With CV killing the Summer Blockbuster and Movie theaters, it may be fun to look back at the 4th of July weekend’s blockbuster releases (some great popcorn movies, and some serious duds!). Here’s the Ringer’s take:
Clearly not a serious list, trollishly ranking Independence Day over Back to the Future and Terminator 2. But instead of hating, let’s look at the lower half of the list for some gems you might have missed:
- Summer of Sam. Spike Lee’s take on NYC in the 70s, and the Son of Sam murders.
- Hancock. A deeply weirdly structured movie, in that it’s two unconnected storylines, as if someone spliced two TV pilots together. Still, a good, early cinematic take on dysfunctional superheroes.
- The Way, Way Back. Like the article says, it’s just so-so, but it’s so-so from some very talented people. So fairly interesting so-so.
- The Shadow. For a long time this and The Phantom were my favorite superhero movies. This is when things like Batman and Robin were coming out, mind you, so this is not saying a lot. But it’s pulpy and fun and over the top and Baldwin is visually perfect for the role.
It’s interesting that so many of the movies just aren’t great popcorn movies, or weren’t what one would consider a blockbuster.
Yeah, living through the 90s in the U.S., I really craved good popcorn summer flicks, but they were really rare. I used to be annoyed at Roger Ebert at completely lowering his standards for summer movies and declaring them good even when they were garbage.
That’s one thing that’s way better today. The Marvel movies are actually good summer movies. As are the Christopher Nolan movies. Honestly, during the 90s, I thought Independence Day really was one of the better ones, even though it wasn’t super great. But during that time, summer movies were mostly just bad, so you took something like Independence Day and were happy about it.
Yeah, but the good Marvel movies are usually Memorial Day releases, though the surprise GoG was in August as I recall.