I love summer movies. I don’t understand the people who don’t. To chastise the summer fare as “mindless popcorn flicks” with little to no integrity or intelligibility is both incorrect and pointless. We should be celebrating their inconsequential escapability! These films exist for two reasons – to make money, and to be fun. They don’t always succeed, of course, but why should we hate on them for trying? If you say you “hate” INDIE 4, I say there’s something wrong with you. I understand having problems with it, because there are plenty of problems to have. But did you not have fun? Did you not smile, or mutter a “whoa” or two? Or did you sit there and pout about how the film failed to meet the expectations you knew deep down inside it never could meet.
Summer movies defy standard criticism. We can talk about what they do right and what they do wrong, and we obviously can point out which we enjoyed and which let us down a little bit. But to write off TRANSFORMERS because it isn’t THERE WILL BE BLOOD…well, that’s just ludicrous.
Updated Summer Blockbuster Smackdown Standings:
1.) Iron Man
2.) Forgetting Sarah Marshall
3.) Get Smart
4.) The Incredible Hulk
5.)
6.) Kung Fu Panda
7.) The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
8.) Speed Racer
9.) The Strangers
10.) You Don't Mess with the Zohan
11.) Harold and Kumar Escape from
6 comments:
I hate Indy IV.
I liked the bike chase ... and the potential it had to be great. Everything else depressed me, and I have now disowned the movie.
Sorry, Wheeler. I like a lot of bad movies, but this one was just too inept for me to enjoy ... and please don't come back with the excuse not to think so much, or just enjoy it for what it is. I draw my conclusions after I have watched the movie, not during. And I can't forgive the film. It was shit.
I'm looking forward to seeing Kung Fu Panda, Wanted and The Dark Knight next this summer. It's been one of the best summers in ages, I think. Indy IV notwithstanding.
Haha...here's the best part. I KNOW you hate it. You were the one who inspired me to rant about it. Delayed, but true.
Hate is such a strong word. I "hate" The Phantom of the Opera in every form, mostly because I was tortured by the soundtrack as a child.
But I suppose the way you feel about Indie 4 is about equal to how I feel about X-Men 3...Bret Ratner coming in and destroying a good thing by doing everything but the action wrong.
As I recall, you enjoyed X-3, si?
I swear ... I really regret telling people I really enjoyed X3. Everyone gives me shit on it. But oh well. :-)
At least X3 had some great action sequences. The death of Xavier gives me goosebumps. The fight at the end -- "Hold the line!" Beast! The scenes with Jean Grey and Wolverine. The final confrontation between them ... I just found so much more to love. I know X3 has problems, mostly it feels a bit rushed, but if we were to compare Indy IV (not Indie ;-p) and X3 I am sorry to say, Wheels, X3 kicks its ass.
I'll never forgive Indy IV for what it did to Marion Ravenwood.
I think the crux of the problem comes from our childhood-based expectations. You were an INDY fan, I was an X-Men fan. Each film fucked up what we held dear to our hearts. You'll never forgive them for what they did to Marion...I'll never forgive Ratner for completely botching the Dark Phoenix storyline and killing off Cyclops with a sneeze.
And "a little too rushed" doesn't begin to describe the complete lack of an epic storyline in a film that should have been defined as such.
But here is why what X-3 did wrong is so much worse than what Indy4 did wrong...X-3 took an already fantastic storyline - a monumental epic handed to them on a silver platter - AND THROUGH IT ALL AWAY.
Indy, on the other hand, got greedy and wanted more of a good thing. The world would have been fine with the trilogy. The 4th installment was a gamble, and it simply let you down. It never SHOULD have been great (I think the Star Wars prequels proved this to us). But X3...by ruining what SHOULD have been a grand capper to the trilogy, it cemented itself alongside the 3rd Godfather film as a failure to finish up a good thing.
Don't blame Brett Ratner. Blame Bryan Singer and 20th Century Fox.
If you ask me, Brett Ratner did an extraordinarily good job under the ridiculous circumstances. He had less time to turn around a film which had been well through pre-production with Matthew Vaughn, who cast Vinnie Jones and Kelsey Grammer, and had less time than Singer had with X1.
I like the film. Cyclops was killed off because he quit to do Superman Returns. These are not Ratner's faults, so I will give you some things but not all.
And what did Singer gives us for abandoning and fucking up X-men ... he gave us Superman Returns, a film worse than Indy IV. And as much as I love Indy ... Superman is my Citizen Kane.
I've had Superman ruined, Halloween remade and Indy fucked up. All that's left is Jaws and my cinema history is rewritten.
Amen.
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