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Erik Davis ordered me to come up with a new approach to summer movies, and he demanded that the concept be intelligent, engaging, and jam-packed with vowels and consonants. (One out of three isn't bad.) And since I'm a childish movie nerd who had a deep affection for all things nostalgic, my first idea was "Hey, let's have the writers pick their favorite 'movie summer' and write a piece about it." And since my next eleven ideas stunk, he said "Ugh, fine. Do your Favorite Summers thing. But don't forget the vowels."

Nearly all of the Cinematicaleers will be penning their own pieces, but since I like to lead by example (when I'm not leading by guilt), I figured I'd get the ball rolling first. (Special thanks to Box Office Mojo for displaying OLD release dates in very handy fashion.) Also, for the sake of this series, let's say "summer" counts as "May through August," even though May is technically spring and part of September is definitely summer.

5/4 -- The Bounty // Breakin' // Hardbodies // Sixteen Candles -- So which one of these would be the big "Iron Man" release? We got Gibson and Hopkins in a nautical remake; a whole lot of pop-lockin' looneys; a leering sex comedy that helped to kill the sub-genre of mid-'80s sex comedies; and the directorial debut of one John Hughes.

5/11 -- Firestarter // The Natural -- Robert Redford knocking the cover off a baseball and Drew Barrymore immolating George C. Scott. Now THAT's summer!

5/18 -- Finders Keepers // Making the Grade -- A pair of justifiably forgotten farces, yes, both of which I saw theatrically.

5/23 -- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom -- Even back in 1984 Indiana Jones demanded his very own weekend ... one that starts on a Wednesday, no less! I distinctly remember seeing this on the afternoon of opening day, and while I was waiting for Mom to come pick us up, there was a woman BERATING the box office girl. Honest! Something about the heart-tearing scene had upset her small child. And just like that, the PG-13 was born.

British rock journalist Nick Kent perfectly summed up pop music by nothing how the best rock combines the Byronic and the moronic. That uneasy mix of poetry and poses, swagger and stagger, makes rock and roll ripe for mockery -- and, with Walk Hard arriving on DVD this week, what better time to name a few great comedies that have mocked rock and punctured the pretensions of pop?

1) Walk Hard

Starring John C. Reilly as roots-rocker Dewey Cox, Walk Hard doesn't just stick a foot out to trip up Walk the Line; it also manages to spoof The Beatles, Brian Wilson, Elvis and much more. (Indeed, Walk Hard follows such a carefully-crafted timeline as it travels through pop music history, it almost feels like a second take on the brilliant, underseen Grace of My Heart, another film that spanned decades through musical styles.) With a brilliant supporting cast and Reilly's cement-headed self-centered performance in the lead role, Walk Hard is that rare parody that nonetheless still loves what it mocks.

Best Line: "Wait a minute, son: Dewey Cox has to think about his whole life before he performs. ..."

As Scott pointed out in his review, you need not fear that this week's Superhero Movie is another brainchild of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, whose satanic perversions of the parody genre -- Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans -- have been terrorizing unsuspecting audiences every year since 2006. Superhero Movie was actually directed by Craig Mazin, a protégé of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker dream team responsible for Airplane! and The Naked Gun, and produced by David Zucker himself. But it, too, is plagued -- albeit to a much lesser degree -- by what's turning out to be the problem with the entire modern generation of spoofs going back to Scary Movie: relentless pop culture specificity.

The basest incarnations of this, of course, are the Friedberg-Seltzer monstrosities, which may be worthless as comedies but which could prove valuable to historians because they indicate precisely what dominated the American zeitgeist in the few months before their release. It's too generous to call these films' vulgar spasms "jokes," but to the extent that's what they are, they depend entirely on either audience members' awareness of US Weekly-type factoids such as Britney Spears' shaving her head or their recall of particular scenes and characters in recent box-office hits. That's not to say that these kinds of jokes can't be funny -- the problem with Friedberg and Seltzer, as others have pointed out, is that they think throwing something current on the screen ("Look, Paris Hilton!") constitutes humor. But they do limit comedies' universal appeal and staying power.

A good parody is hard to spin beyond the here and now. Take "Weird Al" Yankovic, for example. The pop-music jokester has put out 11 regular albums since 1983, when the accordian-playing nice guy's spoof of The Knack's "My Sharona" (titled "My Bologna" and recorded in the men's room of his college radio station) started his career as a musician, comedic icon and food fetishist when it blew up on The Dr. Demento Show. However, every hilarious and unforgettable cut like "Eat It", "Like A Surgeon" and "Smells Like Nirvana" that hit was matched by fade-away tracks like the New Kids jape "The White Stuff" (an ode to Oreos), the Rocky III goof "Theme From Rocky XIII (The Rye Or The Kaiser)" or the misjudgment "Taco Grande" (a riff on Latin rough-boy Gerardo's only hit, "Rico Suave"). The secret to a successful parody is complex, involving a careful balance of picking a song that is big enough, worthy of a good-natured dressing down and most important, funny. The same is true with movies, and the latest in the popular Scary Movie series is a great example of what can go right and wrong with such an attempt.