It is time to recap the summer blockbuster season and make note of the films that busted our blocks during this hot, sweaty, magical time of year.
You probably thought summer began on June 21, but man, are you dumb. It actually started April 19, when “The Scorpion King” stormed into theaters and began beating patrons about the head with a wooden club. The hero of this movie was wrestling star The Rock, who gave probably the best performance by a wrestler since Hulk Hogan in “Mr. Nanny.”
“Scorpion King” was quickly followed by “Jason X,” which was part 10 in the “Friday the 13th” series of movies about a misunderstood fellow named Jason. Jason loves to kill people. He is different from, say, the Scorpion King because, um, Jason wears a mask.
But the summer REALLY began on May 3, a good six weeks before summer began, with “Spider-Man,” about a freakish boy who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and promptly falls over dead.
No, actually, he inherits all the relative strength of that spider, similar to how people who get bitten by toddlers develop all the powers of a toddler, with the crawling and the drooling and the what-have-you.
It was just two weeks after that when “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones; We Enjoy … Punctuation!” was released and hated by millions of “Star Wars” fans, who made their displeasure known to series creator George Lucas by watching the film only 11 times instead of 20.
Were there scintillating, thought-provoking dramas this summer, too? Of course not!
Oh, wait, yes there were. Huh. That’s strange. Anyway, “Road to Perdition” was good, and so was “Insomnia,” about a guy named Al Pacino who can’t sleep. Maybe he should have watched “Unfaithful,” which was dull and morally ambiguous and had a French guy in it, which made it hard to take it seriously, with the beret and the cheese-eating and the what-have-you.
The summer would not be complete without some spy movies, and hot Hollywood couple Matt Damon and Ben Affleck each had one. Damon’s was “The Bourne Identity,” about a man who doesn’t know who he is; Affleck appeared in “The Sum of All Fears,” about a man who thinks he’s Harrison Ford.
Meanwhile, the real Harrison Ford starred in “K-19: The Widowmaker,” a jolly little comedy about an elfish man who lives at the South Pole and makes widows.
And war! We all love a good war movie. “Windtalkers” wasn’t one, but hoo-boy, if it had been, we sure would have watched it!
Summer is also a time for talking animals, both in the cinema and in real life, if you know where to look. This year, “Scooby-Doo,” “Men in Black II,” “The Powerpuff Girls Movie,” “Stuart Little 2: Electric Boogaloo” and “The Country Bears” all featured animals who possessed the amazing power of speech. That is more than I can say for “XXX,” which featured Vin Diesel.
Speaking of children’s movies, Adam Sandler had one, called “Mr. Deeds,” about a man who tried to make a movie without a screenplay. Sandler’s fellow “Saturday Night Live” graduate, Dana Carvey, tried the same thing, with “Master of Disguise,” which was so bad it received not a single positive review in all of America, and therefore grossed $13 million its first weekend. If you made a movie that was hated by every single person in the world, that movie would still gross at least half a million dollars, which is at least a dozen years’ salary for most normal people. Is it any wonder we love Hollywood?
This sort of rapid-fire column is, to me, like running into a room full of people, slapping everyone, and running out again.
Yeah, I could have mentioned "Signs" and "Austin Powers in Goldmember," too. But I didn't feel like it.
