At The F#&%ing Movies

Does this-

Equal this?

And does this

Equal THIS?

Let's discuss.
Last summer, stuck in the countryside with very little to do, an old friend and I made a somewhat misled pledge to see every 'summer blockbuster' that passed through the local cinema. When I was much younger I for some reason mandated myself to attend every film that broke the $100 million mark (as evidenced here).
I can't do this anymore. I don't know what the fuck happened. Not to me, but to the movies, and the people who go see them. How can people I otherwise deem sensible and intelligent come tell me that this

was "fantastic", when it was essentially THIS:

with iron. How many more Marvel Movies will they have to see before they get as exasperated as I am with the tedious formula (Act One: Hero learns powers, to often comic and 'neat' effect. Act Two: Hero performs minor test rescue, using those powers. Act Three: Hero fights 'Big Boss' on a dark, rainy street).
I digress, kind of, but hell, it's all a vicious cycle. After the frustrationfest of Iron Man I knew that Indy was on its way. Not that I held out any exceptional expectation; hell, I just walked in off the street, pushing past the costumed guys and their costumed Dads (!). Now let's all be honest, whether you attended the original film in this series au theatre or whether you weren't even a glimmer in your Henry Jones' eye: this thing was just on par with an episode of frikking Relic Hunter, or any other piece of shit that has blatantly capitalized on Raiders in the last twenty-seven years. Now for fear this turns into my very first fanboy-esque rant, let me calm down a bit. The opening ten minutes of this film, until Indy nuked the fridge, were passable and inspired; the credit sequence encapsulating the 1950's perfectly and without words, setting us up in a distinct time and place. But speaking about the film seriously ends there, and what followed was the tried-and-true formula a la Iron Man- there's stuffy old Indy teaching, some shit happens and he's whisked off, blah blah.
And blah blah it is. Enough hate has been written all over this movie*. I'm going to continue on through the vicious cycle to its next step, and that's me, one of three males a t my sold-out screening, willingly attending Sex and the City- and enjoying it far more than Crystal Skull.
Romantic comedies are among the only films I've out-and-out turned off in the last few years. Fuckin' Catch and Release, Georgia Rule- oh, uggh. But here were well-rounded characters, if not in a realistic environment, feeling realistic things. I wasn't just pleasantly surprised, I was gobsmacked.
So I looked into this- how were critics and audiences feeling about the film version? I didn't use the internet- I used the people and papers at hand. And really, I didn't find one review, oral or written, that wasn't entirely concerned with intricacies and continuity carried over from the television series. These people, they better not ever use the term 'Trekkie' in a derogatory manner... ever. These people far surpass any intolerance Trekkies have for messing with what they consider 'canon'.
The reason I bring up Star Trek is that I cannot for the life of me think of a TV-to-film conversion that is more similar to the one Sex and the City went through. I'll cop to really, really enjoying Star Trek: The Next Generation, and being baffled and disappointed when it wrapped up and appeared on the big screen. Character and interactions that had seven years to form on television were presented as if to an audience that didn't even have a clue what Star Trek was. And it's been asked a million times- who in the shit is going to a Star Trek movie that doesn't know what it is and who it deals with? Those who had never seen The Next Generation were, I'm sure, not entirely converted by sitting through Star Trek Generations.
Yet sitting through Sex and the City, I nearly was. I heard all of the complaints, many of them from the people I attended the film with, and I'm damned sure that if I'd taken them to Generations or Nemesis I'd be getting an earful about wasted time. But they had a guy with them who liked the film more than they did. Somebody did something right with this film. And something is very, very wrong if a Star Trek-loving comic book fan is eschewing The Hulk and every other nasty attempt at mass-market entertainment that's coming down the pike for a girl's movie. I will totally see you at Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2.

* But I can't resist: I have to express the one thing about it that really drove me around the bend, and one of the reasons I compare it to a bottom-feeding, low-production value syndicated TV show. In the first two Indy films, he went through the ringer, sliding down muddy embankments, getting the shit beaten out of him- and he ended his adventures looking like hell. Yet after every breakneck sequence, and even at the very end of the film, sitting on that mountaintop, Jones looks like he just came from the fuckin' dry cleaners. Nothing's happened to him! His fucking pants and shirt are pressed when he's running through the kingdom of the crystal skull! And all this after Lucasfilm drops another one of those "we built 30 hats and jackets in various stages of distress" featurettes. I guess they only used one of each? This is just one of a dozen things that took me out of the spell this movie was attempting to cast.