Making the Most of a Dismal Summer Movie Season
by Alison Wielgus
During my freshman year at college, I kept track of all the movies I saw during the fall semester. In approximately fifteen weeks, I saw thirty movies - an average of two a week. So when I say that I only saw seven films over the course of this summer, it’s clear that there’s something wrong. Even more so than last summer, this year contained bloated, unnecessary sequels and a generally uninspiring lot of films. Hollywood’s box office may be up seven percent from last year’s dismal receipts, but there were far more quality films released by this time last year. By going for large opening weekends, superficial action films, and dull computer animated cartoons, Hollywood has succeeded in its goal of increasing its box office earnings, but at the expense of isolating adult viewers.
For a long time, summer has been the time when students got out of school and could relax, and at some point Hollywood decided that meant that all the movies put out during the summer should be as mindless as children often like their summer vacations to be. This underestimates a large portion of the population who actually like to see films with substance instead of films made of fluff. Since it is months before awards nominations are made, summer became the time for big budget films to reign supreme, and this formula certainly worked this summer.
Last year’s summer movie season wasn’t anything to brag about, but it did contain a number of fascinating independent films that turned out to be some of the best of the year. 2046, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Constant Gardener, Junebug, and Mysterious Skin were all released between the months of April and September and earned spots on many critics’ 2005 top ten lists. Even Crash, a movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, was a summer film. However, when looking at this year’s crop of movies, films like these are sorely missing.
So what happened this summer? Ostensibly, there should have been a few quality action films (X-3 and Superman Returns) and a few indie darlings (A Prairie Home Companion and Little Miss Sunshine) that would appeal to others. Unfortunately, the two action films didn’t quite achieve the critical receptions that some might have hoped for. X-3 floundered without Bryan Singer, the director of the first two films in the X-Men series, and Superman Returns floundered with him. Even though A Prairie Home Companion was one of the more delightful movies in recent years, it lacked the bite and intensity of other Robert Altman films and was met with a shrug of the shoulders by moviegoers.
However, the success of films like Little Miss Sunshine, The Illusionist, and The Devil Wears Prada shows that there is some hope for adult moviegoers in the summer. While The Devil Wears Pradl had a fairly predictable plot the intensity of Meryl Streep’s performance made it worthwhile. Little Miss Sunshine, occasionally dipping into goofy family comedy territory, is frequently funny and intelligent, especially when Steve Carrell is onscreen. Half Nelson, which will probably not do too well at the box office, successfully avoids the cliches that abound in films about inner city teachers and their students. Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps also give some of the most compelling performances of the year.
One of the real reasons that the summer movie season isn’t a wash is a film called The Illusionist. Set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, it tells the story of a magician named Eisenheim (Edward Norton), who reconnects with a childhood sweetheart Sophie (Jessica Biel), who is now engaged to Leopold (Rufus Sewell), the heir to the throne. This affair garners the attention of Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), who is under the thumb of Leopold. However, the real beauty of the film isn’t its love story. It is in the way it intertwines the idea of magic into the tale so seamlessly. Magic, a truly theatrical art form, usually comes off poorly on film, but in The Illusionist, Eisenheim’s tricks do seem truly magical - if not feats of actual magic, then surely feats of human inventiveness and skill. The performances are also impressive. Giamatti finally gets to play someone clever and put-together, and Edward Norton’s intensity is present in every frame in which Eisenheim appears.
The delights of The Illusionist are many, and it’s one of the few films of the summer to have a truly interesting subtext that can almost be viewed as a commentary on the nature of movies themselves. Eisenheim’s illusions often involve tricks of the light, or manipulation of the human eye, or true skill with mechanical objects, and it’s hard not to see the illusions that Eisenheim performs as a reference to the way that film works on members of the audience. There’s even a reference to the phantasmagoria, an early projector that was used to make people believe they were seeing ghosts in the late 1800s. Eisenheim conjures up trick after trick in a beautiful manner, to the point that some people in the film are convinced he can really communicate with the dead or make an orange tree grow with the flick of his wrist. Eisenheim is so successful in the film because of the weighty thought that accompanies the sheer skill of his best tricks as he enfolds them in tales about death and power. But just like the ghosts that Eisenheim conjures up, films are tricks of the light, gone in an instant with the flick of a switch. Thankfully, for the most part, so is the summer movie season.
