I had to actually watch a lot of these quality-be-damned movies that were released. After watching Get Smart, I walked out of the theater completely disgusted. After watching Sex and the City, I walked out of the theater acutely aware of how uncomfortable my seat was. After watching The Dark Knight, I walked out of the theater with some choice words I wanted to direct at Bruce Wayne/Batman. In the case of Pineapple Express, I simply walked out of the theater early.
Not only did I watch the best movie of the summer in September-I'm talking about Kabluey-but I also had one of the most uncomfortable viewing experiences of the last ten years when I went to an August pre-screening of writer/director Alan Ball's film Towelhead.
The Fifth Season of The Wire and the Sixth Season of The Shield both came out on DVD in August and both were disappointingly mediocre. In the case of The Shield Season Six, it didn't even seem like a full season; it seemed like the first half of season that was designed to tease a second half that wouldn't be around for another year or so.
I'm not even going to get into the fact that this summer also marked the first time I listened to CDs by Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr.
9) M. Night Shyamalan
On the heels of the critical and box office failures, The Village and Lady in the Water, M. Night Shyamalan's name took a severe hit. How severe? It's not mentioned in the promotional materials for his new movie, The Happening. The Happening is advertised as simply being from the writer and director of The Sixth Sense and Signs. 2006's Lady in the Water was advertised as being "A bedtime story written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.”
Then there's the whole thing where The Happening barely made $60 million during its domestic run. Worse yet? The Happening compared very unfavorably to some other Shyamalan films. Both The Happening and Unbreakable had opening weekends of roughly $30.5 million. The Happening grossed a total of $60 million, while Unbreakable did $95 million.
Methinks the bloom is off the rose.*
* How off you ask? According to imdb, Shyamalan's next project is not even a Shyamalan original; it's an adaptation of someone else's book.
8) Nicolas Cage
Early in his career, Nicolas Cage eschewed the financial windfalls of acting in big budget studio movies in favor of quirky characters, the Coen brothers and projects that required him to talkin high pitched voices, eat live cockroaches or star opposite Cher. He carved a real niche for himself as an actor's actor. He rode this train to the pinnacle of the actor's actor mountain-he won an Academy Award for his nuanced performance in Leaving Las Vegas-and then pulled a career 180. He started acting in Bruckheimer spectacles, over-the-top John Woo action flicks and bad studio adaptations of Phillip K. Dick novellas.
Say what you will about this artistic change-of-pace, you can't argue with the fact that Cage was getting gpaid. His star seems to have dimmed somewhat this summer though: his latest action blockbuster, Bangkok Dangerous, was released one week after summer ended.
Nicolas Cage: now headlining poorly received action films that aren't screened for critics that are being released in September. Not the words anyone wants to hear.
7) Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie is an enigma. She is arguably the most famous, well-known actress on the planet, yet she isn't even getting leading roles anymore. She had the third cast listing in both Wanted and Kung-Fu Panda. Coupled with her supporting turns in Beowulf, Alexander and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, it's been more than five years since she’s anchored a movie herself (Beyond Borders).
Strangely, in spite of the fact that Jolie was third in Wanted's cast listing (behind James Macavoy and Morgan Freeman), she is often mentioned as the reason for the movie's supposed failure at the box office, where it only grossed $135 million domestically.
I'm still not sure how it works that Jolie has taken so many supporting roles during the peak of her fame. It'd be one thing if she was part of a superb ensemble effort, which was the case in The Good Shepherd, but this is not what she's doing. What A-list Goddess wants to plays second fiddle to James Macavoy?
6) Edward Norton
Studios have always viewed Edward Norton as a somewhat difficult actor to deal with. They've put up with this because Norton is one of Hollywood's most gifted actors and because he always delivers when it counts; it sounds like one of those stupid job interview questions: Norton's problem is that he cares too much and becomes too involved in the projects that he's working on.
As the lead of this year's reenvisionment of The Incredible Hulk (yes, I made up that word), Norton asked for and reportedly received permission to do a rewrite of the script and a hack at editing the final film. When Marvel decided to release a different cut of the film than the one Norton made, he decided to jet of on vacation instead of doing his scheduled promotion of the film.
Norton is a supreme talent and one of the best actor's of his generation, but he's got his work cut out for him in convincing studios that he is the actor that they want to work with. I'm not saying he's Hollywood's version of Ron Artest, but he's getting closer with each passing project. I just hope no one at Universal decides to throw a cup of water at him.
5) Ben Barnes
I want you to imagine the following scenario: you're a young actor trying to make it in Hollywood. You nab a couple of very small supporting roles in several small British movies and TV shows. Out of nowhere, the director of a movie with a $200 million budget calls you up and asks you to be the lead in his summer blockbuster that's going to open in more than 3,200 screens. Check that, not just the lead, the titular lead. How fast do you say 'yes'? Pretty quickly, right? The guys who were cast as Captain Kirk, Annakin Skywalker and Superman, Chris Pine, Hayden Christensen and Brandon Routh respectively, were household names from day 1 forward. I mean, there's no way this turns out poorly, right?
Wrong.
This scenario is what happened to British actor Ben Barnes and 90% of the people reading this are squinting at their computer screens and muttering, "Who the hell is Ben Barnes and what movie was he in?" What is the point of headlining a huge summer blockbuster-I'm not sure if another movie from the summer of '08 had a bigger budget than director Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian-if no one knows who you are? This is officially the reverse Paris Hilton syndrome.
If nothing else, Barnes will be able to hang out with last year's completely unknown lead of a hundred million dollar blockbuster, Charlie Cox.
4) Anne Hathaway
Most actors and actresses strive to avoid appearing in the tabloids at all costs. Doing so can sometimes have the unwanted effect of turning an actor into a, gulp, celebrity. Thanks to Anne Hathaway's former four year relationship with Raffaello Follieri, a real estate developer who very recently pled guilty of 14 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering, she's been splashed across the covers of the tabloids with an alarming frequency this summer. Not only that, but, if we can believe what we read Hathaway was paying Follieri's rent and living expenses out of her own pocket and broke up with him the night before he was arrested by the feds.* She also suffered through the ignominy of having the FBI seize her personal diary as part of the Follieri case.
Regardless of whether the above is true or not-and from the information's prevalence on the web, a lot of people seem to believe it is true-Hathaway's name attracted a lot of mud this summer, something that no serious actor ever wants. There is virtually nothing you could say about Hathaway's off-screen life that the majority of people in Iowa would accept as true right now.
All that and her face wascovered by Steve Carrell's tie on the Get Smart poster.
* The latter point is an especially egregious offense, because Hathaway is also allegedly the person who rolled over on Follieri.
3) David Duchovny
David Duchovny was hit with an unfortunate double whammy this summer: he starred in the extremely forgettable and financially disappointing X Files movie and he made headlines for checking into rehab for an addiction to sex.* It's going to be another couple of years before Duchovny is able to live down the jokes about his sex addiction, much the same way it took Robert Downey Jr. several years to live down the jokes about him getting high and going to sleep in someone else's living room. Bad times, particularly given that Duchovny is the father of two children under the age of ten.
* This is thought to actually be an addiction to internet porn, because, if there was one thing tha this wife Tea Leoni made clear in the few interviews she gave, Duchovny never cheated on her.
2) Black Audiences
I can't figure it out. With political correctness in the United States at an all time high, there are less and less movies being made for black audiences and films that have black leads period. I wrote about this in 2007 too, but it's gotten worse in the last year.
In the summer of '07,there were five major, mainstream releases with black leads. In the summer of '08, that number went down to four. Those movies were Traitor, Hancock, Meet Dave (one of the biggest bombs of the summer) and The Longshots (which was directed by former Limp Bizkit front-man Fred Durst).
Samuel L. Jackson was given the lead in Lakeview Terrace, but that was released in September. Terrence Howard and Morgan Freeman had small roles in Iron Man and Wanted and The Dark Knight respectively. Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Chris Tucker, Chris Rock, Ving Rhames, Martin Lawrence, Cuba Gooding Jr., Ludacris, Danny Glover, Laurence Fishburne and Forest Whitaker were all strangely absent from their above-the-title positions this summer.
Adding insult to injury, Robert Downey Jr. played one of the summer's best black characters in the comedy Tropic Thunder. How much worse can things get for black people when Robert Downey Jr. is playing an African-American? It used to be archetorical question, now I'm wondering what else Hollywood has up its sleeve. Tom Hanks as the star of the Sidney Poitier story? Kate Hudson as Martin Luther King? Nothing would surprise me at this point. Except, of course, the release of a plethora of films with black leads.
1) Wachowski Brothers
Scoring an enormous box office hit in Hollywood as a director (or writer/director) earns you a fair amount of political capital. If, say, you create the very profitable Matrix series, you can then spend several years farting around, producing anime titles, contemplate getting a sex change and falling in love with the idea of adapting a sixties, Japanese, cult cartoon, Speed Racer, to the big screen. The problem with this approach is that if the end result of your years of farting around is basically one gigantic bill to a studio (Warner Brothers), those doors that had all been open several years earlier are now going to be loudly shutting.
Speed Racer was, far and away, the biggest bomb/flop/disaster of the summer. The blame for this lands squarely in the laps of the Wachowski Brothers. I suppose it could be argued that Warner Brothers could have done a better job of overseeing the production, but, since it seems more than reasonable to suggest that the Wachowskis had final cut and script approval in their contract, there isn't much to this argument. Speed Racer is on the Wachowskis. This means that it's been almost ten years since the Wachowskis helmed a film that was viewed by the either critics or the mainstream public as being, you know, good.
In the beginning of 2008, the Wachowskis could have demanded and gotten final cut approval on film and script and had a major say in the budgetary constraints of the project. Now? They'll be lucky to get any of the three.
(c) Stumped, 1998-2006
