Cinema Summer Look-Back
At the start of the summer, I mentioned just how jam-packed the movie season was looking. I listed seven movies that had piqued my interest, and I actually made it to see most of them. Some thoughts are recorded below:
Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse: Terrific. It looks even better than the first, it keeps the laughs coming, and it isn’t afraid to go to a heavy place. Plus, the movie’s dealing with meta-stories (I mean, “Canon events?”) in a way that’s actually thoughtful and not just a, “have you ever noticed that Spider’s-Man’s’s Uncles keep dying?”. Great film to start the summer.
The Blackening: A solid horror parody with a lot of laughs, which is exactly what I signed on for.
Asteroid City: I thought I had missed this one in theaters, but I ended up catching it just last week. In a lot of ways, it’s classic Anderson, but it also builds on the framing narratives he’s been exploring in Grand Budapest Hotel (one of my favorite films, full-stop) and The French Dispatch. I’m still noodling on this one, but I think it hits the notes you would expect from Anderson, while also engaging with a great science fiction question: What do we do with all of the questions that will never be answered?
Barbie: What is this, Warner Brother’s most profitable film ever? Yeah, I get it. It’s a great comedy. I’ve seen some pushback of people claiming that even in the Barbie movie, Margo Robbie’s Barbie is playing second fiddle to Ryan Gosling’s Ken. But I think that’s intentional and clever; the hero of a Hero’s Journey is rarely the most interesting character. And a central point of the film is that you don’t need to be extraordinarily anything to matter.
Oppenheimer: Probably my favorite Nolan film since Inception, though this is a very, very different vibe. Cillian Murphy and RDJ are terrific leads, and the Red Scare story beats were unexpected but very welcome. I think there’s some very fair criticism that the film dramatizes a historical moment that forever affected Japan without including a Japanese perspective, but the movie isn’t really about documenting the history of the war. I think at bottom, it’s a movie about unexpected power, and what it’s like to glimpse into the minds of men who, briefly, have hold of that power.
I never did catch Haunted Mansion or The Last Voyage of the Demeter (the former from lousy word of mouth and the latter from bad timing), but all in all, it really was a strong summer for big, memorable films. And given that we’re four months into a writers’ strike and two into a SAG-AFTRA strike, I think we’ll have to cherish the summer of ‘23 for a while, because we’re probably about to start hitting some theatrical blank spots.