Question of the Week: Movie summing up
Monday, August 27th, 2007These days, the summer movie season begins the first weekend of May (this year with the release of Spider-Man 3), but it doesn’t have a similarly definitive ending. Theoretically it ends with Labor Day weekend, but for practical purposes it peters out sometime in mid-August — this year probably with the release of The Nanny Diaries. Superbad probably counts as the last “summer movie of 2007.” With that in mind, What was your favorite movie of this summer? (For me, it’s Ratatouille.)
In a recent Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris described the summer of 2007 as being a series of non-events and wrote, “Whatever makes people talk about a film for weeks — one great scene, an amazing twist, a star-making performance, a barrier-breaking laugh — was missing.” When so many movies are remakes or the third, fourth or fifth films in a series, certainly familiarity should not be a surprise. But was the summer of 2007 so bereft of highlights? In terms of neat-o special effects, I’d single out Sandman from Spider-man 3 and the giant fighting robots from Transformers. Knocked Up and Superbad had uproariously funny scenes and lines.
For me, probably the definitive detail from a film came in The Simpsons Movie, when Homer sang the “Spider-pig” song to his new pet porker: “Spider-pig, Spider-pig/Does whatever a Spider-pig does/Can he swing from a thread?/No, he can’t, ’cause he’s a pig.”
