Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing Spike Lee film about famed serial killer
Review: In 1977, New York City was terrorized by a serial killer who called himself the Son of Sam. He would prowl the streets of the Bronx area and shot young people parked in their cars. This psychopath, who taunted the police by mailing letters to a local journalist, became the object of the biggest manhunt in the city's history. His real name was David Berkowitz, and he was apprehended in the summer of 1977.Summer of Sam is not directly about this infamous man. We see him, but we never get to know him. Instead, we met some young people who live in the neighborhood. The focus is on Vinny and Dionna [John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino], who have been married for a couple of years. He has been notoriously unfaithful to her, a fact she is just now picking up on. Vinny is presented as a victim of his environment. In his Italian-American neighborhood, a man is a man, and all women are not created equal. He has been taught to set a strict standard for what his wife should be asked to do sexually. For pleasures outside this code, there are other women. Vinny isn't bright enough to see that all of this is mere justification for his womanizing, but after accidentally seeing two of Sam's victims, he does believe God is about to strike him dead. He cannot share his fears with Dionna, because he was with another woman that particular night. We also met the local rebel. Ritchie [Adrien Brody] hangs out a lot in Manhattan, where he is trying to become a punk rocker. His spiked hair, leather gear and outrageous clothing have upset the guys he grew up with, They seem obsessed with fitting in to a mold, despite the fact that they were born into the most culturally diverse city in America. His appearance is nothing compared to his bizarre way of making money. He also has a somewhat twisted relationship with the street's most promiscuous girl, Ruby [Jennifer Esposito]. What director Spike Lee concentrates on is the effect the Son of Sam has on the actions and the thought patterns of these young adults, as well as on New Yorkers in general. He partly succeeds in his efforts. His portrayal of the paranoia these people develop is well done. Showing how a mob mentality develops also works. Lee fails on a deeper level, when he trues to convince us that Sam was simply a madman in a world gone mad - society's victim. The problem I have with this viewpoint is that I believe the world has always been mad, but the actions of a serial killer remain an aberration. There is an enormous difference between having dark fantasies and acting on them. If this weren't true, we'd have wiped ourselves out a few thousand years ago. There is another weaknesses in the story line. In general, when a plot has people doing different things in different places, their paths should literally cross at some point. This never really happens in Son of Sam. While we are often affected by people we never met in real life, this fact is hard to portray in a movie. Here, the result seems to be two different movies happening at once. Spike Lee would have been better off either making a movie specifically about David Berkowitz or one about an Italian-American neighborhood in his native New York. Separately, each story is good. Together, they intrude on each other. They simply aren't parallel enough to fit together.
Rating: 
Summary: A revalation
Review: Okay, here's the revelation i promised you: Spike Lee must HATE Italian Americans. If this was not already obvious from "Do the Right Thing"(which i do admit, was certainly not without its merits and points about bigotry and inter-racial hatred), this film will, without a doubt, solidify this in your mind. He portrays all but one of the Italian Americans in the film as coke-snorting, unhealthily promiscuous, violent, dishonest, and generally unscrupulous characters. Aside from this, he lays every other sterotype in the book down and applies them to his characters with no remorse.
But to Mr. Lee's credit, his accuracy with some of the sterotypes do ring true to the individual of italian heritage(or not, who am i to say) modest enough to admit them.
The film itself...
Spike Lee takes an incident in New York that affected many an individual, and personalizes it to a degree that is sometimes uncomfortable. No, I'm not referring to the shock the viewer is given when he sees the fat guy from the practice as David Berkowitz, or when we hear John Turturro's voice come from a dog. No, i am, in fact referring to the lurid concentration on the characters warped sexuality, that is often thrust in the viewers face in such a way, that you really wish you hadn't convinced mom and dad to sit down and watch it with you. Perhaps if a degree of subtlety had been worked into these sequences, i would have felt better about giving the film the coveted 4 stars.
As always, the writing is of superior quality, and the cinematography is entertainingly unorthodox(most striking to me was the spelling of the word "murder" with a set of children's blocks). The dialouge rarely slows to a gibbering ...of dim nonsense, as was often the case in "He Got Game", which has become a sort of cultural "Baby's first Spike Lee Joint", if not just for the subject matter it details.
For true-crime buffs, the film is both a sucess and a dissapointment. Despite my initial impressions, it has little to do with the actual "son of sam" killings, and uses them as a framework to tell the story about the characters. The depictions of violence, which are quite graphic, show with unflinching accuracy the events that took place in 1979, down to the famed shot to the head through a stack of books. However, it more or less portrays the victims as being wholly slaughtered by the irate berkowitz, when in fact, approximately half of them survived. There are various other "technical" issues such as those, but they are not worth noting here.
All in all, S.O.S was a good effort that could have been made better by perhaps an effort to concentrate less on shock value and a little more on story.
Rating:
Summary: Spike Takes On Sam
Review: Summer of Sam is Spike Lee's take on the true story of how the serial killer David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, placed New York City in the grip of fear during 1977. The movie is not a look at Berkowitz himself, but at an Italian-American community in the Bronx. The two central characters are Vinnie and Richie played by John Leguizamo and Adrian Brody respectively. Vinnie is married Dionna (Mira Sorvino), but he is wildly unfaithful to her. This is a source of confusion for Vinnie, because of his religion, he wants to be faithful to his wife, but he thinks it's a sin to do all the wild...acts he performs with the girls he sleeps with. Richie had left the neighborhood, but recently came back. He is virtually unrecognizable to the guys in the hood as he is a punk rocker with incredible spiked hair and he has taken up an English accent. Richie and the neighborhood [girl], Ruby (Jennifer Espisito) start going together and he introduces her in his bizarre world of playing in a punk rock band and dancing in a...theater. All this happens with the Son of Sam killings as a backdrop. Not only were the killings happening that summer, but the City was gripped by the biggest heatwave in history and an infamous blackout. Despite a spirited performance by Mr. Leguizamo, the film never really succeeds. The convoluted plot on how the semi-mob related guys in the neighborhood think Richie is the Son of Sam never rings true or seems believable. Certain characters like Anthony LaPaglia's cop who is investigating the killings appear and then disappear without adding much to the plot. Mr. Lee does do a great job of intertwine actual footage and events into the film and the closing scene when Berkowitz (played by The Practice's Michael Badalucco) is captured and brought into the station and the guys are hunting down Richie is intense and exhilaratingly set to The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again". Overall Summer of Sam is a decent movie, but disappointing in that it could have been a great film.
Rating: 
Summary: Sex! Violence! Twists of historical reality! I love it!
Review: There was a heat wave in 1977. There was an electrical blackout. The Yankees were doing great. [The] disco revolution is in full swing. And there was a serial killer on the loose. Against this backdrop, this is the story of an Italian American couple in the Bronx (John Leguizamo as Vinny and Mira Sorvino as Dionna) and their crumbling marriage. When their friend Richie (Adrien Brody) starts to get involved with the punk scene he is looked at as weird. Everything in this movie is exaggerated. There is a brashness of atmosphere and color, a comedic quality to the dialog, an exaggeration of characterization. All this is viewed through the eye of Spike Lee's camera. It never seems real. But that might not be his intention. As we all know the story of the postal worker who was eventually caught and convicted of the murders, there is no real dramatic tension regarding the hunt for the killer. The violence captures the mood of the times, and explains some the paranoia that gripped the City. The soundtrack, comprised of disco favorites such as "The Dancing Queen" and "Don't Leave Me This Way," were creative punctuation as the story unfolded, a story that was less the story of a serial killer, and more the story of an era that has passed into New York City history.
Rating:
Summary: Spike. Spike. Spike.
Review: After seeing Bamboozled I figured Spike Lee must be on his casual way back to earlier greatness so I took a chance on Summer of Sam. Ah hunh. This was controversial to who now? Entertainment Weekly? I might've known. If you've seen Boogie Nights or 54 then you've also seen this movie. The only part I really liked was when Spike went to go get a "black" perspective
and this lady told him she was glad it was a white person doing all the killing, because if it was a "black" person, there would be race riots.
I just saved you 2 bucks. Somebody needs a happy meal.
Rating: 
Summary: A critically underappreciated film
Review: Given the press reviews that came out upon this movie's release and a number of the reviews here, I'm going to buck the trend and suggest to you that Summer of Sam is actually one of Spike Lee's very best films. Perhaps it was marketed ineffectively, but Lee clearly never intended this movie to be about The Killer. Rather, Summer of Sam is about paranoia, conflicting ideas of community, and trusting one's self against and through an intense period of: the heat, economic downturn, sexual adventurousness, and drugs that were the late 1970's. The Son of Sam's killing spree in NYC in 1977 triggered a fear and panic in the city that often made people who knew each other for years suddenly suspicious of one another. At the time of its release this movie was roundly criticized for Lee's portrayal of Italian men as "stereotypical 'Guidos,'" but I would ask those folks who make such claims to consider this: if we say that a stereotype is a fixed, unvarying conception of a person, then why aren't all the Italian men in this film exactly the same in their actions and manners? Were there no Italian men in NYC'77 who were quite like the three "Guidos" in Summer of Sam? And do you honsetly believe that Spike Lee intends for these three men to represent ALL Italian men? Of course not. And do we see examples of Italian men in Summer of Sam who are not "Guidos"? Several. The characters are rendered masterfully, I think, and John Leguizamo gives an amazingly rich and layered performance as a man who cheats on his wife BECAUSE his curious religious convictions convince him his sexual desires are too perverse to ask of her. When he comes perilously close to two of Sam's victims, Leguizamo's character undergoes an intense but ultimately doomed period of guilt and self-doubt that he tries to address but cannot--his desire to be good to his wife is very real, yet this desire is overpowered by his sexual desires. In this vein the movie becomes an investigation of how people, "good" and "bad," address their own desires--for sex, for status, for security. And the paranoia created by he Son of Sam's killings creates strange bedfellows indeed: the "Guidos" protect an effeminate gay local because he is a good customer in their drug trade, but they harrass a guy they grew up around because he starts spiking his hair and listening to punk music; the local mafia boss bankrolls a neighborhood block party so people can have a good time in relative safety . . . because he's also provided the "Guidos" with baseball bats to protect everyone. This movie is far more complex than most reviewers seem to indicate. An excellent score and soundtrack that never overwhelms the action, and a gifted cast that delivers memorable performances, many of which should have been award-worthy (Leguizamo, certainly, but also the poignant and determined Mira Sorvino character, Adrien Brody's nearly-doomed punk rock dreamer, and the alarmingly unheralded Jennifer Esposito as the local tramp who really wants to change who falls in love with the punk rocker). The film's climax, in which the wrong man is attacked and beaten by the "Guidos" (having been lured out of his house by his own conflicted friend) plays simultaneously with the capture and arrest of the real killer, and it is so masterfully rendered I don't think I'll ever forget it. Bookended by commentary from notorious/ubiquitous/beloved NYC columnist Jimmy Breslin, Summer of Sam, as Lee surely did intend, is far more than a movie about seeming stereotypes and disco music during a scary time in the city. It deserves a closer look by anyone interested in Lee's singular grasp of human dynamics and desires. It would be a shame for people to write this movie off as a misfire, for it is no such thing.
Rating: 
Summary: .44 Caliber Disappointment
Review: This movie failed to live up to its promise. It had a strong cast including John Leguizamo, Mira Sorvino, Adrian Brody, Jennifer Esposito, Bebe Neuwirth, and Patti LuPone; it had fascinating subject material to work with in the Son of Sam killings. But the story fell flat. the lead characters (portrayed convincingly by Leguizamo and Sorvino) were unsympathetic and annoying. There was a point I was hoping they were next to be gunned down. Really. The only characters I found interesting were the Punk Rocker and his new girlfriend, Ruby (Brody and Esposito). They were sympathetic, developed, and were the sanest characters in the movie despite their societally unacceptable appearance. Other characters were flat characatures and social stereotypes, with too occasional appearances by "son of Sam". The movie dragged on, twisting a potentially interesting concept into a seemingly endless nightmare of boredom. 1 star was too high a rating for this awful waste of a movie.
Rating:
Summary: people need a good definition of porno
Review: This was a fantastic film , a bleak film about the summer of 1977. But what I don't understand is why this movie is being called a "porno"?..what porn?...there was barlely any sex , you wanna gripe about hollywood porn watch Caligula . This movie isnt any worse in vulgarity than Trainspotting which is hailed as a milestone classic.Quit being so PC and clean cut and get over it , it really isnt that bad as people are making it out to be , they just are too busy watching Disney films , that something as softcore as this terrifies them.
Rating:
Summary: fantastic film from my favorite time period
Review: 1977 is one of my favorite years in history. Everything that happened in that year shaped my life. It centers around a serial killer I had been studying David Berkowitz , it shows the gritty punks in CBGB , and the prejudice we faced in those days. The film is a grim dark look at the urban side of New York during the hot , terrifying wake of the Son Of Sam killer. I don't care for Spike Lee's films , but this is a great film. I don't wanna bother with a synopsis , so see it for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: A remarkable piece of garbage
Review: Summer of Sam proudly takes its place amoung the ten worst films I've ever seen. This plotless, shapeless mess of poorly directed and edited drivel fully deserved sinking out of sight at the box office.
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