The end credits are just about to roll on the summer movie season, and the winners and losers are being proclaimed. The blue ribbons go to the surprise smashes (“Men in Black,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding”), while the booby prizes are reserved for big-budget flops (“Speed 2: Cruise Control”) and, presumably, audiences.
Poor moviegoers had to suffer through another summer of high-tech lobotomies, or so the refrain goes. Any moderately thoughtful movie was greeted like a surprise guest at a dreary party.
Yet regardless of whether the studios scored or were floored during the season — whether spending $100 million to make a movie that has grossed $110 million domestically was a good investment or whether the failure of toy spinoffs hurt a corporation’s bottom line — the summer of 1997 really wasn’t so bad for those simply interested in seeing movies.
True, the summer produced no instant classics along the lines of “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or even “The Lion King.” It also was as excessive as advertised in terms of money directed toward explosions and production design.
But on most given weekends, there were probably more worthwhile movies playing in the theaters than you had time to see, and that wasn’t necessarily the case last summer. This summer’s 10 most-seen movies certainly stack up favorably to those of 1996.
1997: “Men in Black,” “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” “Air Force One,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Face/Off,” “Batman and Robin,” “Con Air,” “Hercules,” “Contact” and “George of the Jungle.”
1996: “Independence Day,” “Twister,” “Mission: Impossible,” “The Rock,” “The Nutty Professor,” `Eraser,” “Phenomenon,” `The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “A Time to Kill” and “The Cable Guy.”
Last year’s group included five action movies that made minimal sense plus a hodgepodge of flatulence jokes, treacly heart-tugging, dark Disney, sanctimonious drama and failed black humor. The box-office disappointments weren’t so hot either: “Striptease,” “Dragonheart,” “Flipper,” “The Phantom” and “Chain Reaction.”
Click on 1995 for a top 10 list that includes three critical successes (“Apollo 13,” “Crimson Tide” and “The Bridges of Madison County”) and others that taxed few brain cells ( “Batman Forever,” “Pocahontas,” “Die Hard with a Vengeance,” “Casper,” “Waterworld,” “Congo” and “Nine Months”). That was also the summer of the high-profile flops “Judge Dredd” and “Johnny Mnemonic.”
The record-breaking summer of 1994 was the last notably more impressive one, even if there were some clinkers among the top 10 : “The Lion King,” “Forrest Gump,” “True Lies,” “The Flintstones,” “Speed,” “The Mask,” “Clear and Present Danger,” “Maverick,” “The Client” and “Wolf.”
This year, “Air Force One” and “Con Air” were well-crafted but predictable hijack variations on the action-flick formula, and “The Lost World” and “Batman and Robin” were dud sequels that failed to present any believable humans (and, like “Speed 2,” were largely rejected by audiences once the opening-weekend hype wore off).
But many of this summer’s wide releases for the most part achieved what they set out to do. “Men in Black,” though lightweight and at times clunky, thrives on qualities absent from last year’s list: modesty and a subtle, deadpan wit. It’s a rare unbloated blockbuster.
“Face/Off” is as gripping a thriller as has been released in recent years, not because it’s so plausible but because it pursues its implausibility with such conviction — a specialty of director John Woo. While action movies like “Con Air” try to offset their Swiss-cheese plots with winks and wisecracks, “Face/Off” and lead actors John Travolta and Nicolas Cage lay their emotions on the line amid tantalizingly filmed, if sometimes overdone, action.
Julia Roberts’ two flawed summer releases engage viewers in not-always-predictable ways. Though marred by a love triangle in which the lines don’t quite connect, “My Best Friend’s Wedding” works as a pointed comedy featuring surprising leaps into musical fantasy and a spontaneous performance by Rupert Everett. And before “Conspiracy Theory” leans too heavily on its chase and love-story elements, it shows some smarts, guts and humor in presenting Mel Gibson as an unhinged taxi driver caught in a truly disorienting plot.
Speaking of smarts, director Robert Zemeckis’ “Contact” engages the senses (especially the ears) at least as powerfully as 1995’s “Apollo 13” while providing more food for the mind, though the God-vs.-science conflict never quite achieves profundity.
On a smaller scale, “Ulee’s Gold” was the summer’s best movie — as opposed to the best summer movie — and other independent releases offered alternatives to pyrotechnics as well, though too many were released in the past month, creating a low-budget logjam. You can’t complain that there’s nothing worth seeing unless you’ve already caught “Box of Moonlight,” “In the Company of Men,” “Love Serenade,” “Shall We Dance?,” “When the Cat’s Away,” “Mrs. Brown,” “Career Girls” and “Cop Land.”
Last summer’s smaller films offered at least comparable quality — with “Trainspotting,” “Lone Star” and “Welcome to the Dollhouse” leading the way — but not the quantity.
This summer did less well by kids, who were the target audience and subject of few movies. Of the exceptions, “A Simple Wish” was charmless, and “Wild America,” “Good Burger,” “Free Willy 3,” “The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo” and “Air Bud” didn’t exactly reach the heights of 1995’s two great kids’ movies, “Babe” and “A Little Princess.”
Kids had to be content with a live cartoon, “George of the Jungle,” and a real one, “Hercules,” which was lively and well made even if the action figures didn’t sell. Otherwise, they just flocked to “Men in Black” and “The Lost World” with everyone else.
Also lacking was much ethnic diversity on screen. Aside from “Men in Black,” energized by Will Smith’s winning performance, the top 10 summer movies all featured white leads (including “Hercules”).
For black star power you had to look to Martin Lawrence in “Nothing To Lose,” Laurence Fishburne in “Event Horizon” (plus “Hoodlum,” which opens Wednesday), Michael Jai White in “Spawn,” Samuel L. Jackson in “187” and — heaven help us — Shaquille O’Neal in “Steel.” Other ethnicities were even less represented at the multiplexes.
The summer moviegoing experience can become a bit of a blur. Which thriller featured the guy chasing the plane down the runway on the portable staircase? In which hijacking flick did the good guy hide in the cargo hold? (Oh, yeah — both.) In which two movies did CNN anchor Bernard Shaw appear? Which ones didn’t feature Larry King?
Yes, all the explosions do look the same after a while, but at least this summer if you could navigate through the cinematic minefield, you could find — or lose — yourself in some interesting places.
