The Art of the Mediocre Movie Season

Spring may have sprung only days ago but we are currently in a different kind of season, the season of the unabashedly shitty movie. Movie seasons operate in a similar fashion to the weather. They last about as long, too. There two out of the four seasons we can all agree upon as enjoyable and two that are just downright depressing. Summer and spring usher in warmth and picturesque scenery. Fall and winter seem like sad conclusions to what our climate should be. Leaves fall, the ground turns to tundra and the world goes from a full color photograph to greyscale.  While winter and fall are one giant entity lasting months, the movies separate their two  seasons to spare us long term agony.

Prime viewing every year begins in May, when the onslaught of summer movies takes hold of the industry for four months. It’s a glorious time; great weather and great (and occasionally shallow) movies coexisting in harmony together. Few films released during this time have a high IQ, but they kick ass and take names. If there’s a fun script to match the special effects, I find myself feeling like a kid all over again (“Pirates of the Caribbean” 1 & 2, I’m talking to you; number 3, what was the point of you existing?).  Most of the time, its 120 days of guilty pleasure.

Then we enter a period where every pseudo-summer movie that was rejected gets pushed to September, our first lame season. This is when Clive Owen shoots lots of stuff real good in “Shoot ‘Em Up” and the next Nicolas Sparks adaptation swoons females of every age, both applying a level of cheese to rival a macaroni casserole. The latest early fall tear-jerker was “Nights in Rodanthe” which reunited Diane Lane and Richard Gere, a clearly exhilarating pair. October doesn’t do much to lift moviegoers out of the rut, mostly because every other movie is a slasher flick with impossible amounts of full front female nudity. And then there is always the next “Saw” movie to look forward to. What number are they on now, eight?

After two months of sifting through the trenches of bland and unoriginal filmmaking, November comes around to begin the second act of releasing movies that are blockbusters. Sure, there are way too many Christmas movies (released, mysteriously, around Thanksgiving, proving once and for all movie executives are clinically retarded). Two words, though: Oscar. season. The big guns are taken out of their holsters and if the hype is justified, they fire on all cylinders. Future classics are destined to come into the limelight around this time. Usually, I can die a happy man by end of awards circuit.

We’re stuck right now in the final season in the cycle of the movie industry and coupled with a climate from Antartica, it’s the worst by far. January through April is the  long slog before the big summer movie season comes around the bend. Audiences are in the thick of it as we speak. I regard the current slate of movies as such:  It’s as though the studios took a giant laxative to let all the creative leftovers out. There are rules, however, to mediocrity. Every month during this hullabaloo, one freaking awesome movie is allowed. Just one. That’s the standard. This past January, we were given “Edge of Darkness” and although I have yet to actually SEE the movie, I can only assume the entertainment value is there due to the prospects of a pissed off Mel Gibson. February released “Shutter Island,” a different but disturbing thriller from Martin Scorsese. March should have had its crowning achievement in “Alice in Wonderland,” but you know all too well my thoughts on that already. Instead, it seems, “How to Train Your Dragon” – the annual animated film to come out in March, a month more prone than any other for the release of animated films (“Ice Age: The Meltdown,” “Monsters vs. Aliens” etc.) – is the big winner.

Critics are calling “Dragon” essentially “Avatar” meets “Shrek.” Entertainment Weekly, in an all-out rave says, “It has winningly Potteresque teen-dragon-slayer classes, a queen-bee dragon as grand as Godzilla, and a layer of age-of-terror allegory about the ignorance bred by jingoism.” Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example, as Owen Gleiberman just loooves to make his reviews as incomphrehensible as a David Lynch film. Translation: it has bomb action sequences, its cute for the kiddies and occasionally it throws in a very, very stealthy adult reference that wins over the all-to-philosophical movie critics. The 3-D adventure has a challenger on its hands in the form of “Hot Tub Time Machine,” a comedy with the best movie title since “Snakes on a Plane.” Surprisingly, “Machine” is getting well received, though when you think about it, how can a movie with such a so-bad-it’s-good title be horrendously bad? It’s one of those rare instances where the movie that’s supposed to suck is actually really good.

And the rest speaks for itself: “Leap Year,” “The Spy Next Door,” “Legion,” “Tooth Fairy,” “Valentines Day,” “Brooklyn’s Finest,” “Remember Me,” “The Bounty Hunter” and “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too.”

Thankfully, audiences will be relieved of this blasphemy soon. As the flowers bloom, so do movies of  quality.