Based on a highly unscientific poll of high school students (the two living in my house), I’ve reached the conclusion that the old “what I did on my summer vacation” essay is a thing of the past.
That’s too bad, because that old chestnut of sophomore English class served a number of useful functions. It taught students how to organize their thoughts onto paper, and to prioritize what one would write or (if the summer was particularly eventful, in a “Stand by Me” sort of way) not write.
Most important, the dread of such an assignment was a sure way to obliterate nostalgia for the recent past.
So, as the summer movie season ended over last weekend — the lowest box-office haul for a Labor Day weekend in years, according to those who keep track of such things — it was high time to say farewell to the summer of ’17, with a final backward appraisal of what we learned at the movies.
This summer at the movies, we learned:
• A soundtrack and groovy banter do not make a summer blockbuster all by themselves (“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” “Baby Driver”).
• Kurt Russell will still be cooler than you five years after he’s dead (“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” “The Fate of the Furious”).
• Any mystical sword being guarded by David Beckham is probably not worth the trouble (“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”).
• Just being foul-mouthed isn’t enough to be funny, or enough to draw an audience (“Snatched,” “Baywatch,” “Rough Night,” “The House”) …
• … Unless Queen Latifah is in your movie, then it’s all good and people will flock to it — and Hollywood will still think a comedy with four black female leads is an “anomaly” (“Girls Trip”).
• There’s still a place for pretty teenagers to stare moonily at each other for 90 minutes (“Everything, Everything”).
• Going back to the well once too often doesn’t pay off (“Alien: Covenant,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” “Transformers: The Last Knight,” “Despicable Me 3”).
• Even when he’s not playing Littlefinger, Aiden Gillan is creepy as heck (“The Lovers”).
• Sometimes toilet humor for kids can be funny — but only if it’s humor about actual toilets (“Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie”).
• Badass women, in front of and behind the camera, can deflect criticism and second-guessing as surely as Diana, Princess of the Amazon, can deflect bullets with her bracelets (“Wonder Woman”).
• A movie studio can’t just throw some random characters it owns together and call it a “cinematic universe” (“The Mummy”).
• For all we complain about there being no original movies, sometimes being too original just ends up being too freaking weird (“The Book of Henry”).
• A talking car having a midlife crisis opens up way too many questions about the very nature of a car-centered world. Like, if there’s no one to ride inside them, why do they even have doors? And why are there buses? (“Cars 3.”)
• Sometimes multimillion-dollar deals between giant corporations can create something good (“Spider-Man: Homecoming”).
• The fact that America embraced a romantic comedy about a Pakistani-born, Muslim-raised comedian who falls for a white woman from the South made me feel better about this country (“The Big Sick”).
• The fact that America also embraced a movie that depicted the end of the human species’ dominance on Earth also, in a weird way, made me feel better about this country (“War for the Planet of the Apes”).
• Giving Luc Besson enough money to do whatever the heck he wants may not be a sound business decision, but it does produce results that boggle the mind (“Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”).
• If the Brits elected Mark Rylance as prime minister, I don’t think anyone would object (“Dunkirk”).
• When that little voice inside your head says “this is a bad idea,” you should listen to it. Especially if you work for Sony Animation (“The Emoji Movie”).
• Some books are never adapted into movies for decades for good reasons (“The Dark Tower”).
• Steven Soderbergh can make heist movies until he’s 90, and I will still line up to see them (“Logan Lucky”).
• A group of determined young women, facing discrimination and poverty and all the breaks going against them, can still show the world how confident, tough and fierce they are (“Step”).
• So can one fireplug girl with a motor mouth (“Patti Cake$”).
• Utah looks really good on a movie screen (“Brigsby Bear,” “Wind River,” “We Love You, Sally Carmichael!”).
