RR Summer Movie Retrospective RR
A Cinemarati Special Feature
>> Click here for companion pieces by other Cinemarati critics! <<
This feature article is presented in coordination with www.Cinemarati.org’s Summer Movie Memories—and it is dedicated to my fellow critics at that site (especially MaryAnn, Nathaniel, Gabriel, and Jill), for teaching me, inspiring me…and inviting me!
My notion of “Event Movies” is clearly a little peculiar. I remember the day Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady opened in January 1997 in Boston, where I was then living, and I got to the Landmark Kendall Square theater over an hour early to “beat the lines.” I worked late on Thursday night and early Friday morning in order to make the first matinee. I brought special food in my backpack, and my journal. I was so there. Ninety minutes later, the lights went down on me and three other people. It did not occur to me that anyone might not care about this film—which, if memory serves, only grossed about $1 million. I remember thinking, bewildered, “Where is everybody??”

No two people, not even two movie-lovers, see or love the movies in quite the same way, and summer is the season where film audiences are most obviously polarized. Studios make their biggest commercial and marketing pushes, and the ticket-buying world bifurcates more than ever into The Masses and The Snobs. For true movie nuts—we who are omnivores, we who are proudly bi—this can be a uniquely schizophrenic experience. On the afternoon in June 2001 when I saw Jurassic Park 3 at 4:00 and Songcatcher at 7:15, I remember feeling sneaky and giddily traitorous, folding quietly into two audiences that looked and sounded nothing alike. Because I am not a professional reviewer, and none of the movies I see are assigned to me, there is a thrill in choosing such different experiences for myself, wandering across the range of genres and styles, and wondering how the same medium can yield such different ideas and sensations, pleasures and displeasures.

So when I look back at the catalog of past summer blockbusters, which all of the reviewers at Cinemarati have been asked to do, I have the same kinds of memories and timely associations that other people have—and yet, as with many of the Cinemarati, this list of Hollywood’s biggest seasonal hits is not the same thing as a personal list of the most important or enjoyable or memorable summer movies from each of the listed years. So many movies that defined these summers in my life are not here; the summer of ’98 was, for me, much more about seeing Taste of Cherry a year after its Cannes victory, or Lawrence of Arabia in a restored 70mm print, than about watching Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis poke at an asteroid. Some of the movies that are on this list haven’t touched my life at all, particularly the profit-craving sequels that increasingly characterize the season, or other projects that just never ignited my interest…not to mention that I wasn’t yet walking or talking when some of these pictures established the summer Event Movie as a tradition in its own right.

Below, then, are a few quick reflections on the major money-makers from the May-July period of every year since 1975, a list compiled and shared by all the members of Cinemarati. (The musings and memories of these other members can be accessed conveniently using the links at the very bottom of the page.) Occasionally, from 1993 on—when I was old enough to have ways and means to see movies my parents and friends weren’t necessarily attending—I’ve supplied another movie or two that, for me, defines that moment in cinematic time, as much as or more than the consensus commercial pick. I hope you’ll enjoy the write-ups of all the Cinemarati members, and that you will e-mail me with your own responses and recollections!
1975

Jaws – The tradition of “blockbuster” movies stretches back further than 1975, the tradition of “Event Movies” even longer. But we at Cinemarati (and we are hardly alone) feel that Steven Spielberg’s Jaws inaugurated something special, because the movie’s power and popularity have everything to do with its summer release date. Here is a kind of movie whose very concept could sell tickets, quite apart from actual execution, and which was designed especially to entice and electrify a restless, adrenalized, thrill-seeking summer audience. Enough with croquet, badminton, and carnival rides—summer was suddenly about coming inside, in order to see and feel things that more mundane outside recreations (so the marketing mythology still goes) could never conjure. Jaws convinced us, once and for all, that watching things happen to people on the beach might be better than actually being on the beach.

As it happened, Jaws both embodied and exceeded its popular, populist, and lucrative recipe, ornamenting its success with the kinds of gratuities—Oscar wins and nominations, built-in sequel potential—that catalyzed all kinds of imitators. It helps, too, that Jaws really is a terrific movie. Recurrent visitors to this site know that I have plenty of agnostic-to-nasty things to say about Steven Spielberg’s career. He has created some of the most flatulent and opportunistic summer movies ever realized, some of which appear on this page. But his best movies, Schindler and Private Ryan be damned, also belong to this tradition, and it’s impossible to fault the economy and brilliance of Jaws’ framing, structure, and editing. Check out the chapter on Jaws in Fredric Jameson’s Signatures of the Visible, too, for a compelling political reading of this seemingly lightweight venture. Meanwhile, the Shark itself—recently listed by the AFI as the 18th most fearsome villain in American film—turned out to be the perfect, ambivalent emblem for the genre he spawned: impressive but alarming, cunning but primitive, surprising but relentless, tantalizing in theory but, all too often, not much fun to run into.

1976

[No Blockbuster] – The phenomenon of Jaws and then – nothing? 1976 yielded plenty of memorable pictures, and Rocky especially demonstrated the combination of critical viability and popular appeal that summer-movie producers would continue to pursue, though not necessarily in that order. Still, Rocky was an underdog movie about an underdog character, each carried to greatness through dogged effort and word of mouth. America waited another year for another pop-cultural explosion that fixed itself indelibly into the popular imagination from almost the first frame…

1977

Star Wars – Star Wars was born in May of 1977. I was born five months later, so in a literal sense, Jedis and lightsabers and Vader and Hammerhead were already in the world by the time I emerged into it. But even if the calendar didn’t verify this fact, I wouldn’t be able to imagine a Star Wars-less world. I am not one of those people who speak Huttese or have memorized all the galactic coordinates of Hoth and Alderaan and Mos Eisley—but I certainly don’t have to reach to come up with those names. I don’t remember seeing any movies before Star Wars, but more than that, I remember being surprised to discover, later, that Star Wars was a movie. I mean, The Fox and the Hound was a movie. Star Wars was an experience that seemed to encompass my imagination and my brother’s and those of our friends. The screen images didn’t seem like a fiction but a partial transcription of some far-flung but real experience. There was too much evidence of Star Wars in my mind and in our house—figures, books, models, soundtrack LPs—for me to possibly conceive that George Lucas had simply directed a movie and people had simply responded. The Wizard of Oz is the only other movie I can think of that had this kind of status in my young brain—not a piece of entertainment, but a universal landmark and language, a shared Thing, like street signs or meals or going to bed at night.

Later, of course, I learned better. Yes, Star Wars was a movie—not a perfect one, either, though I will never achieve critical objectivity on this matter. And all that merchandising was part and parcel of Lucas’ own Jedi mission to transform entertainment into a kind of cosmic conquest: to rule the audience, to make us willing subjects. But it’s unfair to describe Star Wars as a fantasy of childhood that I later outgrew or rejected. I am still absorbed by the movies (the first three, anyway). And while there is reason to be cynical about Star Wars—the deluge of sellable tie-ins, much more than Lucas’ cinema-as-amusement-park aesthetic, began the massive and ongoing erosion of ambition and artistry in popular moviemaking—there is equal reason to be reverent toward it. For, after growing up a Star Wars kid, it was impossible for me to pretend that movies were ever “just movies.” If one film could mean so much to so many, then taking movies seriously and reading them critically became even more pressing a task. Other filmmakers have kept me on this personal and professional path, but Lucas probably started me there, and I thank him for it.

1978

Grease – I didn’t see Grease until my senior year of high school, when I was at a school party/dance with four pals: Kate Culpepper, who is still a dear friend, and Emily Yurachek, Dena Jacob, and Christie Pine, all of whom I’ve since lost touch with. These last three came to the event wearing pink, and for the evening had dubbed themselves The Pink Ladies. I had no idea what they were talking about. Upon recognizing my ignorance, all four girls decided that staying at the dance was much less important than spreading the cult of Grease, and not a half-hour later, we were in Dena’s living room, in front of her TV/VCR. The rest, as they say, is rama-lama-lama-damma-di-ding-di-dong. I graduated from high school with many other virginities intact (ahem), but no one could ever say I hadn’t seen Grease. And it seems to me a defining trait of summer blockbusters that, even when you’ve forgotten nearly every scene (as I have done with Grease), you still remember when, how, and with whom you saw them.

1979

The Muppet Movie – You know, I was really more of a Great Muppet Caper person. And, though I enjoyed it a little less, I saw The Muppets Take Manhattan many more times, so I remember it best. In fact, I’m not sure I ever saw The Muppet Movie at all. But my bed, as a kid, was still strewn with (among many other animals) a Velcro-palmed Kermit, an oddly legless Miss Piggy, a Fozzie Bear with a rubberized brown derby hat (there was a peg in the underside that slid into a purposeful hole in Fozzie’s skull--??). And then there was my favorite: Rowlf, the gravelly-voiced piano-playing dog, of whom I had a puppet version that allowed you to open his mouth a full 180 degrees. (Why did I want to do this?) The Muppets were pure genius. You didn’t need to see any of the movies to know this. And none of the films matched the brilliant hilarity of the TV show, anyway: early proof to me, long before Shelley Long and David Caruso, that while the movies are terrific, they are not necessarily the best medium for everybody.

1980

The Empire Strikes Back – Is there anyone who doesn’t like Empire better than the original film? Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who is also near and dear to my heart for all his work with David Cronenberg, deserves a lot of the credit here. Sure, the plot thickens brilliantly. Revealing Darth as Luke’s father is an inspired stroke, and the unblanching darkness of the end is even better: the quadruple shockeroo of Lando’s duplicity, Leia’s imprisonment, Han’s live entombment in freezing carbonite, and the amputation of Luke’s hand amount to one of the bravest challenges to mass wish-fulfillment that the modern commercial cinema has yielded. But Suschitzky’s glossy, glorious images bring out the submerged elemental power in all these moments, and in many quieter interludes. The bold expressionism of Darth Vader’s pitch-black silhouette, slashed across the middle by a pink light saber that seems to float in front of him, is exactly the aesthetic polish that the series required (and just as quickly lost, in the comparatively ragged Return of the Jedi).

And then there is Yoda. What words could suffice?

1981

Raiders of the Lost Ark – Scary but true: I learned what a Nazi was by watching Raiders of the Lost Ark and asking my parents what those bad guys were doing in Egypt in the first place. I am not sure that Steven Spielberg or anyone else involved in Raiders wished young educations to transpire in quite this way. (Or to endure this way: a 10th-grade classmate of mine listed the attempted theft of the Ark of the Covenant as the Nazis’ greatest crime on a World Studies test. Shocking.) But let’s be honest: if people were ever watching Raiders as history, the blame is their own. Raiders packs in a lot of fanciful narrative incident, but at heart it is a valentine to the cinema itself, marshaling all of the medium’s joys and techniques into one of the most propulsive, perfectly pitched adventure stories anyone in Spielberg’s generation produced. You watch Raiders (as you do not, for example, watch Tomb Raider) and imagine that Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn would have enjoyed it tremendously. And why didn’t Harrison Ford get an Oscar nomination for this role? Indiana Jones is exactly the kind of character everyone presumes is an actor's holiday, but he is a much richer character, with a more complicated human temperament, than many of the performances that have garnered a Best Actor Oscar. It’s too bad that both sequels reduced the character, and none of his future company was as feisty and challenging as Karen Allen’s wonderful Marion. But more about that later.

1982

E.T. – the Extra-Terrestrial – E.T. is the first movie I actually remember going to. I had certainly seen many others by that time, mostly Disney cartoons or Spielberg/Lucas stuff, but this was the first time that the rowed seats, the rituals of paying and ticket-tearing, the tubs of popcorn, and an actual consciousness of being in a cinema took root in my mind. I didn’t like the movie. It scared me when E.T. jumped out of the bushes, and I thought he should be fuzzier and cuddlier, like Winnie-the-Pooh (who was then, as he is now, the Gold Standard of all fictional characters). The only part I remember liking was when Gertie dressed E.T. in grandma drag, but otherwise, I was kind of put off.

For whatever reason—probably because of Hook and *batteries not included and 95% of John Williams’ subsequent movie scores—I always assumed I would hate E.T. when and if I returned to it. How wrong I was! Last year’s theatrical re-release was probably the best movie I saw the whole twelve months, marred only by those damned digital touch-ups that Steven and George keep forcing upon movies we already love. The DVD of E.T. comes with the original, untampered-with version on a separate disc, and this is the real treasure, a sweet-sad chronicle of childhood to equal The 400 Blows. As in much of Spielberg’s work, the wonderment of youth is a major theme, but on this occasion the youths are actual youths (and not, for example, arrested-adolescent paleontologists), and the confrontations with the outer world are surprisingly harsh and deftly surrealized. And E.T. himself, like Melville’s whale or Morrison’s Beloved, manages to be blatantly symbolic in at least a dozen ways while still emerging as a coherent, freestanding character. There simply isn’t a thing in the movie that doesn’t work: an apogee in summer moviemaking that studios have chased for twenty years and never re-achieved.

1983

Return of the Jedi – Love Jabba, leery of the Ewoks. Something afflicts the Star Wars series here. You can feel the obvious narrative cleave between the first hour and the second, suggesting two partial ideas that got grafted together by stalled creativity, subpar filmmakers, and overriding market incentives; take one look at Wicket and the other Ewoks, and it is clear that Star Wars has stopped being a story and has become that shadier and more polluted thing: a franchise. But I still love Jedi, again because it’s always been there, and because it has the most ghoulish background monsters. I was always especially partial to Squidhead, Ree-Yees, Weequay, and the wonderful Bib Fortuna, that rare Cabinet officer who doesn’t bother concealing his pointy teeth and tentacles. And I remember seeing it in its first week of release with my brother Nathan, our uncle Kevin, and his friend Adam: we enjoyed it so much that we hid underneath our seats to avoid the manager’s gaze and popped back up for a second consecutive show.

1984

Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – If Return of the Jedi was the first movie whose release I consciously and eagerly awaited, Ghostbusters was the first popular hit I didn’t know about until my school friends told me they loved it. I of course wanted to see it, but I didn’t, at least not right away, and when I eventually caught up with it, I wondered what the fuss had been about. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was a big event in our family—my brother the Star Wars fanatic was only slightly less avid about Indy—so that was a hot ticket. I can really only remember a single line from each movie: “There is no Dana, only Zool,” and “They took Sibalinga from us!” But I wouldn’t say either one of these flicks is a particular landmark of great moviemaking, or even great moviegoing. The success of these two and Jedi seems, at least in retrospect, to augur the decline of craftsmanship and the increase of pure formula in big summer moneymakers.

1985

Back to the Future – I never saw the sequels, but this film remains a pleasure, even though I haven’t seen it for a few years. Just the memory of Christopher Lloyd popping his noggin through the doorway with all that garage-scientist apparatus on his head is enough to get me giggling. Also, it is clearer in hindsight how shrewd (or lucky) Michael J. Fox was in his first big transition project from TV to film. His Future character is much less cocky and headstrong than Alex P. Keaton, but isn’t a totally different persona, and furthermore, Back to the Future as a whole is such a nifty and clever concoction that you forget it is a transition project for its star. The entire casts of Friends, Seinfeld, and just about every post-Family Ties sitcom really should have taken better notes (or maybe they really wanted to make Ed and Dunston Checks In?).

1986

Top Gun – I lived on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, when Top Gun debuted, so I didn’t have to travel very far for real-life displays of military technology and bravado. My family didn’t own a VCR until five years later, so the mass-scale hawking of Top Gun on VHS—still a crucial moment in the expansion of that market—kind of passed me by. All this means that I didn’t see Top Gun until I was in college. By then, the movie certainly felt more like a time capsule of mid-80s sleekness-as-substance and of superpower chutzpah than it felt like an actual film. I wonder if Top Gun might already have felt like this in 1986? It’s not that I expected the movie to be deeper; I just kind of thought more would happen than a rather abstract dogfight over the Indian Ocean and a lot of boy-boy banter that Kelly McGillis tries hard to look interested in. As many have noted, Top Gun was a better recruiting tool than any ad campaign the U.S. military could have devised—which is impressive but sad, since it still resembles a 100-minute shaving commercial with extra jets. If this picture informed or inspired my generation’s view of military life and foreign conflict, it is no surprise we are all in the mess we’re in.

1987

Beverly Hills Cop 2 – Never bothered. Never even saw the first one. Why is it that some movies and movie stars can fail to entice you even a smidge, even if you’re normally quite susceptible? I don’t really like or dislike Eddie Murphy, and I haven’t pursued or avoided Beverly Hills Cop. I just never cared. Then again, without this movie, there’d have been no soundtrack, which could have meant no “New Attitude” or “Neutron Dance,” and for that, we all would have had lesser lives.

(I also, incidentally, remember the summer of 1987 as the time I started asking my parents to take me to see recent Oscar winners, which were only then arriving at our base theater. Obligingly, they took me to see The Mission and even shepherded me, an eight-year-old, into Children of a Lesser God, which I was totally ecstatic about, because I’d seen Marlee Matlin win on TV and found her inspiring, and also Blair had referred to the film in a punchline on The Facts of Life. As Simone de Beauvoir might have said, one is not born, but is made, a movie nerd.)

1988

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – Here’s another movie that I felt strangely indifferent to seeing, even as my buddies were clamoring about it. Again, I think the problem was that Roger Rabbit just wasn’t my kind of animated character, because he had nothing in common with Winnie-the-Pooh. Kids have their criteria, mysterious as they are. What can I tell you. I did eventually see Roger Rabbit and forgot it almost immediately, except the suspicion that if the marriage of live action with cartoon characters wasn’t appealing in itself, the movie had little else to offer. Not a stinker, but not a treasure.

1989

Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – My whole family went to these two movies on consecutive days, which represented a pretty big binge within our normal moviegoing diet. I don’t remember visiting the theater more than once every couple months until I got to high school, and even then, it was a noteworthy occasion. Batman was special to me because it’s the first movie I remember making rudimentary critical distinctions about: I thought the production design and the art direction (a term I’d learned from the Oscar telecast) were neat, but I wasn’t really moved by the story. When the Academy responded exactly the same way a few months later, I felt like such a little expert. Because I had seen Beetlejuice a few times on HBO, I think Batman was also the first time I remember drawing a directorial connection between films that weren’t sequels, and having the role of the director explained to me by my parents.

The Last Crusade was a fun family experience, and I enjoyed being scared by the early sequence with the rats, which seemed worse to me than the bugs in Temple of Doom and much worse than the snakepit in Raiders. (To each his own.) But—may I say it?—I’ve always been bored by Sean Connery, and I always felt the Indy/Indy pairing in Last Crusade came across as a little too precious and self-satisfied. The movie seemed to find their rapport much cuter and funnier than I did, which has not changed with age.

1990

Ghost – Oh, how I loved Ghost. My family had moved to Hanau, Germany, by then, so I didn’t see it until late fall or early winter—movies arrive to overseas bases much later than they debut here. I think my friends and I went to the theater three or four times to see it. I adored Whoopi’s scenes, and to this day, I still hiss at Japanese apple pears in the grocery store. I don’t recall thinking Ghost was a beautiful romance, even though I liked romantic movies. In fact, I think I enjoyed that we were meant to feel sorry for Demi’s loss and Patrick’s anguish even though their relationship seemed pretty ordinary and unelectric. Would Sam and Molly even have stayed together if he had lived? I always felt like they wouldn’t, midnight pottery notwithstanding, so what moved me somehow was that their connection only grew out of their sudden separation. I would not call Ghost a wildly sophisticated movie, but the emotions seemed richer and darker than the bold strokes of the plot implied, and I still appreciate movies that can work that way.

1991

Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – I always found it charming that the future society in The Terminator managed to teleport bodies and prophecies back into the past, but they couldn’t quite transport the clothes. There is something so campy about Arnold’s naked, dry-icey emergence into this film. A few scenes later, Robert Patrick arrives in much the same way, but the scene felt totally chilling and spooky: the movie starts when Patrick gets there. Maybe I only felt that way because I thought the T-1000 was way cuter. For many more reasons than that, T2 totally captured my imagination: I ran a mile in the rain to see it for a third or fourth time. Watching the T-1000 ooze upward from a tile floor or split jaggedly in half were such awesome revelations, even to a non-techie moviegoer. It really felt like, from this point, special effects could take movies absolutely anywhere.

Maybe it was T2’s fault that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves felt so humdrum in its wake, but I still blame the Terrible Kevins, Costner and Reynolds, whose individual talents are narrow enough, and yet seem to bring out the worst in each other.

1992

Batman Returns and Lethal Weapon 3 – Two more sequels that I couldn’t have given a hoot about, and didn’t. I’ve lived this long without sitting through a Lethal Weapon movie, and I’m thinking I’ll just keep going that way. It’s working out fine. I did catch Batman Returns later on video, mostly to enjoy the swell time Michelle Pfeiffer seemed to be having: help me know how Oscar nominators were more taken by Joan Plowright mugging through Enchanted April than Catwoman stealing an entire franchise from right under everyone’s noses.

1993

Jurassic Park – Maria Rendine was a wonderful teacher who offered an elective in Film Studies at my high school in Fairfax, Virginia. That class was a huge turning point in my life, for lots of predictable reasons. Mrs. Rendine started us off in September with The Purple Rose of Cairo, and I was tantalized. She followed up with Vertigo, and suddenly I wondered why anyone did anything except go to the movies. An ancillary perk to the class was getting in free on weekdays to selected matinees of current movies, which is how I got to see Jurassic Park the week after it opened. I was surprised how goopy and scatological it was: we spent a lot of time with dino-boogers and dino-patties before the action really got going. But the 5-year-old dinosaur freak who still lived somewhere inside me did re-emerge during this movie, which was nothing more than advertised but still showed its audience a good time.

Much more importantly to me, the summer of 1993 was the first time I got together with a couple of friends to trek into a big city (Washington, D.C.) to see a movie that wasn’t going to reach the suburbs. My friends Susan and Carol Blosser were driving to see Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, whom we worshipped, in Much Ado About Nothing. In retrospect, that film may just be a brightly-lit travelogue version of a wonderful play, but I will always remember it as so much more: Ken and Em seemed so deft and plucky and passionate in their roles (and in their romantic rapport, sniff sniff), and because the urban arthouse seemed so exotic to me, I felt like the Blosser sisters and I had been to a museum or a special event. We repeated the trick two weeks later for Sally Potter’s Orlando, which I loved even more. A gender-bending, time-traveling pseudo-comedy shot in four countries, including Uzbekistan? My mind was delightedly boggled. And Tilda. Tilda. Tilda.

1994

The Lion King and Forrest Gump – I didn’t care for either of these films, which would have been fine, except that in the fall of 1994, I got a movie-review column in my high school newspaper, and I thought it was necessary to share these thoughts. I didn’t understand why The Lion King had been such a smash; I didn’t really dislike it, but it didn’t dazzle me the way Beauty and the Beast had (to say nothing of classic Disney), and the songs were awful. Forrest Gump was a more complicated case because, when I saw it with my grandmother, we both really enjoyed it, but as we were leaving the theater, I suddenly felt like I’d been propagandized, or conned, or both. Had I just been told, with some sincerity and distracting ingenuity, that ignorance really was bliss? If stupid is as stupid does, then a film that glorified the joys of mental stuntedness and a know-nothing glide through history seemed stupid indeed. This, by the way, was not a popular opinion to express in high school, but that’s what nerds are for.

1995

Batman Forever and Apollo 13 – After the disappointment of Batman Returns and the addition of Val Kilmer to the cast, there was no way I was going to see Batman Forever. Working in McDonalds that entire summer handing out Happy Meal mugs of all the principal characters was exposure enough—my first experience of a marketing immersion so overwhelming that my desire to see the film was slaked rather than whetted. Apollo 13 seemed more my speed. I saw it with my Dad, and I remember describing it later to my Mom as “very excellent,” which isn’t customary English phrasing, but a fair expression of post-movie excitement. (Even better was The Bridges of Madison County, my favorite mainstream film of that summer, and a keeper to this day.)

1996

Twister and Independence Day – Okay, yuck, and yuck. Hollywood blockbusters seemed to get bigger but dumber as the decade wore on, and the summer of 1996 marked an especially low point. These two weren’t even pleasurably predictable, like Jurassic Park had been. They just seemed thinly conceived, garishly mounted, and worth neither the time nor the money. Plus, I had just finished my first year of college in Boston, so I was no longer under any illusions that movies couldn’t offer a lot more than this. In the preceding year, I’d burrowed into the city to see Strange Days, Dead Man Walking, Georgia, Persuasion, and When Night Is Falling, among others, and I’d kicked off the summer with Mary Harron’s bracing I Shot Andy Warhol, attended by one of the most memorable audiences I’ve ever sat with. So you wanna sell me suddenly on the non-chemistry of Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, or the papier-mâché stylings of ID4? As Liz Taylor says in Butterfield 8, “No sale!”

1997

The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Men in Black – Mssrs. Spielberg, Sonnenfeld, Smith, and Jones got handsomely paid in 1997, but they all got a lot more than they gave. There were some quick thrills in The Lost World and some cute gags in MiB, but there were better studio concoctions to be found, like the spunky and excitingly nasty comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding and the tremendously involving, beautifully acted Face/Off. Still, as in the previous year, the summer docket at the multiplex just couldn’t compete with the weird, horizon-opening visions at the arthouse, like Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed, about a budding female necrophiliac, or Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, which gets old after the first hour but is still a delirious, hypersensual seduction. These weren’t necessarily “better” films than Wedding or Face/Off, but they pushed the medium and the audience much more bravely, and I always feel that flawed experiments are as interesting and rewarding as proven pleasures.

1998

Armageddon and Saving Private Ryan – Both of Summer ‘98’s biggest grossers had impressive box office to gloat about, but each was shamed creatively and aesthetically by rival pictures on similar themes that were released in the same year. The loud, garish, adolescent Armageddon left almost no impression on me, even while the movie was playing, while Mimi Leder’s older-skewing and more humane Deep Impact still feels fresh in my mind. And though Private Ryan is an estimable photographic achievement, the story, editing, and performances all supply the barest and cagiest of updates to the most familiar clichés of war movies. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, released six months later, was the war film that really had something new to teach us. And by the way, Summer ’98 was an above-average vintage for commercial gay cinema, led by the rowdy, hysterical The Opposite of Sex and the insinuating High Art.

1999

Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me – Yep, I was there on Phantom’s opening day. I wasn’t wearing a mask or a costume, but I did ride the subway a half-hour at noontime to squeeze in, and I was toting an old, greenish teddy bear whom I’d outfitted to look like Yoda. My small contribution to what turned out to be quite a carnival, which was absolutely indispensable to enjoying The Phantom Menace. I saw it twice that week, and after its slow and awkward start, the pod-racing scene whisked me and the rest of the audience right in. Years later, though, watching The Phantom Menace on video produced a depressing discovery: it is a visually boring and dispassionate film, setting up intriguing backgrounds to the Star Wars saga but setting off precious few sparks. So I guess some summer films are meant to be collective experiences.

Whether this is true, too, of The Spy Who Shagged Me I’ll never know. I pretty much liked the first Austin Powers movie, but I doubt I’d watch it again, and watching a billion-dollar franchise spring full-blown out of that modest beginning has been a truly perplexing experience. (Where was the real heat that summer? – at Eyes Wide Shut and The Blair Witch Project, two utterly beguiling movies that many folks still seem to hate.)

2000

Gladiator and Mission: Impossible 2 – I went to see Gladiator only a short hour after telling a professor (by this point, I was in graduate school) that I was going to need an extension on a term paper because my schedule had gotten so clogged. He didn’t mind the late submission because he said his own calendar was booked solid for several weeks and he’d never have time to read what I’d written anyway. Sixty minutes later we bumped into each other at a Tuesday matinee of a 150-minute toga movie that either one of us could easily have skipped. Gladiator is not an awful film, but it has been seriously overrated, and its Oscar victory as Best Picture began a three-year streak of rewarding competent mediocrity that will hopefully abate this February. Then again, who am I to impugn a film that puts My Russell front and center in virtually every scene? As for M-I:2, one of the ugliest acronyms in Y2K movie marketing, I don’t see movies that are smart enough to cast Thandie Newton in a lead role and too dumb to do anything with her but make her beautiful, generic bait for the villain. I doth protest.

2001

The Mummy Returns and Shrek – Skipped The Mummy Returns because I hadn’t seen the first one, and no one’s report has ever moved me to question either decision. Should have skipped the crude and needless Shrek, but I was deceived by several ardent responses to the movie which in hindsight I will never understand. But why even bother with stuff like this? The summer of 2001 was a happy time to be hitting the plexes, with truly weird and bound-pushing spectacles like Moulin Rouge and A.I. Artificial Intelligence filling the screens, not to mention Memento twisting its way into arthouses. None of these pictures broke the box-office bank, but friends, colleagues, and students still buzz about them two years later, when The Mummy and Shrek already seem like fossils. Could this be the dawn of a new kind of summer event movie? Let’s hope so.

2002

Star Wars, Episode 2: Attack of the Clones and Spider-Man – Last year was a pretty good one for movies, though summer blockbusters weren’t really the reason. Attack of the Clones was a lively continuation of the series, and Spider-Man was lighter and friskier than I’d expected, at least until its third-act meltdown. Still, after the rich, risky, mysterious excesses of 2001’s best summer offerings (see above), Star Wars and Spider-Man both felt like movies that had been created more at the computer than in the camera, more by salespeople and retailers than by artists and storytellers. In the techno-wizardry of Clones and the welcome emotionalism of Spider-Man, Hollywood is setting out in promising directions, but the industry will need to flex and test and invigorate their imaginations even more to meet the summer-blockbuster standards of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. We all keep returning in droves to see it happen, often for movies that don't deserve or repay the effort—here's wishing our faith will eventually be rewarded!

But don't just take my word for it!...
Follow these links to Summer Movie Retrospectives by five other Cinemarati member critics:
(Or click here to see what's going on at Cinemarati's own collective website!)

Nathaniel Rogers whipped out the charcoal pencil and made a cheeky, hilarious graphic guide to summer movies past. (Stay tuned for monthly updates...)
MaryAnn Johanson, the heroic Flick Filosopher, speaks for the sci-fi geek in all of us while righteously putting Hollywood hacks in their proper place.
Jill Cozzi & Gabriel Shanks share reflections and swap some memorable lines at their fancy, newly remodeled joint website.
Catherine Cantieri relives the roster of summer blockbusters, but doesn't let us forget those other summer jewels - if you're a Lost Boys or Desperately Seeking Susan fan, here's the website for you!
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