If I have a guilty pleasure, it surely is my love of summer Hollywood blockbusters.
The movies themselves aren’t the pleasure. The movies are invariably terrible, leaving me feeling both cheated and angry that I’ve once again allowed myself to be suckered.
But the anticipation of the movies is a sweet pleasure indeed, and the anticipation has everything to do with the unimpeachably high quality of summer blockbuster movie trailers.
Sadly, I haven’t seen a movie in months, and therefore haven’t seen a trailer in months. The last movies I saw in the theater were Two Towers, which I enjoyed, and Harry Potter’s Secret Chamber, which was like having thumbtacks pushed into my eyeballs.
The only reason I saw Harry Potter is that I was dragged there by a friend, who presumably chose me as an escort because she couldn’t con her boyfriend into going. In fact, I seem to remember her adding insult to injury by gloating that she now had a date to the movie and didn’t even have to have sex with me.
So I now have a rule: I will only see Harry Potter movies for sex.
I have a few other rules to help me make it through the summer unscathed. My one-man Jerry Bruckheimer boycott now enters its third year. I will never know whether our boys succeeded in saving the Somalians from the alien invasion; nor will I ever be sure if that rapping kangaroo gave the money back.
Also, I will never ever see another movie made by George Lucas.
But these rules still give me wide latitude to indulge in crappy summer fare. A few days ago, frustrated by my pop cultural isolation here in western China, I did a very nerdy thing: I installed Quicktime on a computer in an internet cafe and caught up on my previews.
I didn’t bother watching the Matrix preview. If I build up my anticipation for the Matrix any more, I’m liable to rupture some gland. Also, I find that the bigger the build-up, the greater the inevitable let-down, and at this point I’ve set myself up for severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Anyway, in one week’s time I’ll be in Bangkok, where I can be brutally disappointed by the movie in full Dolby Digital Surround.
A Mighty Wind does not count as a summer blockbuster, and perhaps appropriately its trailer is not all that enthralling. Undoubtedly this will be the only actually good movie I see this summer.
The X-Men trailer is of the caliber one would expect from a movie starring 800 B-list actors with mutant powers. It rocks. Also, the movie has gotten positive notices in the press, thereby setting up my already high expectations for an even more savage beating.
Finally, there is The Hulk. I don’t know what to expect of this movie, although Ang Lee’s attachment to it gives it a touch of class. I do know that the trailer features the Hulk smashing things to a really loud Heavy Metal soundtrack, which I like a lot. Mainly, I’ll be satisfied if the movie answers a question that has bothered me for decades: how come the Hulk is always wearing pants? In the TV series, Bruce Banner’s transformation into Lou Ferrigno always featured a close-up of Bruce’s shirt exploding into tattered ribbons. But at the end of the morph, Lou was always left with a conveniently chaste pair of cutoffs in which to run around smashing things. You never saw the Hulk racing down the street wearing only the severely distressed elastic waistband from Bruce’s Fruit-of-the-Looms.
In the new movie, the Hulk appears to be about eight times as big as Lou Ferrigno. And yet I still don’t recall the trailer showing any giant green genitalia flapping around in the wind. Mind you, I wasn’t really looking, nor was I really disappointed by the absence of giant flappy genitalia. I got more than enough of that at the animal market this weekend, thank you.
But I am hoping for at least a semi-plausible explanation to this mystery. Maybe Banner’s pants were also exposed to gamma rays, and maybe they also get really angry and huge when the Hulk’s bursting quadriceps pop the stitches in their delicate inseams.
I look forward to having my expectations dashed.
