5 Great Summer Vacation Movies

Whether you have plans this summer for a cross country trip, lazy days on the beach, or a a visit to a distant relative- these 5 films will take you on various cinematic vacations, through summer flings, European sojourns, and road trips gone haywire. Spend your summer break with a couple of these, and even if you’re stuck at home with nowhere to go, you’d still have traveled all over the world.

  • National Lampoon's Vacation (1983) Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo. Dir. Harold Ramis. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the first and best Griswold family vacation, as Clark W. Griswold takes his wife and kids on a road trip from Chicago to California’s “Wally World” theme park. Disaster ensues, but Chase’s sheepish silliness holds it all together and makes his final freakout all the funnier. Randy Quaid and John Candy are scene stealers in support.

  • Summertime (1955) Katharine Hepburn, Rossano Brazzi. Dir. David Lean. The first entry in the “single woman goes on vacation and finds herself in a foreign country” genre (think Under the Tuscan Sun or Eat, Pray, Love). Kate is a middle aged, lonely spinster who goes on a picaresque journey to Venice, shops, sight sees, and falls in love with Italian dreamboat Rossano Brazzi. A gooey romance, and Italy has never looked so ravishing (what can you expect from Lean, after all?) Chick flick? Definitely. But in the very best of ways.
  • Jaws (1975) Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfus. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Spielberg’s breakthrough may still be his best movie, utterly devoid of sentiment and filled with heartpounding suspense. Martin Brody is the new police chief of a summer resort town, and it’s no sooner than summer begins when tourists start getting terrorized by a man eating Great White. Thrilling, exciting and may put you off swimming for a while, but most definitely worth it.
  • Dirty Dancing (1987) Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey. Dir. Emile Ardolino. It’s the summer of ’63, and teenage Baby is vacationing with her family in the Catskills. Wouldn’t you know it, the dance instructors just happen to include sexy shaker Johnny who has a thing or two to teach Baby about how to move…in all kinds of ways. A huge hit in ’87, and still one of my all time guilty pleasures.
  • Little Miss Sunshine (2006) Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell. Time for another quirky road trip! Dysfunctional family including neurotic dad, shrill wife, suicidal gay brother-in-law, brooding teenage son, smack snorting grandpa and 6 year old wannabe pageant contestant haul into a broken down van en route to the annual Little Miss Sunshine contest. Sweet and funny with elements of black humor, the chemistry among the cast is tops, and the ending is heartwarming.

Hollywood's Highest Paid Actors

Forbes has got the list, and coming in at an unsurprising No. 1 is Tony Stark himself, Mr. Robert Downey, Jr., with a whopping $75 million in earnings last year. With Iron Man 3 easily crossing the billion dollar mark in a matter of weeks this summer...yeah, that makes sense.

Hollywood's highest earning men: 

  1. Robert Downey, Jr. - $75 million
  2. Channing Tatum- $60 million
  3. Hugh Jackman- $55 million
  4. Mark Wahlberg- $52 million
  5. Dwayne Johnson- $46 million
  6. Leonardo Dicaprio- $39 million
  7. Adam Sandler- $37 million
  8. Tom Cruise- $35 million
  9. Denzel Washington- $33 million
  10. Liam Neeson- $32 million

REVIEW: Pacific Rim (2013) Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi. Dir. Guillermo del Toro

Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim is a fun filled, lighthearted action romp that was obviously a labor of love from a director who loves to play with gigantic toys- it's robots vs. monsters on a massive scale, and a neat tribute to the old Godzilla and monster movies too.

Set in a very near future where monsters known as the Kaiju have risen up from the ocean through a portal to start wiping out our biggest cities, humans have fought back by creating a robot weapon called the "Jaeger"- a massive machine they can control by two people powering its moves from the inside; slightly reminiscent of the old Power Rangers actually. Both the Kaiju and the Jaegers are spectacular CG creations through some pretty flawless special effects, which may be reason enough to go and see the film. The battles between them are epic, and I can't imagine anyone who loved seeing robots smash each other in the Transformers movies, wouldn't enjoy the action in this  as well. But thanks to Guillermo del Toro's inspired vision, the action is framed by creative and inspired set design- future Hong Kong where the movie is set, glows in bright oranges and reds, recalling similar sci-fi futures in films such as Blade Runner.

In a movie like this it's clear that the passion was inserted into the action and special effects- the Kaiju and the Jaegers are what the audience wants to see and del Toro along with them. But surprisingly, there is enough quirkiness and originality fused into the characters to carry them along as well. The premise that the world had to come together to defeat these monsters leads to a human cast made up of people from different countries, and most of the actors acquit themselves well by giving energetic performances. Idris Elba is great as the marshal who runs the Jaeger program, Charlie Day is really funny as the scientist who figures out how they can defeat the Kaiju, and del Toro favorite Ron Perlman shows up in a scene-stealing role as a black marketeer dealing in Kaiju organs. But my favorite was Rinko Kikuchi as a girl who wants to be a co-pilot in the Jaeger to avenge her family that was lost in an attack on her childhood city. The flashbacks to her experience and her talent as a fighter made the tributes to Godzilla feel even stronger. In fact, it felt as thought she should have been the sole lead of the film, ala Ripley in Alien, because less effective in that role is Sons of Anarchy vet Charlie Hunnam, who spends most the movie clearly struggling with an American accent and whose part is decidedly bland next to hers. Almost as if they felt obligated to have a generic white guy in the lead since the film was set in Hong Kong with such an ethnically diverse cast giving it an international flavor otherwise. Too bad.

But Pacific Rim is undoubtedly a fun, action-packed time at the movies, and while some may wish del Toro would have been even more inventive and original with the premise, you can't deny the simplistic joy that comes from watching humans pilot a gigantic robot through stormy waters and cities to beat up a monster and defend the human race. He wants to make you feel like a kid again, and to that end it's a smashing success.

* * *

BOX OFFICE 7/12-7/14: Sandler Scores, Pacific Rim Opens Soft

The big box office story this weekend was actually still Despicable Me 2, which topped again by bringing in another $44 million and has almost surpassed Monsters University's domestic gross ($237 million) in just two weeks. It's a massive hit, and is about to overtake Monsters' international haul too, with $474 million so far. The new releases split good news and bad, with the critically savaged Grown Ups 2 scoring second place with $42 million, and on track to be Adam Sandler's 14th $100 million grosser (although the audience gave it a mediocre "B" CinemaScore, so it may not hold up), and Pacific Rim managed $38 million for third. It's not a wildly impressive debut, since the movie cost $190 million, and proved to be somewhat frontloaded (decreasing in its daily gross from Friday through Sunday). Still, it's the biggest opening of Guillermo del Toro's career, and good word of mouth ("A-" from crowds) could it help it maintain itself through the rest of the summer, with no other blockbuster releases on the horizon.

TOP 5:

  1. Despicable Me 2- $44.8 million
  2. Grown Ups 2- $42 million
  3. Pacific Rim- $38.3 million
  4. The Heat- $14 million
  5. The Lone Ranger- $11.3 million

The holdovers are doing as expected, with The Heat holding up well and crossing $100 million this week, while The Lone Ranger plummeted 62% since the 4th of July. And in limited release news, Fruitvale Station earned an impressive $377,000 from just 7 screens, which gives it a high per screen average of $54,000. It's the first potential Oscar movie of the year, and in light of the recent Trayvon Martin ruling, its topicality has just exploded. Expect to see it get much more attention in the coming weeks.