| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Movie Name | SUMMER OF SAM (1999) |
| Director | Spike Lee |
| Writer | Spike Lee, Victor Colicchio, Michael Imperioli |
| Lead Actor | John Leguizamo |
| Cast | John Leguizamo, Adrien Brody, Mira Sorvino |
| Genre | Crime, Drama, Romance, Thriller |
| Release Date | July 2, 1999 (United States) |
| Duration | 2h 22m(142 min) |
| Budget | $22 million |
| Language | English |
| IMDB Rating | 6.7/10 |
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SUMMER OF SAM purports to be about life in the Bronx’s Little Italy neighbourhood during the sizzling summer of 1977. Disco was the rage, Reggie Jackson and the Yankees chased the pennant, and the city baked under media-fanned hysteria over David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz’s random serial shootings of lovers in parked cars.
Director Spike Lee gets some of the pop-culture context and mood right, but the dreary characters and story quickly fade into crude stereotypes and pointless sexual obsession. The focus is on Vinnie (John Leguizamo), a macho hairdresser with Catholic guilt He likes to experiment sexually but doesn’t want to ask his nice-girl wife, Dionna (Mira Sorvino). She’s desperate to please and worried she’s losing him. The result is a string of bizarre grope and grapple scenes.
While Vinnie fears that Sam has been sent by God as retribution for his sins, his friend Ritchie (Adrien Brody) is a musician wannabe who reinvents himself as a Brit-talking punk rocker. Ritchie, who earns needed money as a performer and hustler in a local gay club, becomes a Sam suspect.
The characters have some riveting scenes screaming at each other, but you’re given no reason to care about them. Little Italy appears as a soulless place where neither friends nor family offer much help in a crisis. Berkowitz’s sick, violent craziness used often as continuing background seems to fit right in.
Sam seldom gets past a kind of detached amusement at the ordeal of city life that summer, at the pathetic sexual fantasies and guilts, and at the weird twists of street machismo among poor white guys facing social and cultural changes beyond their understanding. Not Spike at his best relentless street language and sex; for adults but not recommended.
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