I Know What You Did This Summer
I wrote this a couple of months ago, and it never saw the light of day so I thought I'd pop it up here. Enjoy, or don't.
What a summer we had. The blocks were well and truly busted as we were sledge hammered with big budget films over the last few months, and whilst admittedly the quality varied wildly (Speed Racer, anyone?) we were treated to what amounts to over $1.5 billion worth of cinema. Lucky us.
Franchise was the order of the summer. Some were revived, à la the disappointing Indiana Jones; some were born, as with the surprisingly not that bad Iron Man; and others were hopefully put to bed, namely the desperate Sex and the City - yes, I actually saw it. With movies being continually considered as simply a way to make sums of money, studios are looking for films with viable sequel potential and lucrative merchandising opportunities. About half of the major blockbusters were, once again, some form of sequel (Indiana Jones, The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2, Chronicles of Narnia), whilst others like Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk (was that really necessary) and probably Wanted and Hancock will spawn bastard sequels of their own. I don’t even want to imagine the kind of merchandise that came from Sex and the City (you’d hope a Carrie Bradshaw-shaped cyanide pill, perhaps) and other films like the magnificent WALL-E birthed a multitude of pyjamas and cuddly toys that I came worryingly close to buying for myself...
Three films (Indiana, Iron Man, The Dark Knight) grossed over $100 million in their opening weekend in the States alone, with The Dark Knight breaking the previous record held by Spiderman 3 - seriously, how did that get there? At least six films (at the time of writing) raked in over $350 all in all, and we’re left to wonder where on earth all this disposable income came from. So it all looks pretty rosy for cinema, at least in financial terms. Well, not quite. The great success of these summer smashes has meant that considerably less money and attention has been given to the smaller films - you know, the ones that get good reviews but never seem to be showing at your local Vue. Whereas in previous years, less commercial films such as the fantastic Man on Wire would have easily surpassed £1 million in the UK, this year it only managed to scrape past £500,000. The highest grossing foreign language film was Mongol: The Rise to Power of Genghis Kahn, which wasn’t even close to reaching the million mark. We seem to have forsaken the subtleties and appeal of independent film and flocked to much easier forms of entertainment.
This may not be entirely fair, however, on neither the so-called blockbusters nor the general viewing public. Whilst there were undeniably soulless, pointless, idiotic films that Sarah Palin probably supported - Speed Racer, The Incredible Hulk - there was more than a healthy bite of intelligence from this summer’s cinematic lunch. Iron Man, even if refusing to directly address the issues, had large parts of its runtime in the Middle East, and Wanted at least tried to address issues of societal apathy, even if it didn’t quite convince. And for those of you who saw The Dark Knight, which I’m sure is pretty much everyone, it barely needs to be said (though I’ll say it anyway) that the issues dealt with were certainly not the standard fare for a big money ‘superhero’ movie. At times it almost feels like a political drama, and the big fuss with the BBFC considering upping the rating to a 15 goes a little way to emphasising how ‘adult’ the film is.
WALL-E, too, was hardly your usual children’s animated film. Although it’s become an expectation that Pixar conceive their films with adults in mind as well as the little kiddies, no one quite expected how far they’d go with their latest creation of genius. Having a central character who can speak less than a handful of words was a risky move, but he is one of the most adorable and loveable individuals of cinema history. The first 40 minutes or so of the film, with its dystopian and deserted depiction of earth, is every bit the art film of, say, 2001. So it’s not like we’ve been trying to avoid any kind of intelligent thought.
Really, then, we have been pretty lucky this summer. With films like WALL-E and The Dark Knight, we’ve been having our cake and thoroughly stuffing our faces with it, and even though they’re awful, films like Speed Racer are useful because we like to have something to complain about. Plus they make everything else look considerably better. So rejoice and be thankful. I hope you, like me, were able to get out and about round the multiplexes and breathe in the summer’s offerings. You should make the most of it: with last year’s writers strike starting to catch up with the rest of Hollywood, not to mention the world in financial crisis, next summer could be a pretty meagre one...