There's a lot to love about May/June: great weather, (before the heat drives everyone back indoors), school buses no longer make commuting a unending nightmare (ask a driver on a Monday morning stuck behind a bus how he feels about home schooling) and even the crappiest yard in your neighborhood has a fresh green look. Late spring also means the arrival of that cineplex phenomenon known as the summer blockbuster. Every year around Memorial Day local theaters are awash in big budget, high octane, testosterone fueled extravaganzas. Most are sequels or remakes (Man of Steel, Fast and Furious 73, Iron Man 3, etc) Some are sequels masquerading as new movies (Star Trek Into Darkness, The Internship [wedding crashers go to Google] and Monsters University). Last year 9 of the 10 top grossing films worldwide were sequels. No great surprise there. Ask your average Hollywood mogul if he'd rather own the rights to Hangover or John Carter.
Summer blockbusters don't change much from year to year. They get bigger, noisier, special effect-ier and, with the advent of 3-D, pricier. Tragically they don't get smarter, more innovative or sexier. (Sex is right out if you want to keep your PG-13 rating.) In spite of the considerable success of the dialogue-rich Iron Man movies, most directors will prefer a few more bullets or explosions to a few more words any day. You want words, go see Much Ado About Nothing. Even James Bond, with that dreamy British accent that magically causes women's undies to hit the floor at fifty paces, would prefer to shoot rather than talk his way out of sticky situations. I like a good special effect as much as the next guy but not at the expense of a credible plot. You want plot, go see The Usual Suspects. (I'm told that the next Fast and Furious will feature Vin Diesel crawling through the tail pipe of a Toyota and winding up as a character on the GPS screen.)
Isitjustme doesn't usually do movie reviews. We can't normally see enough of them to be relevant. Plus there's a distinction between movies and films. Films are pictures made: 1) in third world countries, 2) by directors with unpronouceable names 3) with subtitles 4) shown only in theaters (actually "theatres") in really bad neighborhoods. Unless you're trying to impress a woman, these films are best left to On-demand. Mostly we see movies that are non-artistic drek, made for teenagers, serial killers with time to burn and the unemployed. In other words fun stuff. So for the benefit of anyone with $30 to waste and a few idle hours in their day, here are a few selections that we have seen.
Iron Man 3 - Someone needs to explain why Iron Man and Fast And Furious get regular numbers and Hangover gets Roman Numerals.
Iron Man is pretty good. Robert Downey, Jr is fun in the title role. He's irreverent, charming and capable of using multisyllablic words (a drawback in The Hulk). Think Bill Gates with really cool face hair. There is a story, it makes sense, sort of, and there's a bit of comic relief and from an unexpected source. Guy Pearce plays a delightful villain (a hero is only as good as his nemesis) and our hero lives to fight another day...and make Avengers 2 (or maybe II).
Star Trek Into Darkness
An explanation for the culturally clueless who were probably reading Proust in the sixties: Captain James Tiberius Kirk and his intrepid crew aboard the Enterprise spent the better part of four years from 1966 to 1969 in outer space, boldly going where no man had gone before. Cancelled as a TV series the storyline went on to foster six (VI) movies with the original cast and a prequel movie in 2009. Into Darkness is the sequel to the prequel. Remember, in space no one can hear you scream, "Stop flogging this franchise to death".
Actually the movie is good. Seeing Spock, Bones McCoy, Uhura, Chekov, Sulu and the gang when they were just kids is a gas for "those of a certain age". Younger audiences appear to like it too. Watching McCoy and Kirk invent the cliches that made them fully formed characters in TV reruns is like seeing James Bond have his first martini. (Casino Royale, 2006.) Even the bad guy is a visitor from the future... or the past. Yes the budget and the effects rob the tableau of some of its sixties kitsch but no one in 2013 would tolerate Doctor McCoy using a salt shaker as a prop to administer an injection (true story). The movie feels right and director JJ Abrams has paid considerable homage to Gene Roddenberry's vision from 45 years ago.
Now You See Me
Another example of how movies are becoming fun again. Now You See Me has a cast for all ages, from Jesse Eisenberg of Social Network fame, to Mark Ruffolo to Woody Harrelson to Morgan Freeman. It's a big caper movie that, although it cheeses on the payoff a bit, still provides a lot of the reason you go to the movies instead of the bookstore (like you could find one).
"Magic" movies haven't been big box office lately (The Prestige, The Illusionists) maybe because it's too hard to make a movie audience sit still for complicated magic tricks unless the trick involves fast cars and rocket launchers. You should give this one a chance. How they did it will matter less than who and why.
If I had to find a fault with blockbusters, it would be the need for the pull-out-all-the-stops, bigger than the last one, knock our socks off climax. (This kind of climax is distinguished from the other kind in that men tend to be more excited at the end than at the start. Women, not so much.) The idea that a hero and villain spend two hours outwitting each other, only to have their conflict resolved in a fist fight seems cliched? Really? A mano a mano brawl? What are they, cave dwellers? Every action movie ends the same way. It's like a fireworks show. Throw all the stuff in the air at the end. Maybe just once, the good guy and the bad guy could put aside their differences and unite against a common cause, like climate change or genetically modified foods. We need something else. After all, Proust doesn't end like that.
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