The Summer ‘08 movie season: where successful movies played the movies disguised as other movies.

I have to say that I’m entirely confused. Was the Summer 2008 popcorn summer movie season a good one or wasn’t it? The batpod-tastic success of The Dark Knight certainly seems as though we can mark this one in the “win” column, but on reflection I realize that I saw about a third fewer movies in the theater in 2008 than I did in ‘07.

My summer’s in-theatre viewings were:

• Iron Man
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
• Kung Fu Panda
• WALL·E
• The Dark Knight
• Tropic Thunder

More or less doesn’t mean much, though; which year had better** movies?

Summer blockbuster season tends to be the one that most appeals to my admittedly lowbrow sensibilities, so in general I have to say that 2008 scored with its stories of conflicted men with tortured inner lives and desperate loneliness given possible redemption through impossible love and –

Wait, now I’m really confused – are these still summer movies I’m talking about or did Oscar season come early? So much angst and longing and torture and desperation found in this year’s supposedly superficial summer films – what happened here?

The Dark Knight and WALL-E happened. Two massively entertaining movies that strained and broke the bonds of their respective genres by daring to be deeper, more rich and complex than we popcorn-munchers might have expected them to be.

We pretty much all knew that The Dark Knight would be different, right? Director Christopher Nolan’s precursor Batman Begins gave us all the indications we’d need that his follow-up would break traditional superhero movie rules. Even so, the origin-story nature of Begins still needed to follow at least some of those rules, so there were elements of it that felt conventional. TDK would have no such constraints. That sense of sequel freedom, coupled with all of the pre-buzz behind Heath Ledger’s realistic and chilling performance – not to mention his sad yet secretly-helpful-to-movie-marketers death – all built the anticipation that TDK would give us something bigger, different, compelling – and the movie truly delivers on that promise.

And the fact is, I’m still not sure what to make of WALL-E. It’s spectacular, a feast for the eyes and ears, an amazing achievement of film and storytelling on so many cinematic levels – but a part of me also feels saddened by it. To me it suggests Pixar’s definitive – and possibly irrevocable – split from making children’s movies that adults will enjoy to simply making mainstream audience movies of any genre.

WALL-E is, quite simply, not a children’s movie. Barely at all. It’s certainly marketed with all the cuteness of an oldey-time Disney flick, and the film’s merchandising is all aimed at the kiddies and their parents’ checkbooks, but the movie’s narrative and all of the terrific cinematic tricks that Pixar has packed into it portray a much grander, much more complex goal, I think, to use the company’s branded excellence in animation to tell any kind of story, regardless of audience.

My kids were kind of bored by WALL-E. It’s light-dialogue, romance-heavy plot simply didn’t hold their attention all that well. And just think about the romance angle for a moment more: Pixar’s original movies had virtually none of this, outside of the chaste flirtations between Woody and Bo Peep. A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo – no romantic conflict at all. But in the last few years of Pixar movies – in Cars and Ratatouille – romance has become more of an important plot device in the company’s storytelling, and now in WALL-E it’s not a device: it’s the entire point. It’s the reason the movie exists at all.

Of course, that’s not to suggest that romance has no place in traditional kids’ movies – but to me it truly signals a shift for Pixar, a move into new narrative territories and new stories to tell. Perhaps the fact that they’re now owned by Disney might suggest otherwise, because I’d imagine that the Mouse House would prefer to have the well-oiled Pixar family-oriented blockbuster machine hitting on all cylinders. That tends to be why companies spend billions of dollars on such things, so that they can keep the creative types well-compensated while they’re happily working within the narrative shackles of tried-and-true formulas.

But I really think that Pixar tends to have more subtleties, more stuff going on behind the scenes than what might appear on the surface. “Go ahead and market our movies with cutesy toys and whimsically big-eyed one-sheets,” they seem to be saying. “And we’ll go ahead and create genre-defining films that say and do exactly what we want.”

Christopher Nolan now has earned that same clout, too. Warner Bros. would be wise to simply shut up, write a check and get out of the way because if Nolan wants to make another Batman movie, he obviously can get the job done effectively and turn a nifty profit for everyone. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 shows us exactly what happens when studio involvement gets too close, dictates too much story, and ends up screwing around with a director’s better judgment. Ideally, WB has learned that lesson and will continue to act upon it.

So how was your summer moviegoing? Was it everything you expected or something completely different?

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**Maybe the question should be “which summer’s movies were less disappointing?” The two movies of ‘07 and ‘08 that held the biggest anticipation for me personally – and which both crushingly, heart-stompingly let me down – were Spider-Man 3 last year and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this past May. That these two movies all but destroyed my good will toward their respective franchises in two subsequent summers in a row is nearly enough to make me take up jogging or badminton when May of 2009 comes along.