When Will We Get Another Great Blockbuster?

Sure, crowds are forking over bucketloads of dough at the multiplex on a film's opening weekend, but you don't see anyone sneaking out of the office for repeat viewings.

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My son and I had just seen our sixth mediocre movie in as many weeks when he posed an interesting question: "When was the last time we saw a really great film at the cineplex?" At home we'd recently watched Chinatown, Casablanca, The Godfather Part II, The Last of the Mohicans, Lawrence of Arabia, Jurassic Park, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, Shane and Dog Day Afternoon, all great films that represented an effort to compensate for disappointing multiplex outings involving movies like Basic, Tears of the Sun, The Italian Job, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Johnny English. The point he was making was that for at least four years, we'd been going out to theaters to see movies that ranged from the adequate to the entertaining, from okay to pretty good, but not movies that made you want to come back and see them again and again. I saw Gladiator on the big screen four times. I saw The Fast and the Furious once.

No amount of hack work by the flack industry could change this fact. Despite massive success at the box office and impressive technical achievements, the last two Star Wars installments were duds. Spider-man was a pallid rip-off of Batman, with Tobey Maguire in a totally different weight class than Michael Keaton. The Matrix: Reloaded was a pretentious mess compared to the pretentious original. Terminator 3 sucked. And big-budget extravaganzas like Daredevil, XXX and The Hulk all stank. The best popular movies of recent years may well have been Shrek, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. But those are cartoons. So, in answer to my son's question, I said that the last truly great popular movie we'd seen was probably Gladiator.

Gladiator came out in 1999.

Since we are rapidly nearing the end of the fourth year in this new century, I don't think it's too early to start worrying about the cinematic legacy of the decade. The '60s had Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, The Hustler, Hombre, Hud, Breakfast at Tiffany's, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Graduate, Space Odyssey, A Hard Day's Night, the classic Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. The 70s had serious popular fare like The Godfather, Chinatown, Carnal Knowledge, and The French Connection, great "fun" movies like Star Wars, Rocky and Jaws. The '80s had classics like The Untouchables, No Way Out, Field of Dreams, The Big Chill and Bull Durham, plus brilliant oddities like Blue Velvet and Blood Simple. And the '90s offered everything from Fargo to Braveheart to Scream to Pulp Fiction to Thelma and Louise to Boogie Nights to Batman to Emma to American Beauty to Speed. And so we return to the question: Where are the great commercial films of this decade?

In using the admittedly ambiguous term "great," I am referring to motion pictures that for one reason or another get an entire society revved up and excited about going out to the movies. Sometimes these films are preceded by fanfare (Schindler's List, The Truman Show), sometimes they appear out of nowhere (The Sixth Sense, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Full Monty). But they are movies that the whole country ends up talking about, movies that people see over and over again, movies that people feel embarrassed not to have seen. I do not recall feeling this kind of excitement since Gladiator.

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