hat. Bonus points for Jeremy Strong² giving his all in the supporting cast. Watch the two movies back-to-back and let your soul be free.

A movie to take to the beach

Just about any bookstore you walk into during the summer months will have a designated section for “beach reads.” The concept of a “beach read” is a marketing tool, sure, but there’s also something enticing about a quick yet engrossing story. Something that doesn’t require too much from your sun-drenched brain, something you can glance up from when your friend asks you to reapply their sunscreen without feeling too removed from the narrative. What’s the boy movie equivalent of that, I wondered? Boy Movies’ art director Sarah Turbin is, by my metric, the queen of the short movie, and here she is on why The Thirteenth Year is the cinematic equivalent of a beach read³:

When I pitched The Thirteenth Year to Boy Movies CEO Allison, she asked me, “Can DCOMs be boy movies???” to which I answer: just barely. It’s about a young lad who discovers that his mother is a mermaid and must juggle his secret merboy powers with his life on land. Of course, stories with mermaids (notice how weird it feels to even say “merman”), beautiful moms, shameful puberty metaphors, and fear of captivity are basic girl movie traits. Not to mention the absolute treasure trove of queer themes that can be brought to the surface here, if only Disney had dared to dream a dream back in 1999. But Cody (that’s his name) is also a jock on the swim team who kisses a pretty girl in the movie, and the plot culminates in an action sequence against an evil fisherman. If a beach read is quick and light, then The Thirteenth Year is the perfect nostalgia soaked crowd-pleaser. Also, it comes in at a tight 95 minutes. It’ll go down as easily as a shucked oyster.

A summer blockbuster

The thing about Dwayne Johnson is that he’s a good actor. Or, well, maybe he used to be? With his recent stream of bizarre flops — Jungle Cruise, Black Adam — he seems hellbent on making the public forget that he at one point possessed genuine talent and sincere charisma. This summer, return with me to the bygone era of 2018, when his blockbuster output was weird in a fun way that allowed him to flex not only his muscles but his chops. Skyscraper is, I believe, relatively underseen compared to some of The Rock’s other death-defying films (shoutout to San Andreas). This is a mistake: Skyscraper stars The Rock as a Marine-turned-fed-turned-real estate assessor (?) with a prosthetic leg (!) who has to rescue his wife (played by Neve Campbell… I can say nothing else but “slay”) and children from the tallest skyscraper in the world after it’s set on fire by terrorists. Of course there’s a scene where The Rock has to make the impossible jump from a nearby crane back into the burning building. Of course there’s another where he falls off a ledge and dangles upside down, held up only by the rope wrapped around his prosthetic ankle, and of course he gets himself out of this situation by utilizing the raw power of his own core strength. Give yourself over to Skyscraper, which is like if an idiot had made Die Hard.

• I went long on the Succession series finale. I was devastated by it, I was thrilled by it, I loved it. I already miss this show dearly, but it’s been an absolute pleasure getting to cover the final season. What else is there to say? I guess just this: Team Ken, baby.

1. Allison here: The Beach Bum also features a great Zac Efron supporting performance.

2. Allison again: Hell yeah, brother.

3. Sarah also made the banner you see up top!