Illustration by Brian Taylor

It’s still the early part of the season, the good part, when summer hours kick into effect (for the luckiest among us), before the tourist invasion starts and the city starts to heat up and emit that special odor that’s uniquely New York in August.

There’s no better time to be in the city for those who love culture or the outdoors. Every street corner seems to sing with its own event or festivity, and even the most jaded New Yorker can find something to pique their interest.

Those fortunate enough to live here are in the epicenter of a marathon celebration that runs all the way through the dog days of August.
Inside, we’ve created a handy-dandy guide to the best live concerts, film festivals, theater openings, museum shows, outdoor events, summer reading series and more that will help you plot out the next few months of your life.

So heat up the grill and pour yourself a cold one. We hope you’ll find something that will brighten your summer within these pages.

-Allen Houston, Executive Editor of Manhattan Media

Music
Top 10 Concerts
Reading Summer Film
Film
Best June Events for Kids
Cultural Events & Festivals
Hamptons Events
Celebrity Summer Guide
Out of Town
Summer Reading Series
Theater
Eats & Drinks
Top Food of Summer
Museums
Outdoor
Bike Share
Top Bike Trails
TV Guide

Summer Guide was compiled by Allen Houston, Marissa Maier, Megan Bungeroth, Adam Rathe, Robby Ritaco, Laura Shin, Armond White, Regan Hofmann, Rachel Khona, Angela Barbuti, Sean Creamer, Anam Baig, Andrew Rice, Magdalena Burnham, Doug Strassler, Max Sarinsky, Whitney Casser, Robin Elisabeth Kilmer and Andrew Bartel, Ed Johnson

Film Socialisme

Taking reading and movie-watching literally
Summer used to be the time people caught up on the reading they had always meant to do. In Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth parodied the ritual pulling out of Tolstoy’s War and Peace around the pool or on the beach. Roth observed an ideal situation—not beach fiction but great fiction on the beach—that should inspire movie lovers as well.

With the increased availability of movies in various delivery formats following their initial theatrical runs, when people simple don’t have the time to get out to theaters, summer relaxation offers the opportunity to catch up.

Thanks to tablets and smart phones, this summer’s reading doesn’t have to be limited to Tolstoy, Robert Caro or those James Brown and Nile Rodgers biographies; summer reading ideal can include movies, too, especially movies where you literally need to read—the subtitles.

Conversation Piece
Burt Lancaster stars in Luchino Visconti’s quasi-autobiographical story of an dying professor assessing his appetite for life when a greedy, narcissistic family invades his estate. Many of the themes Visconti explored in his film version of Mann’s Death in Venice are re-examined in this mostly interior-set film, which goes both deeper yet lighter. It‘s a wise man’s view of sexual folly unlike any other.
Each close-up of each ravishing face (Lancaster, Helmut Berger, Silvana Mangano) is worth several pages of great prose. Visconti‘s 1974 masterpiece is one of the New York Film Festival premieres left out of this year’s NYFF retrospective. It’s rarely shown, but this new DVD offers it in an aspect ratio that preserves its widescreen beauty. (Raro Video)

Film Socialisme
Jean-Luc Godard turns the ends of both film and of socialism as we know it into a provocation, going into the bold cinematic and political territory of the present as no other filmmaker can. This film contains some of Godard’s most perplexing yet charming études: two parent and child sequences—one jazz, one classical—that symbolize cultural and spiritual indoctrination.
Godard plays with the idea of a “readable text” by creating special subtitles in “Navajo English” that poetically fracture language into verbal codes. Simultaneously analyzing people, the world and the media between them, he teases sound and image. The visual experiments confirm Godard’s pitch-perfect compositional and color skills. An opening sequence aboard a cruise ship symbolizes the state of the world, afloat/adrift between new media and old means of conveyance. Prophetically, the ship is named Costa Concordia. (Kino Lorber)

Going Places
Bertrand Blier’s debut comedy is as outrageous now as it was back in 1974. Newly released on DVD, it shames contemporary sex comedies as timid and juvenile expressions of sex and romance. Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, at their physical peaks, portray a pair of louts who roam a small town looking for sexual release at the expense of available women (or each other, if the mood hits).This contemporary surrealist sex farce is perched between erotic daydream and pre-Viagra nightmare. Blier tests social conventions as well as the fragile if bodacious male ego—especially when the unarousable Miou-Miou achieves fulfillment the alpha male duo cannot provide. Going Places shocks, amuses and makes you think. (Kino Lorber)

The Clowns
Fellini’s examination of the circus and clown tradition pays tribute to conventions of comedy and caricature that are at the core of his “serious” films. This rarely shown documentary offers a trove of the “Felliniesque”—from outrageous faces and acrobatic movement to universal pathos. It also predates what came to be thought of as the “mockumentary,” through Fellini’s ingenious way of making his documentary investigation as absorbing and fascinating as a fully scripted drama. Instead of mocking narrative convention, Fellini expands the storytelling boundaries of filmmaking, all the time expressing his unique sensibility. Not just for fans of Fellini but for cinema and performing arts enthusiasts, too. (Raro Video)

No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo & Vilmos
For cineastes, this is the year’s worthiest documentary, a look back at the twin careers of great cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs. These Hungarian immigrants came to the U.S. in the 1960s, bringing New Wave experiments with natural lighting and mobile cameras that changed the look of American cinema. Between them, Zsigmond and Kovacs shot most of the best and important films of the 1970s’ American Renaissance period—McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, The Long Goodbye, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Easy Rider, Paper Moon, Five Easy Pieces, Nickelodeon, Shampoo, The Deer Hunter and more.
Actually, there are no subtitles to read here, but director James Chressanthis brings the cross-cultural art movie experience closer through the personalities and creativity of these major artists. (Cinema Libre Studio)

Film Forum

This West Village hub of art house cinema continues its quest to promote new indie and underground releases, as well as a wide array of repertory selections. It remains the only autonomous nonprofit cinema in New York City. Selections this summer will include a tribute to silent film maestro Erich von Stroheim, including his Greed, The Merry Widow, Queen Kelly and Sunset Blvd. During the month of June, Film Forum will run a tribute to spaghetti westerns programmed by Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan and Bruce Goldstein. Flicks will include Death Rides a Horse, Django, The Big Gundown and the Man with No Name trilogy. 
filmforum.org 

Downtown

IFC Center

This downtown mecca for independent feature films, documentaries and short films offers several series for cinephiles this summer. Short Attention Span Cinema: Films from the New York Times’ Op-Docs will play short opinion documentaries covering events both historical and current, with a special evening screening with filmmakers and guests from the Times’ editorial staff to be scheduled for June. Additionally, the Queer/Art/Film spring/summer series, curated by Adam Baran and Ira Sachs, continues, including Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, I Could Go On Singing and Rope. Ifccenter.com 

Downtown

Movie Nights on the Elevated Acre 

A few select Monday evenings this summer, New Yorkers can climb up to the Elevated Acre to catch free outdoor films. The first screening, on June 18, is of Stella Days, a new film starring Martin Sheen as a priest in 1950s Ireland who struggles to reconcile a modernizing country with its cultural and religious traditions when he brings electricity and Hollywood to his small town. June 25, Collaborator, starring Martin Donovan and David Morse, brings two childhood pals with different lives into a violently tense hostage situation; the film is Donovan’s writing and directing debut. The final installment, July 9, is Side by Side, a documentary that follows Keanu Reeves through the history of cinema as he interview Hollywood icons like James Cameron, David Fincher, David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Steven Soderbergh.
June 25-July 9, seating opens at 6 p.m., films begin at 8 p.m. or sunset. The Elevated Acre, 55 Water St., rivertorivernyc.com/events/film.

Downtown

Movies Under the Stars in Riverside Park

As usual, Bryant Park’s summer film schedule features a slate of timeless classics. But let’s face it: That lawn is too damn crowded. Fortunately, for those who’d prefer not to trip over a dude in a bowler hat and miss the climax as we search for our blanket whenever we use the Port-a-Potty, there are a number of other city parks with outdoor films. Most notable is Pier 1 in Riverside Park, which follows up its invasion film-themed 2011 with an eclectic mix that includes Cinema Paradiso (July 11), Amélie (Aug. 1) and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Aug. 8). Chairs await you, and you won’t need to arrive four hours early to snatch one. 
Wednesday evenings, July 11-Aug. 15, 8:30 p.m.; free. Pier 1, Riverside Park South, 70th St. at the Hudson River, riversidepark.org.

Upper West Side

Film Society at Lincoln Center

Getting psyched for Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s maybe-prequel to his classic 1979 space horror film, Alien? May 25-June 3, the Film Society pays tribute to the 74-year-old director with a retrospective of his versatile career. Past and Prologue: The Films of Ridley Scott will present a complete inventory of his work, including Blade Runner and the three movies that earned him Oscar nods: Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. Also, in preparation for the 50th annual New York Film Festival this fall, the Society will take a look back at highlights from the first 49 years. Films include Gates of Heaven, The Last Metro, My Own Private Idaho and Hoop Dreams.
Filmlinc.com.

Citywide

50 Years of the New York Film Festival

One of the world’s premier film festivals, the NYFF is leaping into its 50th year with a series of screenings showcasing the most important movies from years past, from memorable mainstream successes like 1993’s The Piano to lesser-known gems such as the 1994 flick Lamerica, about Italian con men in Albania. The 50th edition of the fest kicks off in late September, but there’s no better way to prepare yourself than with these screenings—and perhaps some afternoon sunbathing on Lincoln Center’s divine Illumination Lawn.
Ongoing, locations and times vary; $13. filmlinc.com 

Citywide

French Institute Alliance Cinema

The annual Films on the Green series, celebrating French and American literature brought to the big screen, is presented by French Institute:Alliance Française and never fails to inject a bit of joie de vivre into the summer film scene. This year’s movies, screening in parks around the city beginning June 1, include OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a spy film parody from Michel Hazanavicius—the Academy Award-winning director of The Artist—as well as the cult favorite animated film Persepolis and the Truffaut classic Jules et Jim. Packing a baguette and some brie is practically mandatory.
fiaf.org 

Citywide

Rooftop Film Festival

The Rooftop Film Festival kicked off its 16th year of “Underground Movies Outdoors” on May 11 with a collection of the best new short films from around the world. Be the first of your friends to see one of the many independent films that are being premiered at the festival. Venues include the Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn, Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens and Solar One, a solar-powered arts center in Kips Bay. Movies are preceded by live music and followed by a Q & A with directors and an after-party.
Through Aug. 18; $12. rooftopfilms.org.

Midtown

HBO Bryant Park Summer Film Festival

Now in its 20th year, this film festival in the heart of Midtown will feature a fun slate of classic and more recent films that will compete with blocks of glittering skyscrapers for your attention. Kicking off with Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary Psycho, the fest will include screenings of The Wizard of Oz, Roman Holiday, Rebel Without a Cause, All About Eve and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Keep in mind that this series features some of the more competitive seating in town, so get there early and plan to be cozy with your neighbors.
June 18-Aug. 20, films start at sunset. Bryant Park, enter at E. 40th St. & 5th Ave. bryantpark.org.

Midtown

Intrepid Museum Summer Movie Series 

Spending a summer evening aboard the magnificent ship Intrepid is draw enough, but throw in some crowd-pleasing military-themed movies, and it becomes a must-see. On Friday, May 25, bring your aviators, decide who in your group is Maverick and who is Iceman and memorize the lyrics to “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” because the series kicks off with Top Gun. Subsequent screenings include Spider-Man (that one from way back in 2002), the J.J. Abrams-directed Star Trek, Jason Segal in The Muppets and everlastingly glorious classics Jurassic Park and The Goonies. Films start at sunset on the Flight Deck, but come early for prime seating.
May 25-Aug. 17, 7:30 p.m.; free. The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Pier 86, W. 46th St. & 12th Ave., intrepidmuseum.org.

Midtown

New York Asian Film Festival 

This self-described “two-week orgy of popular Asian cinema” celebrates its 11th year this summer. Highlights include the opening night screening of director Pang Ho-Cheung’s Vulgaria, a movie about movie-making that was shot in only 12 days and revolves around gangsters, lawyers, the sex film industry and all manner of sleazy fun; the director himself will be attending. Korean action director Chung Chang-Wha will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. His 1972 movie Five Fingers of Death, which will be shown at the festival, launched the American kung-fu obsession when it was one of the first Asian films to find Western success.
June 29-July 12; $13. Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, 165 W. 65th St., and The Japan Society, 333 E. 47th St., facebook.com/nyaff.

Upper East Side

Central Park Film Festival

Now in its 10th year, this festival is known for pairing themed movies—past favorites have included Coal Miner’s Daughter and Dreamgirls—with live DJs for a week every August. The gates around Rumsey Playfield open at 6:30 and visitors are free to relax and frolic—no glass bottles!—until the screenings begin. The roster for this year’s fest has yet to be announced, but there’s rarely a bad pick in the bunch; with a whole summer guide’s worth of things to do, who knows how much time you’ll even have left in your schedule.
Aug. 21-25; films start at 8. Rumsey Playfield in Central Park, enter at E. 69th St. & 5th Ave., centralparknyc.org.

Upper West Side

Manhattan Film Festival 

The MFF is in its sixth year as a festival and its second year as a forum for indie filmmakers to actually make some dollar bills off their work. Fifty percent of ticket sales go right back to the filmmakers, so they can hopefully continue to make awesome independent movies instead of working at Starbucks. The lineup is still being created, but highlights from last year include Under Jakob’s Ladder, which won for best period piece and best actor, based on the true story of a chess game that led years later to the captivity and torture of its victor in a Soviet detention camp. Winner for best dramatic feature, White Irish Drinkers centers on two brothers in 1975 Brooklyn who plot to rob a theater during a Rolling Stones concert. It’s safe to say you can expect some interesting on-screen scenarios again this year, plus the knowledge that your ticket is directly supporting the filmmakers.
June 21–July 1. manhattanfilmfestival.org.

Downtown

Sunshine at Midnight at Landmark Sunshine 

Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema is a consistently cool place to see movies both underrated and wildly popular. In addition to their excellent concessions menu (vegan sweets, pizza-stuffed pretzels, Peet’s Coffee), they’re holding midnight screenings of a grab bag of favorites almost every weekend this summer. Flicks to catch include Raiders of the Lost Ark, Zoolander (which promises special guests), Rosemary’s Baby, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Duck Soup. The most amazing part of the series has to be The Room, which runs Saturday, June 2, as well as Aug. 3 & 4, when director/writer/star Tommy Wiseau will be there in the flesh. The film has become a cult classic, and Wiseau has attempted to market it as a “black comedy,” which may be accurate now but clearly wasn’t the intention when the film was made. It’s so excruciatingly bad that it guarantees a hilariously good time. Bring friends and be prepared to say, “Wait, are they serious?” at least 90 times during the first half-hour of the movie.
$10. Sunshine Cinema, 143 E. Houston St., landmarktheatres.com. 

Upper West Side 

Museum of Arts & Design 

This is the place to go for random screenings of strange movies from the ’80s, like the June 15 showing of Mother’s Day (on Father’s Day, natch), a low-budget Charles Kaufman film about a trio of ladies on a camping trip who are kidnapped by a pair of sadistic brothers led by their deranged mom. Good summer fun! Or check out Hellroller on June 22, about a serial killer confined to a wheelchair who doesn’t let his disability get in the way of his passion for slaughter. If horror isn’t to your taste, see Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape screens on June 21 or Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story on June 28, or catch any of the curated series (like the one of “videos exploring inter-dimensional travel”) in July.
$10. 2 Columbus Circle, madmuseum.org.

Polarizing Comedy Exposed in The Dictator

A scene from Darling Companion

The bucolic look of Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion is an indication of its fine sensibility. Kasdan evokes the natural, wooded landscape of Alfred Hitchcock’s idiosyncratic comedy The Trouble with Harry. The colors here are not autumnal nor quite as vibrant, yet Kasdan affects a similar tone of respite.

His three harried couples (Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline, Richard Jensen and Dianne Wiest, Mark Duplass and Ayelet Zurer) explore the communication tensions of love relationships, from habitual complacency and mature passion to first attraction, respectively. It is a lightly charming, minor film.

One would like to praise Kasdan for making an awesome comeback, but the gentle insights and genial tone of Darling Companion merely pick up where Kasdan left off with the immensely appealing (though slight) mystery Mumford—the best film of its kind since John Cromwell’s Small Town Story. Kasdan is not a master of provincial etiquette and amiable social conflicts, he’s just one of the few contemporary filmmakers interested in such niceties.

With nothing profound to say about marriage or parent-child relationships, Kasdan (who co-write the script with his wife, Meg) at least says it calmly and without the self-congratulation of a lewd, immature, Judd Apatow wallow.

Darling Companion is conceived around the man’s-best-friend conceit of middle-aged Beth (Keaton) adopting a dog to take up the void caused by her husband’s (Kline) involvement with his medical practice. At a retreat in the woods, the three couples’ search for the runaway dog becomes an exploration of their own intimacies, dependencies and misconnections.

The conceit is thoughtful, if not quite sophisticated. It never rises to the remarkable level of the affecting man/pet metaphor in We Think the World of You where Alan Bates memorably acted out the prudent gay desires of the pre-Stonewall era. Instead, this is Kasdan’s typical middle-class circle game, as in The Big Chill.

But occasionally, Kasdan tips into profundity with Zurer’s claims of clairvoyant intuition or the sense of faithfulness embodied in the searchers all wearing red dog whistles the way early Christians carried fish signs. (Kasdan’s cutest metaphor has the bickering Keaton and Kline getting lost in the woods and encountering a pair of rams.)

Without the profundity of Mike Leigh’s middle-age exploration Another Year or the classical form of the Warren Beatty farce Town and Country, Kasdan comes off second rate. It has none of the outright satire of Wanderlust, only a sensitive, more mature sense of quietude and resolve.

It’s an old man’s movie (Kasdan is 63), which makes it a blessed rarity in today’s film culture. Finding comfort and fair-exchange value in the compromises that mature couples make, Darling Companion answers back the anxieties that once haunted the middle class, as in William Inge’s archetypal domestic melodrama Come Back, Little Sheba. Kasdan attempts to use his sensitivity about humans and knowledge of life to create a sane entertainment.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Greta Gerwig in Damsels in Distress.

Whit Stillman’s Damsels in the Clouds

“I like my characters to walk in clouds,” said the great comedy director Leo McCarey. “I like a little bit of the fairy tale.”

That confession well describes the McCarey classics that execute a precarious balance between realism and fantasy—The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow, Love Affair, The Bells of St. Mary’s, Good Sam, even his Ruggles of Red Gap (currently in revival at Film Forum)—which took a whimsical approach to the peculiarity of America’s historical identity. McCarey’s line also describes what distinguishes the films of Whit Stillman, whose new feature, Damsels in Distress, is his first movie in 14 years.

The volunteering girls at Seven Oaks College in Damsels in Distress occupy a peculiar world, set apart from working life. They walk in the clouds of the privileged pursuits of youth, enjoying the leisure of education and idealism about romance, religion and politics—in that order of importance, though not obviously so.

Violet (Greta Gerwig), a tall, gangly-when-not-graceful sophomore, is full of private tastes and philosophies—suicide prevention and tap dancing are her volunteer causes. She’s lucky enough to head her own beautiful-girl clique, a group who support each other and invite newbie Lily (Analeigh Tipton) to join them. They’re a bouquet of eccentrics, with names like Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and archly syllabic speech. Yet, like the vulgar beer-and-cocktail boys they are attracted to (their “distress” Ryan Metcalf, Adam Brody, Billy Magnussen, Jermaine Crawford), each is so pretty and engaging she conveys Stillman’s fascination with the same human qualities and conflicts that made McCarey’s films so moving. His bouquet of eccentrintrics defines itself when one girl sees artichokes for the first time and exclaims”They look so weird!” (Those who don’t catch Stillman’s humor are likely to say the same.)

Damsels in Distress is Stillman’s youth movie. His previous films, Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, surveyed young folk entering the complications of adulthood, but his long absence has added charitable distance to Stillman’s take on maturity. This is, in part, his response to Mumblecore and the opportunity that trust-funded movement provided for his brand of non-commercial class comedy, but Stillman is too focused and articulate to be mistaken for Mumblecore.

His awareness of class has always made him the most idiosyncratic indie. Whereas Mumblecore directors take their social advantages for granted, Stillman makes those advantages crucial to his characters’ spiritual struggles. (It’s in their romantic gamesmanship and political one-upsmanship, as when Violet jousts with the campus journalist. Her pursuit of humanism and a perfect relationship is explained by Heather: “Only excellence can glorify the Lord”).

To read the full review visit CityArts by clicking here.

Picked up by TWC at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival, the film focuses on the effects of bullying by following five teens—of differing races and socio-economic backgrounds—throughout the school year. The company is targeting teen and tween audiences, hoping the film will imbue a message of standing up to, instead standing by, similar abuses. Bullying, the film and advocates assert, has become an epidemic in American schools. Director Lee Hirsch, who has discussed his own history of being bullied as a child, claims that the film is meant to educate parents, teachers, school officials and children.

Due to some harsh language, however, the film was slapped with an R rating making it difficult for its intended adolescent audience to see the documentary. Under current MPAA guidelines, PG-13 films can only include the f-word once. TWC appealed the decision in February but refused to cut content from the film. During an appeal, Bully lost its chance at PG-13 by a single a vote.

In protest, TWC will be releasing the film without an MPAA rating. Major theatre chains may not carry the film as exhibitors usually side with the ratings system. The notable exception is AMC CEO Jerry Lopez who criticized the automatic R rating of the MPAA.

“The message, the movie and its social relevance defy that kind of formulaic, conventional thinking. AMC will show this movie, and we invite our guests to engage in the dialogue its relevant message will inevitably provoke,” Lopez reportedly said.

Lopez was not alone in his support for Hirsch’s film. Politicians, schools, parents, celebrities and activists have argued for the film’s PG-13 rating. Michigan student, and bully victim, Katy Butler gathered over half a million signatures on Change.org in support of Bully.

“The small amount of language in the film that’s responsible for the R rating is there because it’s real. It’s what the children who are victims of bullying face on most days. All of our supporters see that, and we’re grateful for the support we’ve received across the board. I know the kids will come, so it’s up to the theaters to let them in” Hirsch has said.

Joan Graves, chairman of the Classification and Rating Administration with the MPAA, issued a statement declaring that “The MPAA also has the responsibility to acknowledge and represent the strong feedback from parents throughout the country who want to be informed about content in movies, including language.  The R rating is not a judgment on the value of any movie.  The rating simply conveys to parents that a film has elements strong enough to require careful consideration before allowing their children to view it.”

One scene, which helped pushed the film to an R-rating, depicts a ride on the bus where one student tells another that he’ll “f—ing end [him] and shove a broomstick up [his] a–. I’ll cut [his] face off and s–t.” The films creators contend that this is no worse than what kids hear everyday on the playground and provides a dose of gritty reality. This goes hand in hand with Bully’s theme that the real damage of bullying isn’t only physical, but rather that it creates deep, and perhaps irrevocable, emotional and mental scars.

Bully isn’t TWC’s first brush with the MPAA. In 2010, they clashed over the film Blue Valentine which garnered an NC-17 rating after depicting an oral sex scene. TWC won an appeal with that film without making content changes.

Bully opens in New York City at the Angelika Theatre and AMC Lincoln Square on March 30.

Hill) in 21 Jump Street.

The duo have not outgrown their adolescent rivalry or immature sense of amusement that began in high school. Seven years later (after a police academy training session ridiculously scored to The Clash’s version of Junior Murvin’s reggae classic “Police and Thieves”), they’re sent back to high school as undercover cops. Less audience representatives than pandering role models, they want moviegoers to laugh at class clowns and cop clowns.

This nonsense comes from rebooting the 1980s TV series 21 Jump Street, minus the cop-drama gravitas. Ironically, it exhibits the lowbrow humor currently found on both network and cable TV shows—forms geared to the juvenile taste of 12-year-old boys, the gullible demographic desperately sought after by advertisers. Adults now embrace their
inner brat as a sign of cool, longing for the irresponsibility of childishness. They accept TV mediocrity and smuttiness in movies like Knocked Up, The Hangover and Bridesmaids. The downward spiral continues with 21 Jump Street.

Refashioning TV junk as if it were enriched our cultural heritage, Hollywood diminishes it. As that misappropriated reggae song demonstrates, any possibility that pop culture can address socially, morally, politically important experience is denied. 21 Jump Street’s idiocy is personified in Tatum’s tall-drink-ofretardation, Hill’s rotund schmuck (a role he should have outgrown after David Gordon Green’s The Sitter) and later in a cameo by Johnny Depp, star of the original TV series, who is only fooling himself if he thinks this meta-comic turn is equivalent to Marlon Brando spoofing Don Vito Corleone in The Freshman.

Consider: Brando seized the opportunity to comment upon The Godfather’s cultural phenomenon that proved less conscientious than he had hoped when signing on to its gangster-movie allegory for corporate greed. (Could even Brando’s genius have intuited that The Godfather would inspire a new cultural standard of thievery and ruthlessness that even politicians such as The Sopranos fans Bill and Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama would eventually endorse?)

Tatum, Hill and Depp are less conscientious stars; they simply overlook the consequences when trash ignores the crisis of police brutality—a problem producer Stephen J. Cannell had addressed in his exploitative TV mogul way by giving cop drama a hip-hop spin.

Now the spin is out of control. 21 Jump Street is aggressively stupid farce. Its directing team, Phil Lord and Chris
Miller, can’t cohere the tone of a single scene, jumping from teen sap to grossout humor almost schizophrenically. The relentless hodge-podge resembles a LMFAO music video—without the delirium that gives LMFAO their party-animal style. Frequent video game intertitles steal from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; dance scenes, stunt scenes and explosions are mistimed, while the overly violent shootouts imitate Pineapple Express.

This mess of dishonest intentions and cultural decline epitomizes the lack of sincerity and imagination now passing for entertainment. 21 Jump Street has gotten better reviews than Jack and Jill, probably because it has nothing to do with real experience; because it substitutes narrative development with explosions and uses dick jokes for the repressed tensions of male bonding, as in Tatum’s homoerotic puzzlement when Schmidt befriends a
narc played by Dave Franco.

Perhaps the lowest point is Jenks and Schmidt’s singsong
trivialization of the Miranda rights advisory; it’s insulting to current urban sensitivities and reveals Hollywood’s ongoing juvenile comedy phase to be mindlessly offensive. 21 Jump Street is so obtuse it’s as if the social satire of Hot Fuzz never happened.

Delicacy, the title of the new French film David Foenkinos adapted from his own best-seller, could easily refer to the dance that the movie does between heartbreak and humor. Audrey Tautou (Amelie) is Nathalie, a young woman who we see meet and marry her husband in a dream-like state. Embarking on a new career and intending to start a family, Nathalie’s dream soon turns to a nightmare when her husband is hit by a car and dies.

Two years later, Nathalie has devoted herself to her career (at an ambiguously-defined Paris client services corporation) and has impressed her boss, Charles (Bruno Todeschini), sufficiently for him to ask her out on a date. Nathalie tells him – and herself – that she isn’t interested in a new romance. Which is why it’s so surprising then, when she impulsively kisses another co-worker, a lovably oafish Swede named Markus (François Damiens). No one is more surprised, of course, than Nathalie

As shot through the gauzy gaze of Foenkinos and his brother, Stéphane, this duo of first-time directors Nathalie’s road to recovery in Delicacy is neither bathed in pathos nor does it adhere to the tenets of the standard romantic comedy. Perhaps because they are not familiar with the concept. “We don’t have many romantic comedies in France,” Stéphane explained. “But we put romance in every film in France. We didn’t want to escape the mourning in the story, that was part of her process.” He prefers to refer to Delicacy as a dramedy.

Regardless of label, both Foenkinos brothers acknowledge that they felt much pressure in making this film, and as helpful as it was to land a major international star like the star of Amélie. (“We dreamed of having her,” according to Stéphane, “she’s like an icon”), that, too, added to the pressure. But it paid off in finding an actress, who, as David pointed out, “was speaking the same language” as the two directors.

“Audrey was the first person that came to mind,” David laughed. “If she didn’t do it, we would have been screwed.”

“Audrey gives her a humanity and a warmth,” Stéphane said. There are some changes between the novel and the movie, notably the addition of a judgmental friend for Nathalie, but that’s okay with Stéphane. “We’re not trying to make a carbon copy of the book,” he said. “Our main concern was to try to capture the universe of the book.” David agrees, saying that the process “allowed me to rediscover the text [I] had written.”

How did Tautou tap into her character’s grief? By focusing on her perseverance. “I have no personal experience with it,” she admitted, “but I called on an inner dignity for her to deal with suffering. Nathalie is reticent, she keeps a lot in. But she was always standing up straight and dealing with it.”

The actress also applauds both Foenkinos brothers’ ability to work as a team. “It was very important for them to establish one voice,” she said. “We knew we wouldn’t be lost, and the film would be done in a sensitive way.” Stéphane acknowledges his and David’s complimentary filming style, in which he was primarily attentive to the actors and David, the crew. “But we had the same film in mind,” he said.

And clearly their efforts have paid off; Nathalie isn’t the only one to feel like she exists in a waking dream. “We’re glad [Audrey] liked it,” David said. “This is a dream for us.”

Delicacy opens is New York tomorrow.

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston in Wanderlust.

Wanderlust starts with an idea borrowed from Albert Brooks’ 1986 Lost in America—a yuppie couple responds to career setbacks by embarking on a cross-country journey that tests their mettle. Here, George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) leave their tiny, expensive Manhattan studio apartment and fall in among a collective of retrograde slackers in an off-the-grid Georgia commune called Elysium.

Where Brooks revealed Reagan-era acquisitiveness (climaxing symbolically in the existential absurdity of Las Vegas), Wanderlust drops metaphysics to oddly parody Clinton/Obama nostalgia about drugs and communes. It also seems like a retread of “it” director David Wain’s Wet Hot American Summer, similarly fully of bland, self-amused in-jokes by inoffensive comic performers who enjoy each other’s company more than any audience will.
But then something unexpected happens: in only a couple of scenes in which George visits his successful older brother Rick (Ken Marino) making money in the potty business and living miserably in Southern middle-class suburbia, the jokiness sharpens and Wanderlust momentarily becomes about something tangible—sibling rivalry, class delusions, marital tension, parental neglect, plus racism and sexism as spiritual fall-backs for pathetically disillusioned Americans.

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