Column #19 - Halfway to Pay-Dirt...OR...I Fought the Law and the Law Won

It's roughly halfway through the summer movie-going season and as such the time is ripe to re-examine the entertainment we've seen so far this summer. That's right, it's time to relive the glory, the anguish, and the torture...

Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Saw it online for free. Paid too much. (Released in March, so not really a summer flick, but this line was too good to pass up).

Kill Bill Vol. 2. Better than the first by far. Revealed character by the boat-load. Less grind-house charnel carnage porn but had copious amounts of Tarantino-esque dialogue and every true movie fan loves what comes out of their (proxy) mouths.

Van Helsing. Proved that no amount of money and the lovely Kate Beckonsale can redeem a crappy craptacular Vampire-Werewolf crap-fest (those of you who've seen Underworld know of which other flick I speak...Underworld. Note: Using "crap" three times in a single sentence means the flick ain't good). I liked Deep Rising a lot, enjoyed The Mummy, kinda liked The Mummy Returns, but this Stephen Sommer's flick needed a stake driven through the heart of the studio executive that thought this was gonna rival Spiderman for the summer hearts and minds and moollah. This filly deserved to be shot in the paddock.

Troy. Set a new standard for close combat and forty-year old guys. Took out the Greek gods, inflated the hubris, added some sumptuous CGI, and re-wrote the entire Iliad. But...it worked. Basically a love story about Achilles and his ego, Troy worked despite the overly-cloying Orlando Bloom as a Paris so ineffectual that only the magnificent magnificence of Peter O'Toole's Priam redeemed it. You get the feeling that Priam loves his kid so much, he just might let his kingdom fall to protect him. Troy was wildly entertaining and it had the best screen name I've seen this year. Hats off to...John Shrapnel. Raised the bar for future on-screen combat that the next movie paled to in comparison...

King Arthur. Made me long for the dark ages, you know the time when illiteracy and disease ran so rampant that an agonizing death made this experience look fun. I get what they were trying to do with this flick, Arthur as Navy SEAL, home is where the heart is, etc., etc. What I don't get is who thought this movie was a worthy addition to the Camelot pantheon. Seriously, no movie comes close to Excalibur but Clive Owen's King Arthur and Kiera Knightly's Genevieve had less chemistry than Sean Connery and Richard Gere in First Knight and that movie was directed by the guy who invented Police Squad. Save your bucks, save your time, save your spirit, skip this movie, find a friend who paid to see it, take them to the bar, get them good and drunk, slap them upside the head, don't worry they won't remember anyway. Lucky bastards.

Fahrenheit 9/11 and Supersize Me. Interesting, compelling docu-drama, well worth seeing. The former is the most talked about movie of the summer and rightly so. The latter single-handedly caused McDonald's to remove its heart-attack inducing supers-size portions from the menu.

The Day After Tomorrow. Not as entertaining as Independence Day. Not as mind-numbingly derivative as Universal Solider. Not as patriotic as The Patriot. The director, Jan De Bont has a real hate on for -- wait, didn't Roland Emmerich direct Tomorrow. They're not the same guy? Seriously...? You say to-mato, I say to-ma-to. I keep trying to remember back to some particularly gripping scene or moment and I come up dry. There's some ice, some wind, a lot of water and New York gets soaked, then frozen, then abandoned. Man, Roland really does hate the big apple. Why Roland, why? No, there were a couple of things: Americans illegally crossing the border into Mexico, good reversal; and Jake Gyllenhaal, who may just be the "NEXT BIG THING", acting-wise that is, I'm not quite sure what to make of him. Talented thespian or ineffectual has-been pretty-boy? One thing's for certain, I hate him for dating Kirsten Dunst. Nice segue into...

Spiderman 2. I don't love it like the critics do. It was a good, somewhat fun summer flick. Ripped off large quantities of story from Superman 2 and didn't even have the excellent Terence Stamp, with or without drag, he was too busy making a sequel to the "new classic", My Boss's Daughter. I kid. Cause I love. I hope...Finally, the superhero genre has had the balls (pun intended) to address "performance anxiety". Bruce Campbell makes an appearance and he under-acts beautifully. I really believed he was a Snooty Usher. The man's a legend, 'nuff said.

The comedies have been pretty good. Dodgeball was an effective parody of a true sports movie, but didn't quite reach the rich lather of Rudy (which I enjoy more each and every time I watch it, which seems to be weekly given TBS' all-Rudy, all-the-time, rotation). It also has the funniest line of the summer bar none, at the very end of the story. Anchorman was hit and miss, but I did laugh heartily or chortle, the Latin term, more than I groaned and it's a toss-up as to who's funnier, Paul Rudd's Brain Fantana or Steve Carell's Brick Tamland. Brick's intro scene has got to be seen to be fully appreciated. Hands down though, no movie beats Anchorman for its love of silly names: Brian Fantana, Brick Tamland, Ron Burgundy, Veronica Corningstone, Champ Kind, and my personal favorite, Vince Vaughn's Wes Mantooth. In fact, there's so many crossover cameos from Dodgeball that I thought for a moment that I wasn't gonna see Ben Stiller in his seventeenth movie this year when...you guessed it, there he is again. Say what you want about Ben, no one's ever gonna accuse the guy of sloth. Except maybe Michael Caine.

The Terminal. Terminated the competition...Not. And I don't know why. I was entertained by this flick. Going in I wondered why Spielberg would make this film, what the challenge would be to the post-modern Prometheus of film-dom. Know what? It's a fun story, a fun movie, I'd bet a fun film-shoot, and that's enough. And come on, everybody loves Tom Hanks. Even inanimate objects. Like volleyballs.

And so the best film of the summer so far is...wait for it...drum-roll...the tension builds...get on with it, will ya...The Chronicles of Riddick. Nope, you read that right. Nope, I'm not kidding, this isn't another of those witty musings of mine. Seriously, The Chronicles of Riddick. I've been thinking back over all the films I've seen this summer season and the only one I really want to see again is Riddick. It had the best special effects, the best use of a Dame in a supporting role (Judy Dench), and the best anti-hero since Pitch Black. Wait, wasn't Riddick in Pitch Black. Yes. I'm glad we've reached common ground. Riddick presented a hero/anti-hero that would as easily kill you as save your life, a darn-near unrepentant man who every time he lets a little of that light shine through and opens his heart to another human being, it gets snuffed out by a universe bent on assuring his place in the pantheon of intergalactic assholes. This movie constantly defied my traditional, 'heroic' story archetypes. An un-hero, motivated by base, primal, selfish reasons. All the time, every time. Right up until that excellent ending. Special kudos go out for giving Colm Feore a villain worthy of sinking his thespian teeth into. It almost gets rid of the bitter aftertaste of Paycheck. Almost. And I dare you to tell that that Conan the Barbarian-style ending didn't give you bloody satisfaction.

Compared to last summer, I'm still waiting for the mental gymnastics of The Matrix Reloaded, still looking for a brilliant studio film like Seabiscuit, still hoping for a guilty pleasure like Pirates of the Caribbean. Maybe it's I, Robot (it's not), maybe it's The Bourne Supremacy (I did really enjoy the first one), maybe it's The Village (say what you want, but M. Night Shyamalan knows how to entertain even as he exasperates). All I know for sure...Time is running out.
Jess Nakaska is an aspiring screenwriter always on the lookout for the next great script idea. He'll let you know if he finds it. Feel free to contact him at jessnakaska@hotmail.com.