Top Film for Each Year of My Life – 2001

Wet Hot American Summer

“Well, no, why don't we say 9:30, and then make it your beeswax to be here by 9:30? I mean, we'll all be in our late 20s by then. I just don't see any reason why we can't be places on time.”

“You taste like a burger. I don't like you anymore.”

This was really a no-brainer. The only serious competition for this spot was The Royal Tenenbaums and Monsters Inc., and while they are both terrific, Wet Hot is about 100 times more rewatchable. It ranked number two on my Top Ten Comedies of the Past Ten Years list. Even though the film was shot during a wet, cold Pennsylvania spring, the performances don’t show it. Energy and joy pour off the screen.
Wet Hot is an ode to summer camp movies, but also a loving deconstruction of them, mocking the genre tropes and adding its own surreal flourishes. While I never attended overnight summer camp, I feel an intense nostalgia to be a counselor based on this movie. There’s an inherent appeal to nostalgia in all camp movies (well, maybe not Friday the 13th or Sleepaway Camp), but only Wet Hot, a parody, makes me want to work at one. Actually, I don’t want to work at summer camp. I want to live in this movie.

The cast is largely made up of members of The State whose reputation in sketch comedy is well established. Much like Monty Python, they excel at smart silliness, and Wet Hot oozes it, like when Neil (on a motorcycle) is chasing Victor (running) down a long road only to not catch up to him due to a stray bail of hay in the road. Brilliantly goofy.
In addition to the members of The State (who are great, as always) as Elizabeth Banks, Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Christopher Meloni, Bradley Cooper, Amy Pohler, Molly Shannon, and Paul Rudd throwing the all-time greatest temper tantrum in film history. With such a huge cast, one might think a few would get lost in the shuffle, but the episodic nature of the Wet Hot (all of which takes place on the last day of camp) allows for moments for everyone to shine. It helps that David Wain and Michael Showalter wrote a great script and gave everyone defined personalities.

I’d go ahead and list my favorite moments, but I’d be better served posting the script or trying to embed the whole film here. One of my favorite aspects of it, though, is that it’s so authentic that if you aren’t prepared for the over-the-top parody of it, you might just end up confused (as a friend of mine recently did). Throw this in with Freaks and Geeks and maybe the 80s weren’t so bad after all (what am I saying?).