With the summer crashing in a fiery heap this weekend, burning away all memories of blockbusters like leaves curling in a bonfire, it's time to bid adieu to the most popular season of the movie year and turn our attention to the fall, the season of festivals and award-worthy cinema. It's already begun, of course. Eugene Novikov has been sending in fine reports from the Telluride Film Festival, which is the unofficial starting point of the race for next year's Oscars, the Venice Film Festival is in full swing, and the Toronto International Film Festival kicks off on Thursday.

Before we get out a tissue, we ask that you share with us how you spent your Labor Day weekend. Via Twitter, I know many film fans were celebrating the start of the college football season (Texas and USC romped, Oklahoma got upset, and Ohio State narrowly escaped), and some people were rooting for their division-leading baseball teams, while "family" types were spending time with their loved ones, playing and basking in the warm sun, grilling burgers, or building a closet bookcase to house hundreds of DVDs and finally get them out of moving boxes (which is what I did).

What about the movies, though? Did you bravely venture into Gamer (William Goss had a mixed reaction) or All About Steve (Jeffrey M. Anderson was disappointed)? Or did you try Extract (Jette Kernion didn't love it as unreservedly as I did, but still thought it was "much funnier and more fearless" than other grown-up comedies she's seen this year)? Or catch up with one or two indie or other limited releases? Or watch DVDs? Take our poll and let us know!

Earlier this summer I asked the Cinematical team to pick their favorite "movie summer," and also to make me a nice pitcher of iced tea. I got several excellent articles and a used tea bag tied to a rock. (Thanks, Goss.) So now that the summer season is well and truly over -- you can tell because Michael Myers showed up -- I thought it would be fun to look back over those features one more time. Plus it's a really slow news day and this site don't propogate itself. Enjoy!

If the unofficial end of summer arrives with Labor Day Weekend, then all we've got left are a few more days to discuss the summer that was before she rides off into the sunset with her billions in box office dollars and a few more sequels already green-lit. But how does she compare to the summers of the past? A quick glance shows us that, unlike 2008, this summer we didn't get a Dark Knight or an Iron Man ... though we did get a Star Trek and a Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. We didn't get a Wanted, a Hellboy 2 or an Incredible Hulk, but we did get some smaller, smarter sci-fi films like Moon and District 9.

Pixar came through yet again, but the rest of this summer's animation slate seemed pretty weak. Same goes for comedies, with the exception of The Hangover, which kinda made up for the disappointing Land of the Lost, Funny People, I Love You, Beth Cooper, I Hate Valentine's Day, The Ugly Truth and The Goods. Sam Raimi returned with a pretty awesome horror flick in Drag Me to Hell, though, and Harry Potter rolled in with what was perhaps his most entertaining installment of the franchise. G.I.: The Rise of Cobra surprised some with its fun, cheesy vibe, and Wolverine did just enough to score himself another go-round in Japan.

So here we have it, the summer movie season finally winding down, and maybe it's just us, but a couple of peculiar trends have cropped up since May that we thought were worth bringing to light. For starters, we've only further elaborated on Eric's early indicator that puking was 'in' this year (seriously, it's gotten to be a pretty considerable theme), and as for the rest, you can check them out after the jump. Some spoilers follow. And if there are any corrections or additions to be made, please pipe up in the comments, and do so gently.

Upon recently re-viewing Rob Zombie's 2007 take on the classic Halloween, I felt a little bit less harsh about it. Don't get me wrong: it's still mighty tedious and nowhere near scary, but at least I got the impression this time around that the rocker-turned-auteur was trying to fashion more of a character study around boogeyman Michael Myers -- who he was, why he was -- and while diluting the mystique of our killer effectively diluted the suspense, the film still delivered on the basest level of having someone get visibly, viscerally dispatched every so often. If all you had to ask of that film was a body count, Halloween slowly but surely delivered.

But while people do die in Zombie's Halloween II, that's just not enough to make up for all that pesky in-between.

Our friends over at Moviefone came up with a clever time-waster question: What if this summer's indie movies were instead giant blockbusters? What would they look like? What would they be about? After all, summer is definitely a strange animal -- because while it's known for its massive, big-budgeted popcorn flicks, summer is also a time for a host of indie films (most of which previously played festivals like Sundance, Berlin, SXSW and Tribeca) to find their little profitable corner in theaters. So you'll have a Transformers 2 ... but you'll also have a 500 Days of Summer or a Moon or an Away We Go. It's pretty weird to see two completely types of films co-existing in this hot, steamy marketplace, but that's what makes it so much fun, I suppose.

Anyway, Moviefone took this summer's most talked-about indies and pretended they were also blockbusters. Here's a taste of what they came up with:

'500 Days of Summer'
What It Is: A charming, offbeat romance about a greeting card writer's year-and-a-half courtship of a free-spirited woman who doesn't believe that love exists.
What It Could've Been: Roland Emmerich's latest global warming-oriented disaster flick in which we watch in delight as the Statue of Liberty melts, the Atlantic Ocean evaporates and the entire population of Arizona spontaneously combusts.








'Humpday'
What It Is: In this latest entry from the "mumblecore" movement (low-budget filmmaking characterized by improv and naturalism), two hetero friends attempt to have sex with each other for an art project.
What It Could've Been: A couple of totally straight bros/undercover cops (Dane Cook and Johnny Knoxville) must pretend they're lovers in order to infiltrate an ecstasy ring operated out of a Chelsea nightclub.







Check out the rest over at Moviefone

We know that Meryl Streep can rock any role she's given, and save any movie that she graces with her legendary talent. Accents, ABBA songs, and aspics, she does it all with shocking ease. But here's something I bet you didn't know: she's an economic powerhouse. While Hollywood wrings their hands and wonders how to market "to women," and is convinced all ladies want is The Ugly Truth, Streep has been single-handedly turning everyone a profit.

The Independent calls it "The Streep Effect" and notes that she has a Midas touch not only at the box office, but for book sales and tourism. Julie and Julia has single-handledly sent Mastering the Art of French Cooking back onto bestseller lists. (Though the Independent doesn't mention it, Child's My Life in France is selling just as briskly, as is Julie Powell's Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.) There's also been a boom in French cooking classes and cookware sales as people set out to cook their way to a perky hybrid of Streep, Amy Adams, and Julia Child.

And that's only the most recent example! Mamma Mia! resulted in hundreds of couples flocking to marry on the Greek island of Skopelos, with flights up 13% after the movie's release. Lest you think that was just due to the jaw-dropping seaside scenery, a similar effect happened with Out of Africa. Kenya received 152,000 overseas visitors in 1985, a number that climbed to 176,000 in 1986.

How, exactly, do you market a genial, low-key comedy -- without raunch or major stars -- to a mainstream audience nowadays? Post Grad, which opens on Friday, features Alexis Bledel as a college graduate forced to move back home with her eccentric family. Bledel is an up-and-coming star, still known best as Rory in the long-running TV show The Gilmore Girls, but gaining increasing recognition through her roles in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and its sequel. 20th Century Fox Film is capitalizing on her appeal by marketing Post Grad as though it were a starring vehicle for her. Bledel is quite charming as the beleaguered yet ultimately determined Ryden Malby, a go-getter set on working at a publishing house until things go very wrong.

As I watched the film, though, I found myself more captivated by the supporting characters than by Ryden's job and relationship dilemmas. Jane Lynch as her mother, Bobby Coleman as her odd little brother, Carol Burnett as her live-in grandmother, and, especially, Michael Keaton as her father. In fact, Keaton appears to be channeling his role as the fast-talking, idea-popping Bill Blazejowski in Ron Howard's Night Shift from 27 years ago, all grown up as a semi-responsible adult; it's a wonderful comic performance.

And it struck me that Post Grad feels very much like a second cousin to Juno and Little Miss Sunshine and Sunshine Cleaning and Away We Go. While it may not be as successful as the best of the 'indie flicks that feel mainstream' -- in part because it doesn't strain to be profound or hip or edgy -- in its own, family-friendly way, Post Grad is positioned as a 'little film that could.'

I know that Scott has already sung the praises of this film back when he saw it at Sundance, but last week, I finally got to see The Cove for myself and found it to be every bit as emotional and riveting an experience as described by not only him, but colleague after colleague. In a summer season as packed with action as any other, it was this documentary that stood out as one of the more tense and touching films of the year, and the only thing that's probably keeping any of you who can see The Cove from rushing out to do so is its subject matter...

Because The Cove is kinda sorta about dolphin slaughter.

Hollywood has a long history of showing us charming "golddiggers" in film, whether they're cute Depression-era heroines trying to get a free meal, a trio of Fifties fashion models scheming to land rich husbands, or soft-pedaled prostitutes of either gender. In Spread, the golddigger is a young man, much like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy if he'd succeeded in his original plans, but unfortunately not debonair or complex enough to overcome the feeling that the movie is more sordid than sweet or sharply comic.

Nikki (Ashton Kutcher) -- and what guy with that name spells it that way? -- wants to live a life of luxury with as little effort as possible. He succeeds nicely by picking up rich woman and sponging off them for as long as he can. He has no car, no home and no savings, even though at least one woman buys him expensive clothes and gifts. Perhaps he just doesn't have a knack for acquiring expensive baubles like Marilyn Monroe's character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or more to the point, he has no long-term ambitions.

It wasn't long after I became a critic that I realized how the month of August tended to collect bad movies, like dust. Every year, the studios roll the dice on stupid-sounding ideas and come up, surprisingly enough, with stupid movies. They know it and we know it, but they have to try to get their money back anyway, so these movies get released, and they generally get released in August. I could go back and list dozens of examples -- OK, here's one example: Gigli, in August of 2003 -- but suffice to say that the last of the eagerly anticipated blockbusters opens in July and then the junk opens in August, clearing the way for awards season in the last four months of the year.

Now, last summer in my humble opinion was one of the best movie summers of my life, starting with Iron Man and powering through things like The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Hellboy II, etc. Regardless, I expected things to slow down and get stinky in August, and indeed the month got off to a bad start with the godawful The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Then there was the latest from Ben Stiller, whom I generally can't stand, but I quickly signed up as a lifetime member of the Tropic Thunder fan club. Pineapple Express made me laugh just as helplessly, and Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona made #1 on my year's ten best list. We even got the exemplary horror film The Midnight Meat Train, even though I didn't get to see that until DVD.

If I know Cinematical readers, I know you'd like an early taste of Inglourious Basterds, even if you had to read it and are you in luck today! Quentin Tarantino handed Playboy Magazine a Nazi killing scene, and the picture-friendly magazine handed it to R.M. Guera. The result is six pages, and only six, of a Basterds graphic novel. Unfortunately, the flash player Playboy housed it in is really clunky, and would be impossible to navigate beyond six pages.

To those of you who read the script, this won't be anything new. If you're like me and know nothing of the film beyond trailers, tv spots, and the joyful whoops of your friends on Twitter, then this will be fresh and unusual. It will also be a little nightmarish because dang, could Guera have made Eli Roth and Brad Pitt any more scary looking?

If you want to see the film unspoiled, avoid it, but if you want to see just where that scene of Roth, his baseball hat, and a Nazi's skull originates and leads to, read on. It's fun stuff, and makes me wish Tarantino would borrow a page from Joss Whedon, and do a few comic books that run with all his intertwined characters and Red Apple cigarettes. While I certainly don't want an origin story for Stuntman Mike or Bill, we might finally get all those side stories or leaps into the future he constantly teases us about.

[via The Beat]

How strange it is to think that a comedy isn't brash enough or absurd enough or funny enough (okay, that one's not so strange), but the truth about The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is that, while it is brash and absurd and funny in fits and starts, it also seems to lose its nerve as it goes on, running low on laughing gas and coasting to a stop or whatever it is that auto-minded metaphors for auto-minded comedies do.

A wheeler and dealer even in grade school, the now-grown Don Ready (Jeremy Piven) sells cars like nobody's business when somebody's business is in trouble, and that's just the predicament that Ben Selleck (James Brolin) finds himself in. Ready's entourage includes the likes of Ving Rhames, Kathryn Hahn and David Koechner; I'll leave you to guess which of the three is the willful slut. Selleck's staff includes Ken Jeong, Tony Hale and Charles Napier; I'll leave you to determine which of those three suffers most at the racist outbursts of another (hint: not Hale).

Do we really need another alien invasion picture? When it's as hellaciously entertaining as District 9, the answer is a resounding "Yes!"

A huge spaceship comes to a sudden halt above Johannesburg, South Africa, stranding all its passengers on Earth. Twenty years later, the alien settlement has become a crime-filled shantytown; the visitors from outer space, derisively called "prawns" because of their resemblance to sea creatures, have worn out their welcome. They have refused to assimilate into human culture and stubbornly insist on speaking their own language instead of learning an Earth-friendly tongue. Local residents have had enough. The government hires MNU, a weapons development corporation with its own private army, to evict the prawns from their walled-off ghetto and relocate to a new tent city, where it is hoped that they will no longer disturb humans.

The premise immediately invites comparisons with Alien Nation, Cloverfield, District 13, Escape From New York, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, and on and on. The initial scenes only add to this impression by unreeling in a mock-documentary style, featuring interviews with human witnesses and excerpts from television broadcasts. But thanks to the ingenuity of director Neill Blomkamp and his co-writer Terri Tatchell (perhaps with a nudge in the right direction by producer Peter Jackson), District 9 swiftly establishes its own tough-minded, smart identity. Think of it as Independence Day for adults.