Let’s vote on hottest flicks
With cinemas sadly shuttered, our weekly polls celebrate joys of the blockbuster era.
For all intents and purposes, the 2020 summer movie season is canceled.
Theaters are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and, despite some rumblings in eager-to-reopen states, will remain so until further notice. Hollywood studios have postponed most (though not all) of their major May-throughAugust releases.
Summer, usually a time for audiences to encounter and re-encounter their favorite pop-cultural juggernauts, will be bereft of new adventures with James Bond and Black Widow, both sitting it out until fall. Meanwhile, a slew of others — including the “Fast & Furious” crew, the latest “Ghostbusters” team, Peter Rabbit and the Minions — have set their sights on 2021.
This isn’t, in short, quite the 45th-anniversary celebration we envisioned for “Jaws.” Back in July 1975, or so Hollywood legend goes, Steven Spielberg’s bitefrom-the-blue shark thriller shredded audience nerves and industry expectations, giving rise to what would
eventually become the hypedriven, sensation-oriented summer blockbuster season as we know it. For better and for worse, “Jaws” — along with George Lucas’ “Star Wars” two years later — ushered audiences into primal new worlds of wonder and terror, even as they pushed the industry’s governing interests ever closer to the bottom line.
They changed American moviemaking, and not always for the better. Spielberg and Lucas, once thrifty underdogs, became Hollywood’s most powerful and recognizable purveyors of spectacle, inspiring numerous disciples and copycats in their wake. “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” two relatively lowbudget, creatively inspired pictures, helped found a new industry paradigm too often defined by reckless profligacy and minimal originality. You can see this in the innumerable inferior sequels and bloated reproductions that tend to clog multiplexes this time of year (some of them, in the case of the ever-expanding “Star Wars” universe, made by Lucas himself ).
And yet, and yet: The blockbuster imperative — or, as some call it, the long, slow death of American movies — has nonetheless infused both art and industry with new life. Amid the reckless overspending, the lowest-common-denominator pandering and the relentless tallying of box office grosses, a lot of good and even great movies have emerged over the last 45 years, driven by smart visions, pop-savvy instincts and an honest, generous investment in the audience’s pleasure.
Summer movie season has given us classic comedies like “Coming to America,” “When Harry Met Sally ... ” and “Bridesmaids,” sportsmovie touchstones like “Bull Durham” and “A League of Their Own,” masterworks of modern horror like “Alien” and “The Shining,” and innumerable first-rate actionthrillers including “Face/Off,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “Mad Max” movies. It’s given us Pixar triumphs and Roland Emmerich disasters, several Oscar winners and the best (and worst) examples of the now-ubiquitous comic-book superhero extravaganza.
It gave us “Blade Runner,” for heaven’s sake.
Picking favorites
And so, I have a modest and enjoyably time-killing proposal: What if we took this summer — set to be the worst summer at the movies since the dawn of the medium more than a century ago — and instead used it to celebrate the best? What if we put our heads together and, over the next four months of presumed self-quarantine, compiled a list of our favorite summer movies week after week and watched and discussed them from the safety of our homes?
What if we turned the summer of 2020 into the Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown?
Here’s how it’ll work: Each week, I will unveil a list — curated by me and my Times colleagues — of 16 memorable movies that premiered that same week going back to 1975, the summer of “Jaws.”
You are invited to vote in a series of polls posted from my Twitter account (@JustinCChang), pitting these 16 movies against one another in a tournamentstyle fight to the death until we have emerged with one definitive winner for that week. Each winning film will be the subject of a retrospective essay or conversation written by me and/or other members of The Times’ film team.
Round of 16 voting runs from 5 p.m. Tuesday to 1 a.m. Wednesday; quarter-finals, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday; semifinals, 5 p.m. Wednesday through 1 a.m. Thursday; and the final, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday. The week’s winner will be crowned at 5 p.m. Thursday.
One week after readers pick a favorite, we’ll follow with a virtual meet-up livestreamed on the Los Angeles Times Classic Hollywood Facebook Page and YouTube as well as Twitter. I’ll host a conversation each week and I invite you to join me starting at 6 p.m. on May 7.
There will surely be many disagreements about which titles are and are not included, some of which may lead us into tortured ontological arguments about what constitutes a summer movie in the first place. What do we think of when we think of a summer movie? Must it belong to a recognizable popular genre and follow (or subvert) certain accepted conventions and formulas? Must it have attained a certain measure of box-office success and/or cult enthusiasm?
I’d say that, for the purposes of this exercise — and with maybe a few intriguing exceptions — the answer to these questions is yes.
Quality matters too: Our hope is that every title that makes the cut can and should be plausibly defended as a good, memorable movie. Or, barring that, it should at least prompt a rich, compelling conversation about whether or not it is a good, memorable movie.
And that conversation has already begun. We held the first round of Twitter polls this week, starting with a list of 16 summer movies that all had a theatrical release date between May 1 and
May 7. And the winner of that bout, after four frenzied rounds of voting and elimination, was “The Avengers” (2012), the first of many superhero mash-ups in the 23-film Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. It faced heavy competition from its closest rival, the Sam Raimidirected “Spider-Man” (2002), a very different Marvel comic-book adaptation that hailed from an earlier era of Hollywood’s endless love affair with superheroes.
The other 14 films in contention this week were: “Sixteen Candles” (1984), “Dave” (1993), “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” (1993), “Much Ado About Nothing” (1993), “The Craft” (1996), “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” (1997), “Breakdown” (1997), “The Mummy” (1999), “Gladiator” (2000), “X2: XMen United” (2003), “Mission: Impossible III” (2006), “Iron Man” (2008), “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (2011) and “Captain America: Civil War” (2016).
Summer kickoff
The final match-up between “The Avengers” and “Spider-Man” was perhaps emblematic of that love affair. But it was also to be expected in a week — the first week of May — that has been a historically popular one for MCU releases, including “Iron Man” (2008) and “Captain America: Civil War” (2016), both of which also proved highly competitive in this week’s voting.
I do wish more voters had showed up for some of the superhero-free movies on the list, though it was nice to see strong pockets of support for an Oscar-winning Roman epic (“Gladiator”), a witchy cult favorite (“The Craft”) and a popular Shakespeare adaptation (“Much Ado About Nothing”), whose gloriously al fresco bathing scene may be the most summery thing on this list.
And the Marvel overload this week was in some ways a blessing: The remaining 15 weeks ahead, while hardly devoid of franchise fare, offer a much wider range of cinematic universes to explore.
Your vote counts
What will make the Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown a journey worth taking over the next 16 weeks is you. Because I’m curious to know what you think. Because popular tastes are always in flux, always fascinating, and worth subjecting to close critical scrutiny. And because Hollywood is also an honest-to-God repository of some of our most unshakable moviegoing dreams.
One of the wonderful things about “Jaws” is its inexhaustible supply of metaphors. We often regard Hollywood as its own Darwinian shark tank, where the competition is fierce and every movie must eat or be eaten alive. Well, for now, the beaches of Amity Island are closed, the local economy is suffering enormously and we’re all looking ahead to happier times.
In the meantime, won’t you join me for the Ultimate Summer Movie Showdown? Because frankly, we’re going to need a bigger vote.