Ebiri: Ping Pong Summer Is All Surface, But It’s Beautiful

By Bilge Ebiri

Even when they’re good, many coming-of-age movies these days seem to be of the noxiously self-congratulatory kind. They’re not that interested in offering insights into lives other than the audience’s own. Instead, they offer reassuring nostalgia trips, usually into the ’80s, reassuring all us 30- and 40-something viewers that the lives we once led were, in fact, the most interesting ones. But it’s useless to resist; collective memory is now the genre’s currency.