Every movie you see this summer is going to stink

By Drew Millard

You know, Spiderman 3 was actually really bad. If by now, you’re one of the seven people in the universe who didn’t go see it, don’t waste your eight bucks (ten if you go to Epic Theatres in Hendersonville). The combination of the extended dance scene, the three villains, and a side-plot involving Mary Jane that was never completely resolved, convoluted the story much too much to make for an enjoyable film.

Also, the movie presented — to me, at least — way too many questions about Peter’s day-to-day life. Why did he look 30 if he was supposedly about 22? If Peter was Spiderman at night and was in college during the day, when did he sleep? How much did the Daily Bugle actually pay him? Freelance photography for the Bugle was clearly his only vocation, and those Spider-Suits couldn’t have been cheap. Is it possible that Spidey had an eBay business on the side? Why does Willem Dafoe keep appearing in these things if he died at the end of the first movie? And would it even be conceivable for Peter not to know that Mary Jane’s Broadway debut (a) got shelled by the reviewers, and (b) resulted in her getting fired from the role? I mean, come on.

And don’t think that the other summer blockbusters will deliver you from the abominable black hole that was Spiderman 3. Pirates of the Caribbean — despite featuring Johnny Depp marauding around acting like Keith Richards for a hundred and twenty minutes and Keith Richards marauding around acting like himself for ten minutes — was a disappointment. Evan Almighty was the most expensive comedy of all time, and it happens to be aggressively unfunny because its producers forgot that you can’t make a movie funny by throwing money at it. Also, Evan Almighty is a biblical story. The Bible is many things, but funny it is not. Die Hard 4 was actually okay, but it suffered from the problems that typically plague big-budget, high-concept action movies, in that it really was embarrassingly bad whenever Bruce Willis wasn’t doing something violent or threatening to “kick somebody’s a—.” Transformers has all of the problems of Die Hard 4, except instead of Bruce Willis, the audience is supposed to root for the kid who used to be on Even Stevens on the Disney Channel.

On the other hand, there are a few movies that out this summer that are supposedly not insults to the talking picture. Ratatouille, by all accounts, is a charming gem of animation which no one will be interested in seeing because they don’t have any idea how to pronounce the title. And Knocked Up, I can say from experience, is pants-wettingly funny. But that’s about it. There’s really not much else out there.
It seems to me that movie studios are just making movies for the sake of squeezing a few bucks out of the American people. I guess that studios are solely interested in making movies that are either adaptations or sequels (so the audience already knows who the characters are and what to expect the movie will be about) or whose plots are explainable in one sentence, two if the second sentence is “Hilarity ensues.” For example, even the plot of Knocked Up, which I adored, follows these rules that I arbitrarily just made up, because here is that film’s plot: “A beautiful young woman with a promising future is impregnated by a good-natured slacker with no imaginable future. Hilarity ensues.” So my question is this: Are big-budget flicks even worth it any more? Can we as a nation resist the elaborate advertising campaigns we are subjected to every summer and not go see movies that we know are going to be bad and yet go see anyway? Please?

And one other thing, while we’re on the subject of movies. It baffles me that after being nominated for an Oscar and being able to pick any role he could have ever hoped for, Eddie Murphy went and made Norbit. The same man who once made the movie Coming to America is also responsible for Norbit.

How does that happen? I just wanted to get that off my chest. Have a good two weeks, I’ll see you Friday after next.