Comedy Watch: Summer of 69 (2025)

Watched:  06/06/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jillian Bell

So, Hulu has sort of decided to corner the market on horny teen comedies and stoner comedies through the American High company.  

We have a six-degrees-of-separation connection here as someone we know worked on the film, and I wanted to check it out.

This is a "not aimed at me" movie, and that's cool.  I'm a 50-year-old dude, and not a young woman.  But I still found it pretty funny.   But, yeah, this is a movie that seems to be speaking to the awkwardness of being a teen girl - especially a "good girl" teen girl, something I am likely to ever be.  But it's not like everyone was speaking Romanian, so I basically got it.  

Our Hero is graduating high school and her lifelong crush has just broken up with the girl he's been with since first grade.  Learning from her inside source, the school mascot, that Boy's favorite sexual position is a 69 - which she doesn't know anything about - she decides to hire a stripper (Chloe Fineman) to teach her how to be sexy.  

Meanwhile, Stripper is both invited to her 10 year high school reunion and faced with the foreclosure of the strip club where she works, managed by Paula Pell.  However, Our Hero is a gaming streamer and has made mad bank playing video games.  So, Stripper asks for the amount of money she needs to save the club.

In many ways, it's a boilerplate summer comedy with a ticking clock, stakes high and low, and what will surely be a sweet resolution to the issue of one's virginity.  There's a formula.  So you really are focusing on execution.

I'm not sure they stuck the landing on this one.  

There are some great visuals - credit where it's due.  It's all practical and in-camera, but shows how one can hallucinate their way through high school and it's crazy stakes.  The lead, Sam Morelos, is amiable enough.  And Chloe Fineman is perfectly cromulent as her mentor/friend.  

I'm just not sure how in 2025 we're supposed to buy that a kid wouldn't have access to buckets and buckets and buckets of information about sex, from healthy alternatives, porn, etc...  The days of everything being a mystery seem like they disappeared around 2000.  

Aside from paying lip service to "her body, her choice" messaging, the movie comes down on a chaste, almost juvenile stance and it's hard to say that our lead really learns much by the end of the movie.  And in that, it really does feel aimed at very young people.  So it occupies the modern space once filled by fantasy movies of teens all banging away from the 1980's - 00's, but is made with the notion that "no, actually, most people aren't doing that in high school".  

I dunno.  It just feels like they backed down from their own plot and points in the last reel, making it about the strip club more than our lead growing.  But that's maybe very positive, to tell people that they can be liked for who they are, and probably are already liked by someone.  But narratively, it feels like it just sort of fizzles?

 But I am also not the target audience.

The highlight of the movie is maybe one scene where our lead first tells Chloe Fineman what she doesn't know, and what should be cringe is hilarious.  Also, anything done by Paula Pell and Alex Moffat.  And the gag with the mascot.