Cinematical

I look to the coming summer movie season much as ancient cavemen must have looked toward the huge thunderstorms that swept across the blasted plain; with terror, and fear, and a little bit of awe. It was not just the first day of spring that made me think of summer, nor was it the call of the sparrow as she returns from the sunnier climes in the South where she has rested for the past months; it was the frickin' fact that X-Men: The Last Stand is playing at Cannes. There's a New Yorker cartoon by BEK, that master of block-drawn, rushing, stout-legged figures. In it, two people stride out from a movie theater and one asks (and I'm paraphrasing) "When did the movies get stupid year-round?" Well, you can update it: "When did the movies get stupid world-wide?"

There are summer movies I'm looking forward to unabashedly. Part of me wants to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman as nerd Goldfinger, despite all my misgivings about building an action franchise on the gleaming foundation of Tom Cruise's grin.  Part of me wants to see a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, even if subsequent viewings of the first have made it abundantly clear that the movie's third act is as slack and unspooled as a mains'l in the doldrums. (That's a shout-out to all y'all Patrick O'Brien fans! Yeah!)

But I'm not looking forward to X:3, despite liking the first two. Or the other big summer movie debuting at Cannes, The Da Vinci Code. When told that Ron Howard was going to be directing the film of The Da Vinci Code, I was actually glad -- it combined two things I had no interest in (Catholic-cryptography boring best-sellers and Ron Howard's next project) into one package.

And so it is with most summertime movies: Big books (or big franchises) will be splatted up on the silver screen with as much splash as possible, and it seems that a red-carpet roll-out at Cannes is now considered 'splash.' I've been lucky enough to have been to Cannes twice, and I've seen a teeming army of kids walking down the Croisette in green felt Shrek ears; I got up early for the 8:00 a.m. press screening of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith last year, where the French equivalent of a street urchin pretty much leapt at me asking me if I had " … un additionelle billet pour Les Revanche du la Sith?" I didn't. But I sincerely wished I had, 'cause that kid wanted to see that movie. And there's no way he was getting in with my photo on the press pass.

And that's what summer movie going is about, right? Childlike excitement, childlike enthusiasm … and, often, childlike moviemaking, where the marketing campaign gets more thought than the movie, and where scene transitions happen with all the grace of kids moving action figures from playset to playset by holding them about the ankles. And it's not that I object to big, fun movies; I object to badly-made movies that are supposed to be big and fun but aren't. I mean … never mind Brett Ratner as director on X:3; Kelsey Grammer as a strong, agile freak of nature? Maybe 15, 20 years ago … and maybe not even then.

And the more I think about summertime movie going, the more I think about the original Star Wars. I don't want another Star Wars film … I want another movie like Star Wars: Something unexpected and unprecedented -- not based on a comic or a book or another movie or a TV show -- and new. And right now, it's hard to envision that. The best estimate I can find for the budget of Star Wars IV: A New Hope is $13 million. Adjusting by the consumer price index, that's equivalent to $45 million in 2006. Can you imagine any studio giving $45 million to a third-time filmmaker to shoot their own original script? (Actually, Warner Brothers did with the Wachowski Brothers and The Matrix -- more than that, actually -- so bully for them. And so did Pixar, for Brad Bird and The Incredibles; huzzah. These are interesting exceptions, and I leave the question of if they're original to wiser people than  I. …)

But most of the time nowadays, a summer movie comes in a can. The label reads "$100 Million-plus Summer Film; Contains Proven Commodities, International Appeal. WARNING: May Contain Roman Numerals, New Director, Stunt Casting." And while you can get good stuff out of a can now and then, it's not like when it's made from scratch. And we're labeling the can for export, too -- which is why X:3 is playing at Cannes.

And it's an endless summer, now -- or Hollywood would like it to be. And you can understand why, actually: Why make Syriana when you can make another Harry Potter film? In a perfect world, you do both. This is often far from a perfect world. I love summertime movie going -- as much as I like summer, which you learn to do real well growing up in "the warmer part" of Canada -- but it can't be summer all the time, right? And I know that having The Da Vinci Code or X:3 at Cannes doesn't change, say, the films screening in Une Certain Regard or Director's Fortnight, but it's maybe the first time I've ever felt like summer was coming on too soon.