In Hollywood, as in nature, to everything there is a season. Except that these seasons do not comport with the cycles of actual nature: rebirth, abundance, harvest and death. In Hollywood’s autumn and winter, there comes abundance and “quality”, as the Oscar contenders lay out their wares for the enervating rites of spring. January to March – Hollywood’s cold Tuesday of the soul, when all the unwatchable, inept or misguided movie bodies are buried – are overshadowed by backward-looking celebrations of last year’s awards-season crop. Every year, as surely as the turning of the Earth, this pattern repeats itself.
What’s new, however, is that summer, when the wheat is high and the orchard heavy with fruit, is now, in Hollywood terms, a dead zone during which no one over 30 need bother entering the multiplex. Rarely have we endured as dreary a summer season as this year’s wasteland. I think it’s because those stupefying superhero-surplus movies and Marvel adaptations, in their endless and scarcely varying ubiquity, have made modern Hollywood a soil-and-soul-destroying monoculture, punctuated only by gross-out comedies of wildly oscillating quality (Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates) and animated movies like The Secret Life Of Pets that treat their eight-year-old audiences with markedly more respect than is afforded the adults. Even as I write, next year’s crap-crop – OMG, Justice League!! – is being trailed at Comic-Con, the gathering of the geeks.
I’ve given the Marvel/DC mentality all the chances I plan to. Every time there’s a promising “new” twist (spoiler alert: same as the old twist), or a lively-looking reboot, I pays my money and I takes my lumps. Deadpool? I lasted an hour. Batman v Superman? I’d rather watch Roe vs Wade. Another Spider-Man reboot? Tie me up in web-wire and push me down the stairs. More X-Men? Can’t they have a real apocalypse? No matter what superpowers these superfools have, somehow their movies always climax with a harrowingly tedious punch-up, and the tacked-on socio-political subtexts are usually dim-witted and often, as with Zack Snyder, unrepentantly rightwing.
The upcoming Suicide Squad will most likely offer more of the same: boringly dysfunctional superhero “family”; superstar actors uglified to the max but cashing in big time; CGI that will look horribly dated within 18 months; focus group-approved screenplay; bloated runtime; and all the creativity confined to the marketing. Go see it, by all means. But in the meantime, get off my dried-out lawn. I’ve got to put the sprinklers on.
