Summer Camp

So, it seems increasingly common for people over a certain age. You wake up one day, glaring at what your life includes: no childhood pals, no basking in an easy life. Keeping that in mind, Castille Landon’s tiresome comedy “Summer Camp” offers the following, what if there was a means to tap into our childhood youth and re-organize our focus later in life but through play and leisure activities?

It is definitely a good enough premise for any decent entertainment, but this Summer Camp film wastes it because of bad laughter and weak plot devoid of real conflict and unrealistic general impression that the movie tries to maintain.

“Hear, hear, ‘Summer Camp’ tries getting the audience on board with the idea that it show cases ‘the virtues of letting your hair down once in a while’ – which is not the case in this film certainly!’ Quite the contrary, if anything. At least this film has a past. The sitcom stars Kathy Bates, Alfre Woodard, and Diane Keaton as childhood friends Ginny, Mary, and Nora who are so busy with their mundane work life that it has been decades since they last saw each other.”

Now some of them are not that much to be blamed. The story begins when the narrator — a self-help guru whose books goes under the title ‘Get Your Shit Together’ — Ginny narrates her continuous attempts to reunite the band. Mary, an unhappy married and busy nurse finds the adulting life a little too overwhelming to execute any of her plans.

And Nora, who is some kind of scientist and is well fed and clothed, seems to enjoy the monotony that comes with being a workaholic. Luckily, an opportunity that cannot be passed comes up and the three friends embark on a journey to a reunion week at the summer camp where they once became friends for life. But there are of course some changes at the site.

First of all, the girls’ cabin – which was once rustic and unrefined – has now become a chic and classy Insta boutique courtesy of Ginny’s close friend Martha, the one and only Stewart Owens. And the men they used to hate are now charming, handsome, and talented – like Eugene Levy’s Stevie and Dennis Haysbert’s Tommy.

In “Summer Camp,” there are also breadcrumbs that lead to comparisons with the amazing film ‘Now and Then’ — which remains one of the very few films that explores female friendships — which was produced in 1995. One glaringly clear point of reference that is mentioned repeatedly is ‘Book Club’ which was released in 2018, which is a decent enough comedy but of which has the message of the different battles elderly women have to fight in their work, love and friend life.

These comparisons, as one might expect, only reinforce what “Summer Camp” has offer. For instance, it is quite difficult to sympathize with the idea of these adults reuniting for a camp reunion when the film (as opposed to ‘Now and Then’) does not go out of its way to depict the sort of childhood time period that these adults remember, only letting us see moments of what Alvin, Mary and Nora’s lives were like few years earlier.

On an even more troubling note, “Summer Camp” does not engage in any sort of character development for the mature Ginny, Mary and Nora that one might actually believe in. In that, their discussions about marriage versus independence, and humorous undertones such as sex (or sex toys in the shape of remote controls) become rather uninteresting.

It’s as if Landon has worked off a checklist of topics that are supposed to be discussed by these women, rather than imagined the significance or the context of such conversations in a movie about women coming of age at an older age.

One attempt to provide one of the women — in this case, Nora — some semblance of character development via a ‘makeover’ is downright comical, even baffling in its execution. Picture Diane Keaton wearing the costume that is quintessentially Diane Keaton — a high-neck shirt, a smart blazer, a thick belt, and an Annie Hall hat — and going through a makeover to another signature look of Keaton’s.

Amid the three, Mary’s story captures some deeper notes while Woodard only resonates when “Summer Camp” allows her the time to figure out how she ended up in a loveless marriage with a futon-wielding man influentially devoid of drive and ambition.

But possible good which could derive from that thread gets bad running gags in torrents (scenes with Betsy Sodaro’s Vick as a manic camp head seem especially too much of the same), tiresome camp shenanigans and a half-baked twist about the audacious Ginny for a conclusion.

Everyone from the actors to the crew to the people behind the “Summer Camp” has had a lot of fun and fun hanging around a real summer camp in Hendersonville, North Carolina, the beautiful place where the movie was shot. Somehow, however, we are never part of that fun.

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