Hollywood continues to produce blockbusters, but for moviegoers, the summer season isn't what it used to be.
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As Mark Twain might have said, rumors of the death of the American movie audience are probably greatly exaggerated.
The shaky Warner Bros. Pictures has found its footing lately thanks to the success of Minecraft, Sinners, and (to top it all off) Final Destination: Bloodlines. Meanwhile, I’m sure a good number of the world’s eight billion inhabitants have already sunk more than three hours of their lives (including trailers) into Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, which, with its release this Memorial Day weekend, is sure to kick off the summer movie season with a bang.
Is this the return of Hollywood, or is this the cinematic equivalent of an election card that briefly promises victory but ultimately leads to defeat?
I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. Yes, the aforementioned films had the benefit of not being comic book-based, but how long will audiences reward studios for such minimal achievements? Making a film that can top Madame Web or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is an incredibly low bar. Are we really supposed to believe that the film industry will find long-term sustenance in would-be blockbusters like The Smurfs, or reboots of Jurassic World: Resurgence, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Naked Gun, and Freaky Friday? Oh, and that idea that comic book movies have run their course – well, someone forgot to tell the people who embraced Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps. To paraphrase another great American writer, so why do we keep going back to the superhero past?
Some may call me rude, controversial, or just plain cynical, but I prefer to think of myself as simply an old man—old enough, at least, to vividly remember a summer movie season twenty-five years ago that was considerably more dynamic, exciting, and at times artistic than what awaits us now.
Let's remember some of the films that came out in the summer of 2000.
One of the most memorable events of the season was Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks, which debuted ten nights before Memorial Day but which in every other way epitomized what a summer moviegoing experience should be: simple, heartfelt fun. Its pleasures were modest but palpable. Allen played the inept impresario of a group of crooks who are planning a bank robbery. They plan to tunnel into the vault through a nearby candy store, but even their deliberately silly employee, May (played by Elaine May, who is truly inimitable), doubts the plausibility of the story. When it is explained to her that the tunnel is an extension of the candy store into a restaurant and tea room, she asks, “Where are they going to have tea—in a tunnel?”
In one sign of the decline of summer movies, Small Time Crooks was a modest box office success a quarter century ago, but this summer Woody Allen, officially banned from big-time cinema, will not appear on screen at all.
Lest you think my tastes are solely in the smart-alecky comedy genre, I also watched and enjoyed Mission: Impossible 2, which at least had the advantage of being more recent — and closer in time to the original — than the upcoming eighth film in the series. I remember being blown away by the disaster film The Perfect Storm, directed by action master Wolfgang Petersen, starring J.
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
