Looks like a shrug-worthy summer for movies
“Which movies are worth seeing in theatres right now?”
It’s a question my Toronto Star colleagues, among other folks, ask me often.
I try to answer with several options, depending on their individual tastes. Do they like comedies? Dramas? Docs?
Lately it’s been a problem coming up with satisfactory answers; the movies just haven’t been all that great lately. They’ve been more meh than amazing and there have been a lot of real stinkers:
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zoolander 2, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Alice Through the Looking Glass and many more.
It’s shaping up to be the summer of the cinema shrug.
There has been a surfeit of sequels, with most of them vastly inferior to the original films. The situation is so bad that studio 20th Century Fox cancelled most press previews of Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day: Resurgence, this week’s biggest opener, fearing bad reviews.
Even with the good movies, and there have been some, I find myself hedging more than a Scarborough transit planner. Captain America: Civil War has a lot going for it, but maybe a little too much. It runs too long and introduces so many new characters, it’s like a sizzle reel for the Marvel Comics Universe.
Last week’s box office champ, Finding Dory, is good but not great Pixar. And it’s yet another sequel, which suggests creativity really is dead in Hollywood.
There are a lot of good docs out right now — Tickled, The Witness and De Palma, for example — but docs usually play at just a single downtown theatre, such as TIFF Bell Lightbox or Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. The suburbs get snubbed.
By this time last year, we’d seen Furious 7, Mad Max: Fury Road, Jurassic World and Inside Out, all of which enjoyed both critical and audience support.
There hasn’t been a run of similarly strong films this year and there are worrisome indications that fewer people are going to the movies. There were record box-office figures set in 2015, but the increased dollar take came from fewer moviegoers paying more for blockbusters such as Star Wars, a trend that seems likely to continue.
I was starting to wonder if it was just me or if this really is a shrug-worthy summer. I contacted Paul Dergarabedian, the most-quoted of box-office experts. As senior media analyst for comScore, a cross- platform audience measurement firm, he’s seeing increasing pushback by both critics and regular moviegoers to films that don’t deliver the goods.
“This summer, you’re right, it has been a tough go,” he said.
“I think there is a correlation between the perceived quality of movies and the result at the box office. If there’s a perception that the movie is not so great — and that perception is often built on social media — then it’s going to have an impact.
“It’s all about the conversation now,” Dergarabedian continued.
“People always say there’s a disconnect between critics and audiences, but if you look at the results, most of the movies that didn’t do well this year had very mixed or bad reviews from critics and likewise from the audience. I think you would find that, by and large, they’re seeing things the same way.
“Where you have the disconnect is when a movie is too big to fail, as in Batman v Superman. That brand was so huge — even though critics were fairly dismissive of the movie and audiences were somewhat indifferent — that movie nearly made it to $1 billion worldwide.”
Dergarabedian breaks from conventional wisdom when he argues there aren’t too many sequels right now; there just aren’t enough movies that deliver full satisfaction. Hollywood has to take this to heart, he said.
“Audiences have so many options for entertainment today. The bar has been raised to the point where, if you’re not killing it in terms of the quality of your movie or the appeal of your movie or the concept, there are 30 other options for entertainment.”
There is reason for some optimism. A new report issued this week showed that millennials actually do go to the movies, despite theories to the contrary. They account for 29 per cent of box-office totals.
There are, in fact, some good movies playing in Toronto-area theatres, although they might be at secondrun houses by now. Here are five I enthusiastically recommend to you and also my Star colleagues:
Love & Friendship: Poisoned-pen brilliance as Whit Stillman takes on Jane Austen. Kate Beckinsale makes for a savage wit and golden golddigger as she hunts for a wealthy husband for herself and her daughter.
A Bigger Splash: Rock ’n’ roll hedonism and ordinary jealousy fuel Luca Guadagnino’s sun-drenched Mediterranean isle thriller, featuring Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts and Dakota Johnson.
The Nice Guys: It’s 1970s Los Angeles, where disco is king but crime rules. Great comic pairing of Ryan Gosling as a bumbling private eye and Russell Crowe as a ruthless enforcer, who have to work together to crack a case.
Hello, My Name Is Doris: The sitcom premise of an older woman chasing a younger man becomes so much more than that in Michael Showalter’s dramedy, with Sally Field in one of her best roles.
Sing Street: The spirit of Once and the sounds of the ’80s infuse John Carney’s semi-autobiographical musical, about Dublin schoolboys who form a band so one of them (newcomer Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) can get the girl. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column runs Fridays.