Fire Stephanie Zacharek

As I have stated many times, last year was one of the best years for movies, ever. It was fantastic through a combination of prestige pictures (Darjeeling, Blood, No Country), great indies (Once, Away from Her), animated pleasures (Simpsons, Persepolis), and thinking man's genre entertainment (Bourne, Clayton, Knocked Up). One branch of moviemaking painfully, disastrously failed: summer blockbusters. A whole group of 3s (Spidey, Rush Hour, Shrek, Pirates) just flat-out sucked. Although they made tons of money, the studios completely failed to deliver good popcorn movies in 2007.

Of course, that's not the case in 2008. The big pictures have been not only big, but great. Iron Man, Wall-E, Hellboy II, Dark Knight, and Tropic Thunder have all delivered. Indy 4 and Prince Caspian weren't masterpieces but were a lot of fun. Even Incredible Hulk, Wanted and Hancock weren't horrible (ok, Hancock was almost horrible).

So you'd think a critic would be happy that Hollywood rebounded from one of its worst summers ever with possible the best ever, right? Wrong. Salon.com's Stephanie Zacharek has been making a name for herself this summer as one of our worst critics (disliking Dark Knight, loving You Don't Mess with the Zohan, raving about the merely tolerable Indy 4). Now, not content to miss the boat on individual films, she wants to be wrong about the entire summer.

To be fair, Zacharek's article sounds at first like she's tired of summer hype, not summer movies. Statements like "Just how much excitement can movie advertising realistically whip up? Is there a limit to how much movie hype we can take in before we say 'So what?'" are certainly accurate, although also not very interesting (News flash: Online movie critic tired of movie advertising!)

But Zacharek goes off the deep end when she complains: "And when it comes to the movies themselves, how big is too big and how much is too much - in terms of money spent on special effects and marketing at the expense of the basics, like having a decent script and a director who knows how to tell a story visually?"

Here, she's got no case. Sure Stephanie, unlike last year's "auteurs" (Michael Bay, Sam Raimi, Gore Verbinksi, Brett Ratner) Hollywood sure put their hopes in a bunch of hacks this time: Guillermo del Toro, Andrew Stanton, Christopher Nolan, Ben Stiller, and your favorite, Spielberg. Of course, none of them knows how to tell a story visually - they've never done it before, in Zoolander or Pan's Labyrinth or Memento or Finding Nemo or Schindler's List. Oh Stephanie, how I yearn for yesteryear, when the biggest movies were delivered by the brilliant minds behind Mouse Hunt, After the Sunset, the Hercules and Xena TV shows, and Pearl Harbor. Boy, it wasn't exhausting at all watching the films from last summer, but after Iron Man, Hellboy II, and Dark Knight, I'm worn out. Please Hollywood: no more good movies!

Zacharek also manages to completely misunderstand how blockbusters work, which is something I've harped on over and over again. First, she points out that success for blockbusters is based on anticipation. This is partially true: Dark Knight and Iron Man made lots of money because they were anticipated. On the other hand, great reviews and word of mouth drove them to make hundreds of million dollars more after they were out and no longer being anticipated.

But she really fails by believing (as the studios clearly do) that marketing is what creates anticipation. She notes: "Last summer "Spider-Man 3" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" raked it in at the box office, and even though many die-hard fans of the "Pirates" franchise found the final installment disappointing once they saw it, the picture was so highly anticipated that its quality -- or lack thereof -- barely mattered. Blockbusters are built, and marketed, to make money, and more often than not, they do."

She's absolutely right that those movies sucked, and that they made money because they were anticipated. But they weren't anticipated because they were hyped. They were anticipated because Spidey 1, Spidey 2, Pirates 1, and parts of Pirates 2 were really good. Message to ignorant studio heads and elitist film reviewers: people do not see movies because of hype. People want to see movies that are good! That is all! And when the hype for something makes it look good (see the first Spider-Man) they will go to see it. When the hype for something makes it look bad (see The Love Guru) they will not go. Yes, anticipation can help make money, but the anticipation for Pirates 3, Spider-Man 3, and Shrek 3 were based on previous movies being good. Good movies, not marketing, raked in those hundreds of millions of dollars.

I don't even really feel like discussing the rest of Stephanie's points. She spends the middle third of her article explaining what the blockbuster is, and how Jaws was the first one, which I found interesting when I first learned that when I was 17. Then, in yet another absolutely pointless and pretentious jab at The Dark Knight, she writes "I suspect 'The Dark Knight' will inspire more budding video-game designers than it will filmmakers." Finally, she tells us that great summer blockbusters are rare.

That last bit is probably true - most of the time. But it's not true this summer. So if she's exhausted, she needs to get the hell out of the theater, and maybe even find another job. When your response to the best summer of blockbusters ever, which came just after the worst summer of blockbusters ever, is "I'm tired of these movie," you might not be film critic material.