A mother dies. A family gathers to divide the estate and trade memories. Life and death, those persistent cliches, duke it out once more at a country house just outside Paris. From familiar material, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Boarding Gate) crafts a near perfect blend of humor and heartbreak, a lyrical masterwork that measures loss in terms practical and evanescent. The great Edith Scob is superb as the seventy-five-year-old widow who furnished the elegant mansion she inherited from her artist uncle with the artifacts of a lifetime. When she dies, the fate of the house passes to her three children. Adrienne, the subtle, sensational Juliette Binoche, has little use for France or her mother's past life. Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) has plans to move to China. Only Frédéric (Charles Berling), the eldest, would like the house to stay in the family. That's it. But out of that "it," Assayas creates that rare summer movie — one that matters. Lots of films are called haunting, Summer Hours truly is.

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“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.