Grading Summer: A Look Back at the 2008 Season's Highs and Lows : Rolling Stone

A-listers are topped by The Dark Knight — Heath Ledger's immortal Joker and Chris Nolan's untamed imagination add up to the best movie of the summer. Aces were also dealt by WALL-E (animation), Iron Man (action), Man on Wire (amazing doc), Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder (audacious comedy), and the acting of Ledger, Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man, Tropic Thunder), James Franco (Pineapple Express), Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), Alan Rickman (Bottle Shock), Melissa Leo (Frozen River), Danny McBride (The Foot Fist Way), Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex and the City) and Steve Coogan (Hamlet 2).

Box office went off the charts for The Dark Knight (bueno), heading to $500 million with only Titanic to topple. No objections, either, to the profits raked in by Iron Man, Hancock, Wanted, Hellboy 2, Pineapple Express, Journey to the Center of the Earth (but only the 3-D version), Get Smart (for Steve Carell) and Step Brothers (for Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly).

Crap cashed in with Prince Caspian, Mamma Mia!, You Don't Mess With the Zohan, What Happens in Vegas and the umpteenth Mummy movie, while rebel indies as good as Frozen River, The Foot Fist Way, Savage Grace, The Wackness, American Teen and the marvelous French mystery Tell No One, from a novel by the great Harlan Coben, struggled to find an audience.

Disappointment took a lot of the fun out of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf gave it a scrappy try, but you expect more from producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg than just going through the motions. As for its gargantuan $315 million box-office haul: depressing.

Failure was all over the place in an otherwise better-than-expected movie summer. First entry on the wall of shame is The Love Guru, a crusher for the talented Mike Myers. Eddie Murphy was nearly as bad in Meet Dave. The Happening put another nail in M. Night Shyamalan's career coffin. Speed Racer hit a speed bump and erased any residual good will The Matrix built up for the Wachowski brothers. The X-Files: I Want to Believe tried to pass off a subpar episode of the beloved TV series as a bona fide movie. And Swing Vote proved that even in an election year, audiences were not going to vote for a lazy-ass Kevin Costner comedy that didn't have the balls to take sides.

[From Issue 1060 — September 4, 2008]

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