Every week,Entertainment Weeklyis looking back at the biggest movies of the summer of 2002.
Join us for a rewatch of the first true summer of Hollywood’s strange new millennium.
Or more specifically, she is roofied(!)
Michael Tackett/Gaylord/All Girl Prods/Kobal/Shutterstock
And I haven’t even gotten to the flashbacks yet!
But I feel like you may have thoughts about that.
And oh, the flashbacks, Leah.
Michael Tackett/Gaylord/All Girl Prods/Kobal/Shutterstock
Was there an embarrassment of riches?
Hell,that’s a movie.
That sequence stretches for full melodrama “You pathetic Catholic idiot!”
There’s not enough Ya-Ya in thisYa-Ya.
The younger versions of Vivi’s friends make zero impression.
Leah, were there strands of the movie that definably worked better or worse for you?
that she must turn her entire soul over to demon alcohol.
I love an ensemble!
Are we being unfair to a movie that was so much a product of its time?
Is there aYa-Yathat makessenseto you in 2022?
Or is that whatCrawdadsis, basically?
Darren:I’ll see yourCrawdads, Leah, and raise you someSharp Objects.
As a pair, those two projects are much bleaker thanYa-Ya’s sunny swirl.
(Hell,The Helpso affected the zeitgeist that it successfully rendered itself helplessly out of date.)
for a quietly tense coastal retreat.
It’s a primal moment, in a film working overtime for nostalgic guffaws.
Great performers playing outrageous characters with massive personalities: This ain’t rocket science.
Yet I worry that even in 2002, stuff likeSteel MagnoliasandFried Green Tomatoes(both big hits!)
seemed too non-conceptual, plotless, even a bit indie.
Forced whimsy, empty characters, zero tension?
Read past 2002 rewatches:
