Summer Films: Midterm Report

Somebody at the American Movie Classics channel must have a thing for George Peppard. Lately, it seems as if every time I pass by AMC while surfing toward “Baseball Tonight” or “SpongeBob SquarePants,” there’s Peppard from some 1960s movie wearing that grim, blue-eyed visage that some studio hack swore would make him as big as Steve McQueen.

They’re even showing “The Blue Max” from 1966. “The Blue Max”? Even when I first saw it as a 14-year-old aerospace junkie, I was bored stupid by everything in it except the dogfights and Ursula Andress.

Peppard eventually learned to loosen up, and by the late 1970s he was no longer embarrassing. He was even funny--as anyone will admit who has the honesty to confess to watching “The A-Team” for cheap giggles. Maybe these multiple screenings of “The Blue Max” and “The Carpetbaggers” (1964) are supposed to loosen us up for the all-but-inevitable big-screen version of “The A-Team.” No joke. It’s being planned as we speak. Makes you wonder why they’re not putting such Mr. T classics as “Rocky III” and “D.C. Cab” into the cable rotation.

So there’s really no hope, right? Will all our movie summers from now until the second Ice Age (and no, I do not mean the sequel to the animated film) be recycled pop from the cultural junk heap? Is it possible the public imagination will become so parched that last year’s ratings champ will become next year’s summer blockbuster?

With such grim prospects, it might even be possible to look back on this movie summer as we do to 1977, the summer of “Annie Hall” and “Star Wars.” Now that we’re in its midsection, Popcorn Summer 2002 seems a vast improvement when compared with the collection of deflated balloons, such as “Pearl Harbor” and “Planet of the Apes,” that littered the multiplexes a year ago. Still, there are some qualifications here and there.

“Spider-Man” was a rousing keynote to the season. “The Sum of All Fears” served its time as a batty little conversation piece for a week or two, but “The Bourne Identity” is by far the better spy thriller. So far, the family films have been a balanced selection of effervescent little surprises (“Lilo & Stitch,” “The Powerpuff Girls Movie”), bland, but tasty eye candy (“Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” “Stuart Little 2,” “Like Mike”) and passable disappointments (“Hey Arnold! The Movie”). All of them made time go faster than “Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones,” no matter how cool Yoda’s sword fight was toward the end.

Not far beneath the cheap laughs, latex and grinding metal in “Men in Black II,” there’s the soothing sound of people endorsing their checks. I really do hope, though, that the director, Barry Sonnenfeld, hasn’t signed off on his career. Same goes for Kathryn Bigelow, despite the languor that eventually swamps “K-19: The Widowmaker.”

Critics seem to have embraced “Minority Report” and “Road to Perdition” as the season’s best. Both of them look terrific enough to draw you into their vastly different worlds. But while “Report” gives encouraging signs of Steven Spielberg’s deepening command of science-fiction verisimilitude, it doesn’t haunt your dreams the way last year’s undervalued (and, in retrospect, even greater-than-one-first-believed) “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”

As for “Perdition,” absorbing visuals (courtesy of peerless cinematographer Conrad L. Hall) and impressive staging can’t quite hide its conceptual weaknesses--which, given the Dickensian nature of the graphic novel that inspired the movie, may have been unavoidable. Tom Hanks and Paul Newman both look haunted and ravaged. But I honestly can’t tell if they deserve all this premature Oscar hype, because the script gives neither of them anything interesting to say.

And what, by the way, ever happened to waiting for Christmas to flog for Oscars? Even Harrison Ford is being touted for academy consideration for glowering with a Russian accent in “K-19”--at least he was before that movie’s dismal opening weekend.

Nobody asked me, but the one performance I’ve seen this summer that should be a no-brainer come awards time is Emily Mortimer’s heartbreakingly insecure actress in Nicole Holofcener’s “Lovely & Amazing,” a “chick movie” with sharp teeth.

At one point, Mortimer, in bed with a loutish movie star (Dermot Mulroney, who’s also terrific), asks him to give an “honest” assessment of her physical attributes. She stands naked in front of him and us--as she gets exactly what she asks for.

Looking at Mortimer’s tense, avid face throughout this ordeal, you can’t tell whether she’s happy or disappointed that her worst fears haven’t been confirmed by this survey. It’s this kind of grace under pressure that deserves a presidential citation for valor more than a mere Academy Award.

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Gene Seymour is a film critic for Newsday, a Tribune company.