Summer has well and truly arrived in Boston, which means days at a time where the humid heat rises into the 80s and 90s (Fahrenheit) and even after the sun goes down continues to radiate heat up from the ground where we’ve “paved paradise and put in a parking lot.” We don’t have a/c in our apartment, so weather like this means breaking out the fans, taking cold showers long and often, downing gallons of iced tea, and falling asleep with damp washclothes on our foreheads like I used to do as a child back in Michigan. The kind of weather that always makes me think of the passage on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird in which Scout observes:

Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

How to combat the teacake-y feeling? Or at least distract when there’s nothing to be done but wait it out ’til the next thunderstorm blows through? (again: I’m reminded of Garnet in Elizabeth Enright’s Thimble Summer who lies in her bed every night listening to the distant echoes of thunder in the mountains, from rain that never makes it down to the shriveled plains) Why, watch movies, of course! Movies in which characters suffering from heat and humidity to a greater degree than you are suffering from heat and humidity (a little schadenfreude never hurt anyone, right?)! Movies in which characters are freezing their asses off and can only wish for the warmth you are currently enjoying in surfeit! And of course, for prolonged, multi-part distraction, television shows in which characters suffer heat and cold (sometimes both at once and more besides!)

Hanna and I have, accordingly, drawn up a four-part list of one hundred movies and television shows from which you can choose your distraction in the sweltering months to come. We’ll be delivering it to you in four installments over the next month broken down thusly (links to come as posts go live).

Week One: Movies Wherein Characters Are Hotter Than Blazes
Week Two: Movies Wherein Characters Are Totally Chill
Week Three: Television Shows Wherein Things Happen Which Are Hot
Week Four: Television Shows Wherein Things Happen Which Are Cold

Obviously, as with previous such lists, the movies and/or television shows are chosen completely at our discretion and we reserve all rights to bend, twist, knot, reverse and otherwise alter the criteria of each week and the meaning of each movie to fit our desired titles on said list. We make no claims to comprehensiveness or gravity of thought — these lists pretty much end up on paper (er, web pixels) as they pop into our heads, with little by way of composition or editing.

Please feel free to add those titles which you feel we have unjustly overlooked — or merely those which you find help you out in an effort to beat the heat. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy!

Jaws (1975)

H: jaws must be right up there in the …oh, the top three, i’d say, for “quintessential summer movie watching.” this first list is supposed to be “movies to watch when you want to feel hot” and this should do it for you. just when you’re thinking, “gosh, that water does look nice and cool—” nope, not so much. that water looks nice and sharky. yeah, i know the shark kinda sucks — it bounces and the teeth don’t look right and the tail is a little weird but if you don’t at least twitch when it rears up out of the water beside roy scheider, i think you’re probably wrong in the head on some level.

A: Hanna finally made me watch this on a warm night last summer during which, if I remember correctly, they were performing horrendous road construction activities outside the window. Luckily, the dialog isn’t all this has going for it — though Richard Dreyfuss does a thoroughly charming turn as the enthusiastic shark expert from out of town, brought in on consultation that quickly turns deadly.

Star Wars (1977)

H: well, the first third takes place in a desert. i think that’s reason enough, yes? beyond, you know, just everything else that’s right with the movie.

A: Apparently, being of the female persuasion, we’re supposed to be watching Sex and the City 2 this summer as the girl equivelant of the dudely Star Wars. Since I was pretty much hooked on the original trilogy the first time Leia appropriated Luke’s gun, I cry “foul!” and suggest re-watching all three episodes back to back on a hot summer weekend.

H: everybody remember that scene on the death star when luke approaches chewie with the cuffs and says, “now, i’m going to put these on you—” not his wisest move, right? yeah, picture my reaction to anyone trying to get me to watch s&tc. at least without a healthy dose of irony on hand and, probably, a bottle of wine.

The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994)

H: “Oh, Felicia. Where the fuck are we.” you want to know a fun way to make someone’s mind bend? find a genre fan; make sure this process won’t make them physically ill and then show them star wars: the phantom menace. then show them priscilla. then ask who they recognize. 🙂 it also works with lord of the rings fans, but often not quite so well.

A: I was introduced to the soundtrack of this movie back when I was about twelve and spent at least one summer listening to it fairly incessantly — on cassette tape no less! Likely on the Sony walkman I thought (when I got it for my ninth birthday) made me look like a totally cool teenager. Hanna (where would I be without her?) finally sat me down to watch the film last fall and I’m so completely glad I did. Really.

Sexy Beast (2000)

H: “But you’re dead. So shut up.” i’m tempted to say that i’d pay for someone to explain the bunny in this movie to me but…you know what? i’m not sure i want someone to explain the bunny to me. it’s weird and grisly and psychotic and kind of haunting and i think it’s fine just the way it is. i never fully realised how creepy the bunny is until i saw this movie on the big screen last year. not to mention how creepy ian mcshane is. ray winstone comes across as quite cuddly by comparison. ben kingsley as don logan is just so far out in left field it pretty much beggars description. really, the best description of his character is the chill that goes over the dinner table when h — not me — reveals logan’s imminent arrival. there’s a table of four adults who have been chatting about their approaching evening and the mere mention of this man who is coming the next day is enough to change all their expressions, body language, voices, the whole nine yards. to say nothing of the scene in ray winstone’s house in spain where kingsley and winstone are in the kitchen — kingsley is out of shot most of the time, an unseen harangue of profanity and accent from which winstone is physically flinching. he’s the bigger man — he outweighs kingsley by a solid 50 pounds; he has weapons all around himself; and he’s in his own damn house and he is flinching back as though kingsley is hitting him. it’s like watching a badly one-sided boxing match.

A: And Ian McShane is in it! Although only in the London bits. But his character is slightly more understandable than the character he played in the recently-released 44 Inch Chest which was good excepting we aren’t quite sure what the title refers to, what happened to the dog, or what the movie was about, really. So back to Sexy Beast which I promise I really did enjoy except that Hanna took me to see it in the Coolidge Corner theatre back when we were first dating? And to be honest, although I remember thinking the movie was brilliant, thinking back on it I mostly remember how thrilling it was that she let me hold her hand in the dark while we watched it.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

A: This was a “me” addition to the list, and I added it mostly for the quote I referenced in our intro — since it takes places in the hot summer of the South, although that summer stretches into autumn. And when you ask children what they remember about the film, according to Robert Coles, what they remember is not the legal case or the commentary on American racism but the children’s relationship with Boo Radley, the reclusive neighbor next door whom they are frightened of and drawn to and who — in arguably one of the most gripping scenes in the story — rescues Scout on a stormy Halloween night.

H: to be honest, i’ve watched this movie only once, many years ago, and i remember very little about it. i remember the courtroom scene — i remember the last scene with boo radley — and that’s about it. um. this may make me a bad person.

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

A: I defer to Hanna on this one since she has a relationship with cars that, while I thoroughly admire and stand slightly in awe of, I do not intuitively share.

H: i have a theory about movies. it isn’t much of a theory but as far as it goes it runs as follows: every movie has a moment that makes it worthwhile. if you run across a movie that doesn’t, then you have found a true piece of cheese and you should be able to erase it from your brain. excellent movies, of course, are made up of more of these moments — you can see how the rule expands or contracts according to need or personal opinion. f&f has several such moments: brian’s lunch problems in the first half of the movie; dominic’s reaction to the car brian dumps in his garage (“i retract my previous statement.”); and much of the end of the movie. it’s cheesy, yes; it’s simple, yes; but, hey, there’s something likeable about these characters; there is something to watch for other than the tricked-out cars.

The Proposition (2005)

H: what a movie. hot. every frame of it leaches heat. it’s hot, it’s dry, it’s desert-baked in a way lawrence of arabia never thought of. it is hard to watch. the acting is sharp — there isn’t a dud note in it, down to the extras that populate the half-horse town. strange, violent, strangely violent, depressing, and hopeful.

A: Yeah, I’m with her on the hopeful, though you really, really have to hang in there till the end to get there. Through a really graphic rape scene (for those of you who can’t watch them) and brutal, brutal violence. It’s a movie that pulls no punches, but offers some really fascinating moral dilemmas for its characters to deal with — and refuses to let them off the hook. At all. Meathooks. And you can’t get away from the scenery, which is really a character all its own.

H: well, really, if you can’t handle the first scene, just don’t go further. really. honest advice here, folks. this movie is bloody. nasty. unpleasant. unpicturesque violence. the characters and the story coming through all of that are worth it in my book. the reaction of the townsfolk to the public punishment of an arrested boy alone makes much of the blood, sweat, and tears worthwhile, but there is no use in torturing yourself to get there.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

H: never seen it. er. sorry.

A: This was my pick! My brother Brian, if memory serves, introduced me to this Spike Lee movie a handful of years ago. I’ve lost the specifics now, but remember the contours involving heat, heat in the city, and the short tempers that inevitably break when the heat is so damn hot you can’t remember what it felt like to be cool.

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

A: Mary Louise Parker is kick-ass, and really the reason to watch this movie. I mean, okay, there are lots of reasons to watch this movie, but as a young adolescent I mostly watched it to watch Mary Louise Parker kick ass. And cook the bad guy and serve him up for dessert.

H: oh! and there’s that great bit where the tiny little cook whangs the awful rapist child-thieving mean dude with the frying pan! i love that bit! so satisfying! plus the bit where ruth dies in the book made me cry when i read the book in college and understood what was actually happening.

Wizard of Oz (1939)
A: To be honest, Oz scared me as a child — it comes from the same genre of out-of-kilter children’s fiction as Raggedy Ann and Andy stories, in which unhinged characters do things you really wish they wouldn’t, and punishment is meted out unpredictably and by some sort of foreign logic known only by the story creator themselves. L. Frank Baum was not a well man (possibly he spent too much time holed up in his summer cottage located in my home town, writing about the denizens of Oz). I’m with Gregory Maguire on this one: the Wizard of Oz is not a benevolent man, Oz is not a happy place, and the Wicked Witch of the West is not the one we should be frightened of. That having been said: it’s a classic MGM musical with all the bells and whistles, which starts and ends with a tornado in Kansas. What could be more summery than that? Just settle in with a emerald-colored Mojito and enjoy.
H: who wasn’t scared by oz as a kid? seriously — put up your hands so i can fail to believe you. if it wasn’t miss gulch, it was the tornado. if it wasn’t the tornado, it was the munchkins — or glinda — or the trees — or the witch — or — or — or — you gettin’ my drift here?

The Painted Veil (2006)
H: out.
A: It’s a curious film, adapted from a 1925 novel by English author W. Somerset Maugham. It’s a story about an abusive, desperate marriage (adultery on her side, autocratic control on his) between an English debutant (Naomi Watts) and a doctor (Edward Norton) who takes his wife to a remote part of China where they encounter a cholera outbreak and are forced to come to terms with the expectations each of them brought into their hasty marriage. Toby Jones and Liev Schreiber do solid turns as secondary characters, and there is a wonderful cameo appearance by Diana Rigg, who plays a mother superior at a mission school.