Wet Hot American Summer Gets Belated Respect
As thousands of David Schwartz…enkoff…owitzes ship off to the Adirondacks to eat soggy blintzes and consume pornography for eight weeks, The A.V. Club has decided to re-invigorate and re-cool Wet Hot American Summer.
Wet Hot American Summer was dismally received by
the majority of critics at the time (EW's Owen Gleiberman, Newsweek's David Ansen, and um, us
excepted), with many balking at its loose-to-nonexistent structure, its curious
fetish for the most trivial of cinematic subgenres, and, well, a failure to
make them laugh. If you don't find the film funny, you don't find it
funny—comedy is subjective, after all. (And hey, there's no accounting
for taste.) But those other supposed liabilities are probably the film's
greatest assets, and they complement each other nicely: Having a loose
structure gives Wain, Showalter, and the rest of the cast a lot of freedom to scribble
around in the margins, yet the whole enterprise is anchored by its obsessive
fetishization of the period. There's something oddly satisfying about the sheer
volume of '80s bric-a-brac on display here—the Trapper Keeper folders, the
Pepsi Light cans with the peel-back can tops, the vintage soundtrack
contributions from the likes of Loverboy, Rick Springfield, and Jefferson
Starship. Or even the silly ways "cool" manifested itself at the time, like
Paul Rudd's hilariously petulant lothario, or Ken Marino's preening, swaggering, secretly virginal skirt-chaser.
You can read the full re-review here.
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