4 summertime movies you can watch without a VPN

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VPN rage is only going to make you hotter, so stay cool and do without

With summer having definitively arrived, we could be telling you all the great things to do outside. Let’s face facts, though: going outside will make you hot, sweaty and covered in mosquito bites. Staying inside with the air conditioning and watching movies about other people getting hot, sweaty and covered in mosquito bites? Now that’s the perfect way to experience summer. Plus, all these movies are available on Chinese streaming sites, so you can have that perfectly lazy summer day even if your VPN is on the fritz.

Jaws

There’s probably no summer movie more definitive than Jaws. With its marketing onslaught, mass release schedule and easy-to-grasp concept, it laid the foundation for every summer blockbuster that followed. In case that’s not enough, the entire movie is set over the course of a very bloody summer at a beach town. Throw in the fact that it’s an essentially flawless thriller, and you have the ideal movie to convince yourself that maybe it’s not so bad that Beijing doesn’t have any beaches.

Rear Window

Given that it’s all about a man sitting around inside with a broken leg, it’s amazing how much this Hitchcock classic invokes the season. James Stewart seems to constantly have a thin line of sweat on his brow, while the patterns of daily life he glimpses from his apartment window set the scene better than a thousand lines of exposition.

Do the Right Thing

'I have today’s forecast for you: hottttttttt!' Samuel L. Jackson’s DJ announces at the very start of Spike Lee’s masterpiece, and he isn’t kidding. The movie lays at least part of the blame for its rising racial tensions on the rising temperatures, doing such a good job of capturing the muggy heat of a New York summer that you’ll want to turn up the air conditioning.

In the Heat of the Sun

For a perfect evocation of summer that’s closer to home, check out Jiang Wen’s debut feature. The story of a gang of privileged kids running wild during the Cultural Revolution, Jiang layers youthful nostalgia with a menacing undercurrent. Thrown on top of that is a keenly observed portrait of summertime life in Beijing, spent barreling down hutongs and quaffing beibingyang.

For links to watch all these movies online, hit 'Read more'. 

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