4. Heavyweights
Of course, if you like your summer fun a little more structured, there's always the summer camp option. There are a lot of summer camp movies out there, most of them really good (like Meatballs or Friday The 13th), so it was kind of difficult deciding which flick I wanted to place on this list. After a lot of thought, however, there was one film that stood above the rest, primarily due to its light, entertaining tone and one truly great performance. That film was the 1995 Disney film Heavyweights. The film revolves around Jerry Garner (Aaron Schwartz), a somewhat overweight middle-school aged kid whose parents decide that it's time for their son to lose some weight. In order to help Jerry shed the pounds, his parents sign him up to spend the summer at Camp Hope, a "fat camp" designed especially for kids Jerry's age. Jerry's skeptical at first, but after hearing nothing but good things about the camp from the kids who have been there before, he decides that maybe his summer's not going to be ruined anyway. Those hopes for a decent summer, however, are dashed the moment he meets the new camp owner, Tony Perkis (Ben Stiller), an unhinged fitness-fanatic who proceeds to turn the camp into a weight-loss Auschwitz, attempting to force the kids into losing insane amounts of weight in order to promote his new weight-loss program. Eventually, the kids get fed up with Perkis' inhumane treatment and decide to take the camp back by force. There are two elements that make this movie great. The first is the wonderful screenplay, written by a pre-Anchorman (heck, pre-Freaks and Geeks) Judd Apatow and Steven Brill. It's hard to believe that there was ever a time that Steven Brill was a bigger name in Hollywood than Judd Apatow, but that was the situation during the making of Heavyweights; all Apatow had done up to this point were a few TV movies and some episodes of The Ben Stiller Show. It's obvious, however, that Apatow was extremely talented even at this point in his career; the film doesn't lose its humorous edge as we grow older, rare for a kids' movie, and the film contains lots of well-written roles. In fact, Apatow and Brill's high-quality Heavyweights script led directly to Apatow getting the gig that put him on the Hollywood map, namely, Freaks And Geeks; Freaks' creator, Paul Feig, met Apatow on the set of Heavyweights (Feig portrayed Tim in the film), the two hit it off, and when it was time for Freaks to go into production, Feig remembered Apatow and asked him to come on as producer. Apatow agreed, placing him on the path that led him to becoming one of the biggest comedy names in Hollywood. The second great element of this film is Ben Stiller's portrayal of Tony Perkis, Jr. I'll be honest and say that I'm generally not a Stiller fan; while I like some of his work, I generally find him to be a little annoying. However, Stiller is hilarious in Heavyweights. Stiller totally makes us buy him as Perkis; from the second he makes his first appearance, we forget that we're watching Ben Stiller and we're totally caught up in watching this nutty ex-fitness instructor subject his "students" to his insane weight-loss program. The mark of a good actor is that he or she can get the audience so involved in his or her performance that we forget that we're watching acting, and Stiller pulls that off here. It's a trick I've personally never seen Stiller pull off again, but I'm still hoping; the advance word on his next film, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, is amazing, so I'm hoping that this will be the film in which Stiller gets his mojo back.