Our critics weigh in on the summer movie season
OWEN
Do you hear that great big whooshing sound, Lisa? It's Hollywood letting
out a collective sigh of relief now that the summer movie box office
returns are (mostly) in. The news has been good: Despite intimidating
ticket prices, noisy megaplexes, and the rapid ascent of DVD culture as
spurred by increasingly deluxe home-viewing systems, the popcorn season
that is just finishing up represented a big bounce back from last year's
doldrums. People are going to the movies again! In something resembling
droves! To me, though, Hollywood's Comeback Summer is laced with irony,
since everyone seems to agree that the films themselves left something
to be desired. By now, do you think there's any correlation between box
office revenue and our love for the movies? Or is it all an arbitrary
up-and-down cycle that means little, positive or negative, for cinema as
we know it?
LISA
Jeez, Owen, I'm the last person to ask about trends in box office
revenue: I'm still getting calls for my resignation following my
negative review of the summer's most colossal success — arrrgghh, I mean
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest — as if failure to reflect
popular taste represents a critical liability. Who am I (the critics of
this critic demand) to tell $400 million worth of moviegoers that
they're wrong about their consumer choice?
OWEN
Maybe I should join your club, Lisa. I've gotten the same letters about
my review of Little Miss Sunshine, the sheer volume of which makes me
suspect that it could turn out to be the crossover smash of the
millennium: My Big Fat Greek Sunshine. Actually, I think I know why
readers get so incensed when we beat up on a movie they love. It's what
draws me to this business in the first place — the fierce, almost
protective passion that people still feel for movies. I say, Amen to
that.
LISA
Yeah yeah yeah, everyone's right, and no one is wrong. But what if
that's not true? Part of my despair this season — and I do think I've
settled into a funque-de big-studio cinema in a way I haven't during
past summers of escapist junque is that with so much commerce riding on
projects ''not of the heart but of the glands'' (as that old cineast
William Faulkner might say), there's little reason for movie lovers to
further their studies in what used to be called movie literacy. To put
it another way, serve up enough fast food, and pretty soon lard becomes
the dinnertime standard. More than ever in this hot season, quality
cinematic storytelling has been an almost accidental component of what
succeeded, what flopped, what's been loved, and what's been ignored.
Click, Mission: Impossible III, X-Men: The Last Stand, Nacho Libre, or
The Da Vinci Code — each unhappy picture may be greasy in its own way, but
taken together, the menu is a deadly heart attack.
OWEN
It all tastes a bit too much the same. I liked a few of the hits, such
as M:I-3 and Superman Returns, but big-screen summer amusement has
become a relative concept, and a ponderous one at that. Most of these
films are working so damned hard to entertain you, bamboozling you with
their tent-pole mythologies, their bigger-better-wowier F/X, that they
end up weighing you down. What used to be called ''escapism'' has, in a
movie like X3 or Lady in the Water or even Miami Vice or A Scanner
Darkly, become a top-heavy feat of technology, and you can taste the
sweat — of the filmmakers, and of the executives breathing down their
necks.
LISA
Pause for a minute while you're tasting sweat: I think it's hellishly
knotted, but I'd never include A Scanner Darkly — Richard Linklater's
ardent, questing, experimental interpretation of a Philip K. Dick
conundrum, made with the rotoscoping technique some tire of but I
totally dig — in the same indictment of escapism as lazy X3 or empty,
style-over-story Miami Vice.
OWEN
Well, I thought that A Scanner Darkly was joyless, opaque, and pretty
awful. Pirates, on the other hand, connected with audiences because it
became an ironic antidote to the summer movies: an escape from escapism.
Yes, the big megabuck franchise money was riding on it, but it was a
rare throwaway romp, with characters you didn't have to pretend to care
about and a one-thing-after-another silliness that made it, in essence,
a jaunty, disreputable sequel to the Indiana Jones films. It really took
its cue from Johnny Depp, who winks at the whole overblown blockbuster
machinery, even as he's now part of it.
LISA
A throwaway romp? The thing was built like the monorail to JFK
airport — graceless and clunky. And enough with Depp, already (who may
have winked in the original, but now tugs on his eye like a vaudeville
sharpie). The best-made and most sophisticated romps I've seen this
summer have all been of an animated variety: Cars, Monster House, and
The Ant Bully. Anyway, before I forget, will you sign my petition to
make sure that the small, stunning American indie Half Nelson — one of the
best movies of the year, let alone the summer gets the marketing care
and support it needs to entice audiences and earn Ryan Gosling the Oscar
nomination he deserves?
OWEN
Let's not speed so quickly past Cars. On this one, Lisa, we're in
zooming harmony: I think it's the most luscious entertainment I saw all
summer — not quite a great Pixar film, like Toy Story or The Incredibles,
but a lovely and inspired one. If there's any actor I'd give an award
to, it's Paul Newman for his sublime gruffness. He rooted the movie, and
so did its deep nostalgia for a handmade, mom-and-pop, neon-roadside
America that's been squashed by corporate NASCAR glitz.
Half Nelson, I have to confess, I think you and a lot of other critics have gotten a little too excited about. We're all eager to find the summer's Great Indie Hope (forgive me, but I'm not counting My Big Fat Greek Sunshine), and this is a compelling fragment of a movie, yet in demonstrating the theory that idealistic inner-city teachers should avoid becoming crackheads, I wish it didn't sanctify the girl who befriends Ryan Gosling.
LISA
What's with you killjoys who dump all over the stuff we movie lovers
adore?
OWEN
Here's my true killjoy statement, and I'm not ashamed: Cars aside, my
favorite movie of the summer was the urgent, brainy, and deeply
unblockbustery An Inconvenient Truth, starring the unlikeliest movie
star of the year, Al Gore. It was my great escape — from the delusions
threatening our world.
LISA
Al Gore, movie star? What next, M. Night Shyamalan playing a visionary
author? Only in the summer, kids.
