TMP - Summer Break

Wandering Through the Shelves hosts Thursday Movie Picks. It's a weekly series where bloggers post and share various movie picks every Thursday. 

The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five movies and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

This week's theme is Summer Break.

Dirty Dancing

Baby (Jennifer Grey) and her family plan to spend a boring summer at the Catskills resort with her parents. When the resort's dance instructor, Johnny (Patrick Swayze) enlists Baby as his new partner, the two fall in love. Baby's father forbids her from seeing Johnny, but she's determined to help him perform the last big dance of the summer.

Summer hits, and it's hard not to think of this movie. It's just a classic. I'm hoping that Hollywood doesn't give it a whole cinematic universe like they're trying to do with Grease right now.

Adventureland

Plans for college grad James Brennan's (Jesse Eisenberg) long-anticipated dream trip to Europe are squashed when his parents announce that they are unable to subsidize his trip. Forced to take a job at the local amusement park, James prepares for the worst summer ever, until he finds love with a captivating co-worker named Em (Kristen Stewart).

Of course, once I moved away from Pittsburgh, every movie with the most amazing casts started filming there. Most of this takes place at Kennywood, a local amusement park I used to go to all the time. They changed the name of the location, of course, which cracked me up the first time I saw this. Overall, it's not a very memorable movie, but Bill Hader's freak-out is a total mood.

The Parent Trap

In this update of a 1961 film, twins Annie and Hallie (Lindsay Lohan) are strangers until happenstance unites them. The preteen girls' divorced parents, Nick (Dennis Quaid) and Elizabeth (Natasha Richardson), are living on opposite sides of the Atlantic, each with one child. After meeting at camp, American Hallie and British-raised Annie engineer an identity swap, giving both the chance to spend time with the parent they've missed. If the scheme works, it might just make the family whole again.

When my elementary school used this movie as a field trip excuse (I have no idea why), every kid wanted to go to this summer camp. Lindsay Lohan's performances were so ~groundbreaking~ for us  we acted out them on the playground. And, it's still a super sweet and perfect summer break movie.