It’s the land of licensed motorist Lizzie Grubman! Plus? Jillionaire teens Nicki and Paris Hilton in summer attire!
But will anyone remember to tune in? ABC airs it 9 p.m. Sunday, opposite HBO's "Six Feet Under" finale and "The Wire" premiere, Fox's "Bachelorettes in Alaska" launch and Comedy Central's "Crank Yankers" bow! Best set your VCRs now ...
TV Guide says:
Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (“Harlan County, U.S.A.”) guides a two-part cinéma-vérité tour of New York's tony resort town. Shot during the summer of 2001, the film keeps tabs on various residents and tourists, all looking to spend the season (or at least a few weekends) in the sun. “It's like going to a huge party,” says Kopple of the experience. “Some people...you want to spend a lot of time with and get to know them.” Among those making the scene in Part 1, which covers Memorial Day to July 4th, are a bachelorette looking for love, a singer looking for a break and a writer looking at everything around him. There are also a few famous faces, including Alec Baldwin and Billy Joel.
Variety says:
…a soporific four-hour, two-part docu … amorphous impression of these famous vacation spots … What's the Oscar-winning documentarian up to here? The same old city-vs.-country rant, albeit a strangely muted one for Kopple's talents … No thank you, said the Old Guard, who made sure to stop her cameras from invading such restricted monied enclaves as the Meadow Club and the Bathing Corp. … storyline follows the young and blond-as-Brinkley investment banker Angela Barber on her first summer to the Hamptons, where she lands in the sharehouse of Cliff and Kira Friedman, whose entourage of New Yorkers includes lawyer Jacqueline Lipson, who lets it be known over Memorial Day weekend, "I will have a boyfriend in September. I told my father to start saving!" (Amateurs are prone to overact for the camera.) Barber is welcomed into this party-hearty enclave by being berated for hailing from Oregon. Or is it Iowa or Idaho? Those native New Yorkers are never quite sure of anything west of the Hudson. Kopple had the good luck to record the Hamptons the summer Lizzie Grubman's Mercedes SUV allegedly backed over 16 people at Conscience Point Inn on July 4 …
Entertainment Weekly gives it a B+ and says:
Doing without voice-over narration, Kopple's deft editing provides many quick, sometimes vivid portraits of an array of Hamptonites. There is, for example, Jacqueline Lipson, a twentysomething Manhattan attorney who looks upon the summer as a time to meet Mr. Right and goes about it with lawyerly sharkishness -- handing out her number to many guys at many parties, cooing aggressively to one flustered date, ''Why aren't you touching my legs?'' Beneath her gleaming white smile, Lipson seems sadly desperate; it's hard to believe she didn't know she'd come off this way to the camera. Then again, if there's one thing ''The Hamptons'' is about, it's self-delusion. Which brings us to Jason Binn, the tanned, tight-skinned young publisher of ''Hamptons'' magazine (an ad-stuffed glossy designed solely to publish pix of the towns' glitziest denizens), who I'd say clearly fancies himself a Jay Gatsby for the 21st century had he given any sign of having read something more than Tony Robbins self-improvement manuals. …
… Kopple, to her credit, also locates subtler character studies. The best is that of a Hamptons emergency-ambulance technician named Tracie Hotchner. We see her doing her high-pressure job, then learn that she's not just any transplanted Californian -- she cowrote the screenplay for ''Mommie Dearest''! She says people tell her all the time that she should write a movie about her new work, but, she says, ''it's not something that's particularly writable aboutable.'' But the Hamptons, it turns out, are eminently filmable aboutable.
