Jillian Bell’s directorial debut is a drop-dead funny “Risky Business” riff that would have killed in theaters
Some movies feel like they sprang organically from the hearts and souls of their creators. Others, like Jillian Bell’s directorial debut “Summer of 69,” seem to have been reverse-engineered from a clever title. I can’t say for sure that Bell and/or her co-writers Liz Nico and Jules Byrne came up with the idea for a movie about a teen girl hiring a sex worker to teach her how to “69” her prospective boyfriend by working backwards from the phrase “Summer of 69.” But I can say that if they just happened to come up with a 69-centric comedy premise, it sure was kismet that the words “Summer of 69” were already out there, even if the movie really is more of a late spring affair.
“Summer of 69” stars Sam Morelos as Abby Flores, a high school senior who’s had a crush on the hunky Max Warren (Matt Cornett) since grade school. He’s only had one girlfriend all these years, but they break up right before graduation, and that means it’s Abby’s time to shine. There’s just one problem: She has it on good authority that Max is a sucker for the sex position that makes the number “69” elicit the word “nice” whenever everyone hears it out loud.
That may not sound like a problem to some of us, but Abby is so sexually inexperienced when you say the word “porn” she replies “…ography?” She does not have any friends in high school, so she seeks out an exotic dancer named Santa Monica (Chloe Fineman), whose unbridled physical confidence makes Abby jealous. So while Abby’s parents are away she hires Santa Monica as her personal sex coach, and in exchange Santa Monica asks for $20,000. That ungodly sum is the exact amount of money Santa Monica needs to stop her strip club from being sold to the sleazy Rick Richards (Charlie Day), who’s basically what sexual harassment would look and sound like if sexual harassment was a human being.
If the premise of a teenager hiring a sex worker while their parents are out of town and also needing to raise a metric ton of money in the process sounds familiar, don’t worry: Bell has seen “Risky Business” too. It’s less of a rip-off and more of a knowing plot point, like how “Sleepless in Seattle” could not exist without “An Affair to Remember,” or “The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence” could not exist without “The Human Centipede.” Bell’s movie evokes all the best and beautiful parts of 1980s teen comedies while sidestepping all the gross parts that make films like “Sixteen Candles” and “Revenge of the Nerds” hard to watch today.
Indeed, “Summer of 69” is not even all that naughty, the film’s title notwithstanding. The most overtly sexual scene is a fantasy sequence when Abby enters a sex shop and accidentally zones out and has a stress-induced hallucination about her parents chasing her around while wearing strap-ons. And even that is so completely absurd it’s hard to imagine anyone actually being offended.
The most important thing about “Summer of 69” is that it’s got an extremely good heart. Also that’s it’s extremely funny. So the two most important things about “Summer of 69” is that it’s got an extremely good heart and it’s extremely funny, and also that Morelos and Fineman are hilarious together. So that means the three most important things about “Summer of 69” are that it’s got an extremely good heart, it’s extremely funny, Morelos and Fineman are wonderful together, and it’s impressively directed by Bell. Look, amongst the film’s many positive qualities are such elements as a good heart, extremely funny jokes, hilarious leads and impressive direction from Bell. Also the part where Abby tells Alexa to “Play sexy time songs” and instead it plays the theme to TV’s “Taxi,” which surprisingly does the trick.
Bell has been one of our funniest comedians for quite some time, and “Summer of 69” feels like an extension of her humor. Almost all the film’s laugh out loud lines— which is a lot of them — sound like dialogue you would hear from a Bell character in yuck-fests like “22 Jump Street” and “Fist Fight.” This is no bad thing. It makes the movie feel personal, if not necessarily in the story it tells then at least in the telling. It’s all the good parts of a modern comedy feature and none of the bad. It’s the porridge Goldilocks ate, if Goldilocks ate great scripts, pitch perfect casts and exceptional direction. (And for all I know she did. I’m not her biographer.)
The only annoying thing about “Summer of 69” is that this is the exact kind of laugh out loud, emotionally satisfying, share-it-with-a-friend comedy that would probably find a sizable audience in theaters — and instead it’s a Hulu exclusive. That’s right, Hulu, the vestigial tail of Disney Plus that’s just waiting to get chopped off. I’m terribly concerned that people won’t go out of their way to find “Summer of 69” and miss one of the funniest teen comedies in a long while, a film that deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as “Booksmart” and “Bottoms.”
But I hope they do, because just like a real-life 69, there’s only one socially acceptable way to respond to Bell’s “Summer of 69.” And that, my friends, is “Nice.”
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