I’m a little bit late to this one–Happy July 4th to our American friends–so let’s jump right in! June was an insane month at the box office, and many of these movies went on to become bona-fide classics. Two of these movies made over $100 Million, and I had nearly entirely forgotten either of them existed! So let’s look at the good, the bad, and the absolute disasters, starting with…
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
It’s nearly impossible to create distinct iconography for a sequel, and it’s doubly difficult when you basically stumbled Clouseau-style into success in the first place. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery did fine in theaters, about as well as Wayne’s World 2 on a slightly smaller budget. It was on video where it really exploded, going from mid-level hit to worldwide phenomenon. (You had an Austin Powers impression at the ready all through the late nineties, because we all did, baby.) You could feel Mike Myers getting ready to transition to supporting dramatic player, and in some other universe where Mr. Powers wasn’t ubiquitous he’s still making movies like 54 and Pete’s Meteor. Like a secret agent called back for One Last Job he returned to Austin Powers and made a sequel that improbably and inexplicably made four times what the original film had in theaters. The Spy Who Shagged Me sold forty million tickets in America alone, and I can attest that opening weekend felt like a bit of a rock concert.
But this movie is bad, right? I only saw it once but it felt gross and difficult, like nobody was there to rein in Myers’ worst impulses. There are some sparkling bits there; “the English countryside looks nothing like Southern California” is a brilliant moment. Mostly what I remember is a reliance on stretching a punchline until it snaps and the stool-sample joke that made me check out well before a protracted You Only Live Twice parody. You could feel a hyped and ready audience deflating as the movie reached an already-dated conclusion of a Jerry Springer parody.
Goldmember is a slightly-better sequel, but at least the poster to this one is clean rather than a photoshopped nightmare. We’ve got Austin, we’ve got the new and less-fun love interest, it does the job well enough. The Mondrian lines make it pretty if uninteresting. The key art for the first Austin Powers was a pop-art nightmare and unique amongst its peers. This one feels like a character poster made directly for the Five Below market.
RATING: Dimension 5 out of Ten
Big Daddy
I’m sure this moment was supposed to be the big gag that sold the movie, but if I’m being honest this one doesn’t stick in my head. This genre of poster mines what is thought to be the big laugh of the movie, the one that gets you in and becomes iconic in the aftermath. I’m really not sure that guys who work in studio marketing departments are able to pinpoint these moments, and I know this for a fact because I used to work in a studio marketing department and I can’t figure those moments out for shit. If you told me we’d still be talking about the Catalina Wine Mixer out of Stepbrothers all these years later I would have thought you were out of your mind.
Big Daddy is Adam Sandler’s biggest live-action hit, and it’s the sort of mix of crass punchlines and crass sentimentality that ends up being a big hit for comedians and which I personally could take or leave. (See also: Mrs. Doubtfire.) My taste in Sandler movies trends more torwards Airheads and my favorite Happy Madison production is Grandma’s Boy by a large margin, so I don’t think I was ever the target market for this one. Mostly I remember pointing to the icons they got to fill this thing out (Jon Stewart! Joey Lauren Adams! Kristy Swanson‽) and that Rob Schneider once again relied on a lazy accent to make his way through the movie. Talk about mak-ing cop-ies.
RATING: Past 11 o’clock but you still get a Happy Meal
Buena Vista Social Club
Did everyone at your high school suddenly have a Compay Segundo phase when this movie came out, or was that just my weird group of friends? Like O Brother, Where Art Thou or 200 Cigarettes, Buena Vista Social Club lived on just as much as the sound of the movie as the movie itself. (C’mon, how many people were singing about a man of constant sorrow without having sat through the Coen Bros. latest? That was a strange time in America.) Wim Wenders has always known how to compile a soundtrack–Bis Ans Ende Der Welt is probably the best soundtrack of all time as well as the most amount of movie–but having a movie that lives and breathes through its music meant that he was able to create an all-timer.
There’s something about this color scheme mixed with the music that evokes a feeling of Cuba that I’ll never get to experience firsthand. This is the melancholy I got from my NYC-based first-gen Cubano descendant friends, whether they believed in the cause or they were full Cuba Si Castro No. There was a home out there none of us could ever go back to, and with how it felt for me I can’t even fathom how it felt for my friends descended from this place. In its small way Buena Vista Social Club was the way we could all connect to it, created as it was by an outsider simply trying to capture the inner circle of an inner circle. I may never get to Havana, but the streets feel as welcoming as this poster in my mind. And maybe I’ll always feel homesick for a very specific place and time every time I hear “Guantanamera”.
RATING: Catorse/Diez
Wild Wild West
This one should have been a home run. Instead it looks like Will Smith has a dick made out of flame on the poster. How do you biff a sure hit like “The Adam West Batman, but it’s Men in Black“? Traces of the absolute joy that radiates from the Wild Wild West television program still remain in the movie, but it’s mostly a disaster. These two leads have no idea how to play off of each other, which is amazing because both of them are intensely charismatic. There may be no one else from this era who could have played Artemus Gordon other than Kevin Kline, and Will Smith was at this point the hottest property in the whole world, so it was shitty destiny that brought them together.
It probably should have been Bill Paxton playing Jim West, right? Just think about how much better that theoretical movie would have been with Kenneth Branagh as the bad guy and a giant mechanical spider and Kevin Kline also playing President Grant for no reason. You know what, forget the whole thing.
The entire ad campaign ran on this riveted-steel-nearly-steampunk thing, and I can’t think of a less appetizing color scheme than kind-of-grey and moss-green. We’re going straight to a Wild Wild Mess.
RATING: Once out of Tence in the West
Tarzan
Hey look, everybody! This Phil Collins album comes with a free Disney movie!
RATING: 2 (Worlds) / 1 (Family)
The General’s Daughter
Remember when movies like this one could open and do crazy business just by appealing to adults who wanted to go to the theater? Before superhero movies and franchises sucked all the air out of the room? Anyway, this movie made over $100 Million at the box office back when that was pretty difficult to do, and all people had to go on was a giant photo of John Travolta’s face. While we had Big Face Posters before, this one was the first I remember feeling less like a composite made by someone skilled and more like a Photoshop Nightmare. There was something off here and I couldn’t put my finger on why. The face was too big and too center, the rest of it felt like an afterthought, the tagline was in the wrong place. I never even got to the most important three words you can see on any poster:
“And William Goldman”.
The writer of The Princess Bride (and Misery and Marathon Man and Boys and Girls Together and the good draft of Good Will Hunting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and and and–) was always worth checking out, even if it was a Travolta-starring procedural. Goldman would retire just a few years later, ending with the absolutely execrable Dreamcatcher. That one wasn’t his fault; the book is also terrible, the apotheosis of “A…um…LAMP MONSTER!” in Stephen King’s post-van literary career. This poster never drew me in, but those three words at the bottom still might.
RATING: O-4, general-ly boring
Run Lola Run
Lola Rennt ist meine leiblingsfilme von Deutchland! The American poster is striking but does nothing to tell you about the main conceit of the film. It looks cool and so does the film, but Run Lola Run absolutely blew my mind in the summer of 1999. The German poster makes oblique reference to the film’s multiple narratives, but here we’re left with “this cool alternative girl is running!” It was word of mouth and the absolutely incredible soundtrack that got me interested in the movie, so very few points for the American poster. But the second time around…
RATING: Und dann…
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
South Park ruled the world in 1999 and this movie made me laugh so hard that I injured myself in the theater. The lustre is long since gone as Trey Parker and Matt Stone got trapped in the Phantom Zone like Seth MacFarlane and the ghost of Matt Groening. But it doesn’t matter, because going to see this movie on opening night made me feel like I could build the pyramids and beat up Kublai Khan. This full uppercut to the brain made me laugh until I pulled something and smacked into the railing in front of me, a double tap of very dumb injuries brought on by bad words and fantastic musical numbers. There’s zero way that South Park lives up to its reputation now, absolutely no chance that it holds up. But I got that memory, and looking at this poster brings back both the anticipation and the catharsis of seeing this perfect dirty cartoon at Kips Bay. Sometimes all you need is how something made you feel.
RATING: A triple inverted flip while wearing a blindfold.
Next Time: Kubrick Dies, Tim Robbins Lies, and American Pies. Get your best band camp stories ready!