Each week last summer, we flipped the calendar back thirty years to spotlight a movie that was new and exciting back in...the Summer of '78. In the last installment, I made this vow: "Thanks for joining us for the Summer of ’78! If we’re all still alive a year from now, tune in for the Summer of ’89!"

Well, we're still alive, but our venue is gasping its final breaths as we enter this last week in Screengrab history. But I'm a man of my word! I was looking forward to spending this summer re-evaluating the Summer of '89, which I spent driving across country with a friend, seeing America...and seeing a lot of movies. Anytime the weather turned against us, or we just couldn't bear the thought of spending another second cramped inside our tiny Subaru, we'd hit the multiplex in whatever town we happened to be in and spend the day sneaking from theater to theater, killing six to eight hours at a pop. So as it turned out, I saw an awful lot of movies in the summer of '89 (and a lot of awful movies). Obviously, I won't get the chance to fulfill my obligation here, but following this inaugural Screengrab installment of Summer of '89, you can catch new episodes every Monday at my blog, conveniently entitled Scott Von Doviak, at least until I can come up with something snappier.

As it happens, I did not see this week's movie upon its release in 1989, which gives me something in common with almost everyone else in America. I've seen it now, however, so let's kick this sucker off with...

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WHIT STILLMAN (& CHRIS EIGEMAN)



Like caviar or triple-malt scotch, the films of Whit Stillman are rarified, WASPy treats best savored while the rest of the world noshes on Big Macs and beer. Around the time Richard Linklater was eavesdropping on his beloved Austin eccentrics in Slacker and Kevin Smith was chronicling the lives of hyper-articulate, dirty-minded New Jersey wage slaves in Clerks, Stillman’s indie debut, Metropolitan, focused on yet another chatty, self-contained subculture: the privileged debutantes and awkward urban haute bourgeoisie of the Upper East Side twentysomething social circuit. Dry, sardonic Chris Eigeman and nervous, schleppy Taylor Nichols were Metropolitan’s standouts, and Stillman wisely paired the sweet-and-sour comic duo as brothers in his follow-up, Barcelona, a witty, extremely low-concept picaresque about boorish Americans abroad in 1980s Spain. Eigeman also starred in The Last Days of Disco, the final installment of the director’s overeducated white people trilogy (and also his last film to date). For reasons I’ve never entirely understood, given its thematic and tonal similarity to its predecessors, Disco (which also features Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale and Robert Sean Leonard) was considered a disappointment by most fans and critics (if not by Stillman himself, who enjoyed the tale of bed and club-hopping yuppies enough to retell the story again a few years later as a fake roman-a-clef in the voice of one of the film’s characters). Sadly, Stillman’s vision was too wordy, insular and quirky even for art house audiences, making it impossible in recent years for him to finance subsequent projects, the worst result of which (to my way of thinking) is the resultant lack of good roles for the hilarious (and criminally underused) Eigeman. Yet the Internet Movie Database says that Stillman is currently adapting Christopher Buckley’s novel Little Green Men, and though no cast is listed yet, with luck maybe it’s a good sign that Eigeman (recently Spirit Award-nominated for his directorial debut, Turn the River) will someday appear in front of the camera again and not just behind it.

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The apocalyptic monster movie Cloverfield, with its Camcorder-eye view of Manhattan being flattened by an aggrieved, bellowing beastie from the sea, was already well defined in the public mind as "Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project" long before it opened. It used to be that this kind of mixed-marriage pitch was a staple of Hollywood satire, an easy laugh at the industry's blatant embrace of unoriginality. By now, after a few decades of Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment Weekly teaching lay people to think of movies in terms of grosses and big weekend openings, even ticket buyers are conditioned to think of a movie's resemblance to other movies as some kind of come-on. J. J. Abrams, whose Bad Robot company produced Cloverfield (and who is probably the creator most strongly associated with it, even though he neither wrote nor directed it), has also taken credit, in a roundabout way, for the most striking image featured in its trailer, that of the head of the Statue of Liberty being used as a bowling ball, by saying that he'd always felt gypped that there was no such image in John Carpenter's Escape from New York, even though that movie's poster showed the Statue's head lying discarded in the street. But there's another movie that in its structure bears a striking resemblance to Cloverfield: Miracle Mile, written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt and released to nothing better than mildly cultish appreciation back in 1989.

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