Column: Froehlove

It’s the start of a new year, time for Oscar bait to start dangling at Kendall and remind us how awful the summer in movies really was. I for one have noticed a curious lack of film-going anecdotes in my friends’ brief appraisals of their summer vacations.

Gone are the asides that begin with: “Did you see that movie where…,” “Wasn’t Nicole Kidman’s face…,” or “I wanted to kill this obnoxious kid during ‘The Passion of the Christ’ when….” All we’ve been hearing about are our fellow students’ lame beach houses in New Jersey and their “totally inspiring, way artistically enlightening” $10,000 jaunts through Western Europe. Where are the memorable films?

I don’t know the answer, but I sincerely hope that the original negatives of the films released this summer are slowly burning in the smoldering pile of corpses (victims of Martian death-rays and overwrought post-9/11 political commentary) pulled out of the theatre where I caught a screening of “War of the Worlds.” The only reason to save the films would be for an anthropology paper entitled, “Poop and Culture: Ethnographically Approximating the Root Causes of Loose Stool,” which has already been written several times by Roger Ebert anyway.

Pompous wannabe movie critics like myself always write about how bad summer movies are, but let me just remind you how wretched this summer was in particular by recapping some of the bigger hits.

“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” —Someone should have told Tim Burton a long time ago that his days were over. Probably after his “Planet of the Apes” remake, which was, astonishingly, worse than “Gigli.” But with Johnny Depp, a popular Roald Dahl property, and hordes of pseudo-hipster NYU students who love Burton’s “dark, brooding sensibility” and the “amazing production design of ‘Batman,’” it’s no surprise that “Charlie” made it off the ground. What the public received, instead of a triumphant return to form for a once interesting and offbeat commercial director, was a cultural product more neo-fascist in character than a cabinet meeting in the Bush administration. How a movie about an evil dictator who fires all his employees, leaving them impoverished, wretched, starving, and without dignity, only to be continually loved and revered by them, could captivate audiences in America, the land of the free, is beyond me. Surely public opinion polls on gay marriage and the worth of lives of innocent Iraqi citizens provide no clue.

“Star Wars: Episode III”—One only has to recall the climactic scene of “Revenge of the Sith” to appropriately sum up its awfulness. Set on a lava-filled planet that looks like the Bowser stage from “Super Mario Bros.,” Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) and Anakin (Hayden Christensen) exchange heated words on Anakin’s abrupt switch to the Dark Side. The only thing screenwriter George Lucas can think to give Padme (Natalie Portman ’03) to say at this important moment is, “Anakin, you’re breaking my heart!” Not only did my own heart break at hearing the passionate (pedantic?) writing so daringly enlivened by Ms. Portman, but my plush multiplex chair also broke in half at the same moment, the weight of the slop emitting from the screen being far too much for it to bear.

“War of the Worlds”—Steven Spielberg, so knowledgeable about the “human condition,” our callous inner nature, and how to make gajillions and quadrazillions of dollars, knows about powerful questions. He’s asked us about slavery, the Holocaust, being kind to space aliens, and most importantly about the very fabric of our lives, and whether or not that fabric can be purchased with the “Indiana Jones” DVD box set. He certainly left me with a powerful question at the end of his current summer blockbuster. Why hasn’t someone put Dakota Fanning in a dark hole and left her there for a very long time? Actually, the film raised other questions as well, which I will now ask you, the faithful reader. How much money can be made off shamefully evoking 9/11? How much dull heavy-handedness is required to convince an audience of a film’s Importance? Do you know about the war in Iraq—and don’t you think it’s bad? Is that Tom Cruise, or a working-class sex robot from “A.I.”? Haven’t I seen that scene in “Jurassic Park”? Wait, it’s over? Where can I get my money back?

I must stop before the surface goes from scratched to deeply bruised, which is when we are all sucked into a short-range timewarp and forced to watch “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” on a triple-bill with “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Fantastic Four.” I would rather read Dr. Laura for five hours and then be whipped with a wet stalk of sugar cane by Lindsay Lohan after a five-day cabbage-only diet. If Hollywood bigwigs want to continue whining about decreasing box-office receipts, maybe they should wait to see if the trend continues after trying a release strategy that doesn’t involve throwing elephant turds at their overpaying audiences.

—Staff writer Clint J. Froehlich can be reached at froehlic@fas.harvard.edu.