Summer Movies Bring out the Best in Moviegoers

By Katey Rich

I missed last Monday's critics' screening of Iron Man, so on Friday I was faced with shelling out the $13 for a ticket like everyone else, or not knowing what everyone else was talking about yesterday  morning. Of course, there was only one choice. I waited in a line that snaked around the entirety of a Times Square theatre, rushed inside to grab seats with my friends, and wondered if I could handle this much visual spectacle at 10 p.m. at the end of a long day.

Turns out the movie became worth the price of admission before the lights had even fully dimmed. That's when the brand-new trailer for The Dark Knight came on, and as soon as the audience got a glimpse of that black cape against the grim city skyline, they went completely bananas. Even the appearance of the Warner Bros. logo soon afterward got a cheer. In fact, most of the trailers that followed-- Kung Fu Panda, The Incredible Hulk, even The Love Guru-- got a cheer, even though none of them were what the audience had paid dearly to see. And that, above everything else, is why my pulse quickens at the thought of summer movie season, another four months encased in air conditioning and watching the whole world explode. Because no Oscar winner, or laugh-out-loud comedy or even a run-of-the-mill action film can engender the same audience frenzy as a well-marketed summer tentpole. My Iron Man audience was surely packed with people who dearly loved the comics, but just as many probably came in clueless, like I did, and left with irresistible grins on their faces.

It's not even because Iron Man is a great movie-- it's good, but not really great, with an anticlimactic finale and a villain who never really gets down to the evil nitty-gritty. But Iron Man is good enough to cheer for and tell your friends to see, and will be the standard bearer for Hollywood for at least a few weeks, until another big-budget spectacle knocks it off its throne. It's an endless cycle of event movies in the summertime, for sure, but with each of them trying to forge its own identity and win audiences, each will give us something new to discuss on Monday morning

With Oscar viewership fading and movie attendance not exactly growing, it takes a special handful of movies to unite us all in dark theatres. And those kinds of movies, as dumb and loud and unnecessarily expensive as they may be, are my favorite part of summer. Fall is the time for thinking, but summer is when we sit back, relax, and let the stories easily unfold for us.