It's summer in New York City. Heat is emanating from every imaginable surface. I live in a very small apartment on the fifth floor of a walk-up building. I have an extremely feeble air conditioner that seems to be rendered impotent by temperatures above 80 degrees.
The signs are perfectly clear: I should be spending every free moment nestled into the mottled, slightly sticky seats at my local movie theater, enjoying the air conditioning, nibbling on faux-butter-laced popcorn, slurping a giant-size soda, and desperately trying to pick Jujubes out of my teeth.
But here we are, careening into July, and I've seen only two movies since Memorial Day. And those weren't even "real" movies; they were low-budget art-house "films" made with grainy resolution and subpar sound. It's not that I didn't enjoy "The Croupier" and "Hamlet," (OK, I didn't really enjoy "The Croupier" so much), it's just that I've been so well conditioned by the Hollywood machine to expect blockbusters from May through September. (Think "Independence Day," "Deep Impact," "Star Wars".) And now I find myself fighting off low-grade depression.
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times both ran major stories Thursday profiling the desperate state of affairs in Hollywood. Movie moguls, their fourth homes mortgaged to the hilt, are panicking: Why, they cry, why aren't people going to the movies?! Fox head honcho Rupert Murdoch has apparently reached the end of his admittedly very short rope, firing the top guy at Fox studios (which you may remember as the home of a little film called "Titanic").
In an attempt to answer the moguls' pathetic pleas for answers (and perhaps in a bid to keep Murdoch from buying them up lock, stock and barrel), both newspapers worked in down-and-dirty financial analyses of the movie crisis, trying, without success, to work out the arithmetical correlation between moviegoers' appetites and the position of the moon and certain planets.
I can save them a whole lot of time and energy, and maybe even put a few overpaid market researchers out of business. While I can't speak for the country at large, I do know why I'm not going to the movies. Why? Most of the movies that are out right now just plain stink.
Not true, you say? OK, then, just for the sake of argument, let's take a look at a few of these "hits" we're all supposed to be running out to see:
"Me, Myself and Irene": One of the less brutal reviews of the Farrelly brothers' most recent adventure pointed out that viewers are less likely to be insulted by the movie's vulgarity than by its insipid and totally boring plot. Need I say more?
"Shaft": I think Samuel L. Jackson is a great actor. He looks fabulous. He looks even more fabulous in Armani. But I don't need to pay $10 to see him, thus clad, reciting singsong lyrics in a pallid imitation of the groundbreaking movie of the same name.
"The Patriot": Please, Mel. We've seen this all before, and it wasn't so entertaining in "Braveheart" that we needed to see it again.
"Gone in 60 Seconds": Here's a riddle: What are all these talented people (Robert Duvall, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi) doing in a movie like this? Does Jerry Bruckheimer have some kind of career-destroying dirt on Nicolas Cage?
Armed with the grim numbers, Warner Brothers executives probably spent Thursday night huddled around small George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg voodoo dolls, praying to the movie gods and tossing salt over both shoulders in preparation for Fridays opening of the much-hyped "Perfect Storm."
I will be waiting on line to see this movie, I assure you. But if, for some reason, even Clooney's indisputable charms fail to rouse the attentions of the American moviegoing public, here's a suggestion for next summer: Think "reality" features. Keep a small video camera running in the conference rooms at Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount and Miramax as the summer wears on. If profits improve, that's great. If not, you've got a whole series of "reality" movies to show next year, complete with images of frantic executives hurling themselves out the first-floor windows of movie-lot bungalows. Hey, if it works for CBS, why not take it to the local Cineplex?