Blockbuster Summer

My first thoughts when thinking about summer time always involve sweating, baseball, and movies. Supposed blockbusters spawn like fungus on the locker room floor every year. During the summer of 2003, my dad and I went to a movie every week. We would usually go to the Brooklyn Center Regal 20 theaters and get the 2 Large sodas and Large popcorn combo (and by large popcorn, I mean fucking water tower sized bucket). The theater would give you free refills on all Large sized products and we never had a problem finishing our sodas, but the popcorn--that was our white whale. Well, that was the goal heading into "Bad Boys 2" towards the end of July. Our goal was to try and finish the tub of popcorn and get a refill--note, eating any of the refill was not part of our plan, but we wanted the refill on general principal.
Well, we picked one hell of a movie to try this feat during. "Bad Boys 2" clocked in at roughly two and a half hours and we finished that popcorn and I proudly walked to the counter with my head held high. I expected the person at the snack counter to maybe throw some confetti in the air and blow a noisemaker...after all...big tub of popcorn. Alas, there was no great congratulations. The kid filled the tub up and didn't give two shits.
Anyhow, as far as summer movies go, that's a memory that will be hard to top. My dad and I never went to a lot of ball games growing up (we're both Cubs fans and neither of us found the Metrodome to enticing), but we hit the theaters a ton back in the day...in a way, it was out ballpark.
Another summer that comes to mind was the Summer of 2007, when my future wife and I attended a midnight screening of "The Simpsons Movie" and seemed to go to a new movie every other week. To me, this is an important part of the summer tradition. This summer however, has been about as ugly looking as possible. It has however, been the summer of the free movie. I have come into free passes to three movies over the last six weeks and truth be told, two out of the three movies have been pretty much "meh" ("Solitary Man" and "Cyrus"). This all changed a few days ago when the lady and I received passes to an advanced screening of "Inception".
For those of you who are unaware of "Inception", allow me to post a trailer of the movie before you continue on...

I'm worried about getting carried away with my opinion of the film but I'm having trouble finding the words to explain how great of an experience this film is. I haven't gone to enough advanced screenings to know if it's standard practice for the entire theater to applaud at the film's conclusion or not, or if everyone was as blown away as I was. Either way, there was a giddy vibe among the people in the lobby as the movie let out. I've begun reading reviews online and "Inception" seems to be getting nearly flawless reviews.
I've always been a sucker for movies that can successfully pull off one of three things: dreams, Armageddon (surprisingly "Armageddon" failed wildly at this) and afterlife. I find that theses are three of the most difficult aspects to portray on the big screen. It was one of the reasons I was so interested in seeing "The Lovely Bones"--a large portion of the film is a young girl walking around Peter Jackson's idea of the afterlife and "Cloverfield" (because you really felt like you were in the middle of a shit-storm that was going to kill everyone) . Well, Christopher Nolen's portrayal of dreams is one of the more impressive cinematic achievements I have ever witnessed. I loved this film about as much as I possibly could love a movie. The special effects gave me that "holy shit" reaction that I haven't had since I saw "The Matrix" in 1999.
In a summer of mediocre "blockbusters", "Inception" finally brought back that excitement that was missing in theaters this summer. There was nothing inherently exciting about "The A-Team", "Iron Man 2", or "Knight and Day"--there is no sense of originality.
"Moving pictures got us through to September."