Summer Blockbusters

Fifty years ago Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released in theaters, kicking off the summer blockbuster phenomenon. And you know a summer blockbuster when you see one: It's a film that's hugely popular and as a result, financially successful, and seen by lots of people. But not everyone has seen every last one of them. Today, we fill in some personal blockbuster gaps, and finally see a movie that absolutely everyone saw, except for us — including Armageddon, Beverly Hills Cop II, Ghost, The Fast and the Furious. Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:27Speaker 01

  Everyone knows what a summer blockbuster is. It's a film that's hugely popular and, as a result, financially successful. By definition, it's a movie seen by lots and lots of people.

• 0:37Stephen Thompson?

  But there've been a lot of summer blockbusters over the years, and not everyone has seen every last one of them. So we decided to fill some personal blockbuster gaps and finally see a movie that absolutely everyone saw, except us. I'm Stephen Thompson.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  And I'm Glen Weldon. And today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're talking about summer blockbusters we've never seen until now.

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• 2:20Speaker 01

  Joining us today is Ronald Young Jr. He's the host of Pop Culture Debate Club from Lemonada and the BBC. Hey, Ronald.

• 2:26Speaker 09

  Hello, Glenn.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Hey. And also joining us is one of our producers here on Pop Culture Happy Hour, Liz Metzger in front of the mic. Hey, Liz. Hello. Hello. So we asked everyone to bring in one summer blockbuster that they recently watched for the first time. Let's get started. Steven, this is going to be an exercise, I think, in feeling cut off from the mainstream. What big summer blockbuster missed you that you have finally watched and why?

• 2:52Stephen Thompson?

  Well, I'll get to that in a second. It's absolutely wild to admit that I have never seen the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  You should be ashamed of yourself.

• 3:05Speaker 09

  How dare you, Steven.

• 3:06Stephen Thompson?

  Now, for those who've never seen Armageddon, we're going to do a quick NPR-style The Batman is a Cry Fighter. Armageddon is the Michael Bay movie where Bruce Willis is like the world's greatest oil driller, and he leads a ragtag group of misfits on a mission to blow up a killer asteroid that is hurtling toward Earth. Said asteroid is the size of Texas, we are told. Armageddon not to be confused with Deep Impact, which was the other killer asteroid movie in the summer of 1998. I think I never actually saw it because everyone I worked with said it was terrible. And that was that. I never really

• 3:46Stephen Thompson?

  had a reason to revisit it until we inexplicably decided to embark on this particular project. And it is so fascinating to revisit this movie more than 25 years after it came out because it feels like both a pre-September 11th relic, complete with the destruction of one of the World Trade Center buildings. And it also feels like a post-September 11th relic, complete with the inexplicable destruction of Paris. This movie is such-

• 4:19Stephen Thompson?

  Boudicrass trash. I renowned non-astrophysicist that I am, I sat there with my arms folded like a little Neil deGrasse Tyson. Just like, it's not so much like, I don't understand physics, but I do understand basic logic. And the way everything happens in space, the way everything hurtles against each other, nothing makes any sense at all. Every explosion, and there are so many explosions, it's like whatever object is exploding is just inexplicably covered in jet fuel at the time. The asteroid isn't just like five miles wide or whatever, like a giant asteroid would be, it's the size of Texas. Entire cities in this film are leveled as like scene setting.

• 5:04Stephen Thompson?

  At one point, they blow up Paris just for funsies. There are these long, pointless digressions. Liv Tyler is shot so glamorously, but-

• 5:14Speaker 09

  There's a gun in space, don't forget that.

• 5:16Stephen Thompson?

  There's also a gun in space, and it's just sitting there like, oh, that's, that's, something's gonna happen there.

• 5:22Stephen Thompson?

  Chekhov's asteroid. The action in this movie, especially once they're all pantsing around on this asteroid, the action set pieces make no sense at all. I will say, watching this film, it did make me think about how much I miss DVD commentary tracks. Because like Ben Affleck, like very famously, his DVD commentary track for this movie is considered one of the great, just shade-throwing exercises in the history of commentary tracks. It's such a doofy movie. If you want 500 shots from the asteroid's point of view, this is the movie for you.

• 6:00Speaker 09

  But there's something about this like, that is a bit of an origin story for Michael Bay and his direction to come, because Armageddon is his third movie. His first two were Bad Boys, then The Rock. His third movie was Armageddon. He follows that up with Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys Two, The Island, and then straight into Transformers.

• 6:21Stephen Thompson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 09

  And if you look at all of those movies, they could, there's a lot of ways in which, from the cinematography, from the way that people interact with each other, he is setting the- Standard for what a blockbuster is going to be in the future. And there's people who make blockbusters that are borrowing elements from this, including, I think, at least one we're gonna talk about later.

• 6:41Stephen Thompson?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 09

  That are borrowing elements from this film, which is he has a good sense of what the masses go to the theaters for, which I don't think necessarily is a good thing for us to like wanna see a good movie and also wanna be entertained. They've just slide directly just into entertainment, which means that every single thing you said, Stephen, is exactly right. But I guess people just don't care when they're looking at it on giant screen, you know?

• 7:03Stephen Thompson?

  Well, it's the difference between being entertained and being pandered to.

• 7:07Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 7:08Stephen Thompson?

  This movie is doing a lot of pandering. People went to the hell out of this movie as like objectively bad as I thought this film was. By the end, like the the music has been pummeling you for two and a half hours. You do have a certain like, oh.

• 7:27Speaker 09

  Can I ask you about that music, Stephen? Like, I don't wanna miss a thing, the Aerosmith song. Did that play?

• 7:31Speaker 10

  Don't wanna close my eyes.

• 7:35Speaker 09

  Did that play during the movie or just over the credits?

• 7:37Stephen Thompson?

  So basically, there is a scene that invokes the song where it kind of comes up. And it's a scene, it was sung by Steven Tyler and it is a love scene with his daughter Liv Tyler. It's invoked, it kind of comes up almost as a teaser about halfway through the movie during a kind of a moment of respite. And then it just like booms through the closing credits.

• 8:12Stephen Thompson?

  It is a very effective song. I dunk on Diane Warren a lot, but that song is doing work.

• 8:19Speaker 09

  Liz, do you have any Armageddon thoughts? Have you seen this film?

• 8:22Speaker 11

  I was but a wee lass when this movie came out. I would not have been allowed in the theater.

• 8:27Stephen Thompson?

  Oh.

• 8:27Speaker 11

  Except on baby day.

• 8:31Speaker 11

  I mean, I think bad sci fi movies, specifically bad science sci fi movies are good because they have bad science rules. But does this movie have bad science rules? Or do you feel like it's just like we're glossing over? Cause I-

• 8:45Speaker 09

  Both.

• 8:47Speaker 11

  It has both. And it was very like, we never want to pay taxes again. Am I right?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 09

  I mean, it's a good demand if you think about it.

• 8:55Speaker 11

  It's a good demand. It's honestly what you should be asking.

• 8:58Speaker 09

  100%. Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Okay, well, that is Armageddon. Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson. Ronald Young Jr., what's your pick? And why'd you miss it?

• 9:07Speaker 09

  My pick was Beverly Hills Cop 2.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 9:11Speaker 09

  Beverly Hills Cop, the original. Again, it's a fish out of water story starring Detroit cop Axel Foley, as portrayed by Eddie Murphy. It is a fish out of water buddy cop movie in which this black detective from Detroit is solving a crime in the hoity toity and largely white Beverly Hills. This plot, that is the plot of Beverly Hills Cop, that is also the plot of Beverly Hills Cop 2, which came out in 1987. I was born in 1984. That's when Beverly Hills Cop came out. Beverly Hills Cop 2 came out in 1987. So it was not of the Eddie Murphy era that I know. The Eddie Murphy era that I know involves the Nutty Professor. It involves life. So this wasn't my era is the thing.

• 9:54Speaker 09

  But I will say, watching this for the first time, I realized that this is kind of, in a lot of ways, the prototype for the modern buddy cop movie.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 10:03Speaker 09

  I enjoyed the movie. There's a lot of Eddie Murphy. I'm getting a lot of the origin of what he's doing. We're still finding out what his personality is. Watching this movie, he had already done 48 hours. So it just feels like as he's moving forward his career, this is an inflection point, but it's also specifically so many bigger things happening in the second one versus the first one. For instance, there's a cement mixer armored truck car chase, which is just something that you would only put into a blockbuster. But so many blockbuster beats in this film for it to be a sequel. And we complain about IPs and sequels now. And this is something that just has been a fact of Hollywood for decades.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Had you not seen Beverly Hills Cop 1 also? Or had you seen that and just not seen this? Why'd you pick this one?

• 10:47Speaker 09

  Glen Weldon, I watched both movies in about a three and a half hour span, back to back. But sorry, go ahead.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Then you'll be able to answer my question because my memory is that Beverly Hills Cop one was a much shaggier gamble. Where they were kind of like betting on the charisma of one Mr. Eddie Murphy and Beverly Hills Cop two. What seemed like all the edges had been sanded down. It had been engineered to be a blockbuster down to the big final scene in a warehouse at a time when every action movie. Ended in a warehouse. Is that true?

• 11:17Speaker 09

  Yes, but I will say the first two acts of Beverly Hills Cop are exactly what you're saying that shaggy. Mess that you're talking about by act three of Beverly Hills Cop. They've dialed it in. Once they figure that out in act three of Beverly Hills Cop. Beverly Hills Cop two is all act three. Wyscracking Eddie Murphy firing guns and the two other police detectives that he's working with. All working together to solve this crime against like the the crotch the lieutenant or police chief. We're gonna do it no matter what. We don't care what this guy says. We don't go by the book. Exactly. All of that like happens. That's the entire movie. And again, that's setting the tone for every buddy cop movie that comes after it in terms of like the modernity of these films.

• 12:02Speaker 09

  They know what worked.

• 12:03Stephen Thompson?

  How does it age? I mean, I remember one thing I remember about Beverly Hills Cop is there's this long kind of awful. Aside where it's just like Eddie Murphy doing gay voice.

• 12:13Speaker 09

  That does not age well, obviously. What does age well is black folks' interaction with the police department. There's ways that there where I was like, well, this could have been made last week. And then you see Eddie Murphy going to gay voice and you're like, well, this could have been made in 1987.

• 12:31Speaker 09

  Completely different.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  All right. Well, that is Beverly Hills Cop two and also theoretically Beverly Hills Cop one. Thank you very much, Ronald Young Jr. Liz Metzger, what's your pick?

• 12:40Speaker 11

  I picked 1990 Ghost. The thriller romance.

• 12:45Speaker 09

  Good choice.

• 12:46Speaker 11

  Well, okay, we'll get into it. So.

• 12:49Speaker 09

  Oh, Liz, you in danger, girl.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 12:51Speaker 11

  Nicely done.

• 12:54Speaker 11

  Patrick Swayze is in this. He is in a beautiful relationship with Demi Moore. They are this gorgeous couple. They've moved in together. She does pottery, but tragically, he dies and becomes the said ghost. But the only way they can really communicate is thankfully Whoopi Goldberg, who is playing this sort of fortune teller medium. And they're able to communicate. This also stars Tony Goldwyn, who looks like a zoomer. Everything is actually very zoomer coded in this film. And it is a story about a love that lasts. And that even if you die, you can come back. You can bother Whoopi Goldberg and also try to figure out who killed him.

• 13:40Speaker 11

  This is a film that I haven't watched for like specifically the reason that it terrified me as a child. Like I walked in on my parents watching this film. And it begins with very ominous thriller music. Scary. There's dusty rooms. Scary. There's sexy pottery. Terrifying.

• 13:58Speaker 09

  I was gonna say there's pottery.

• 13:59Speaker 11

  And then soon after, someone gets shot. Very terrifying. And then there's a home invasion. And that's when I walked out of the room. Yeah. So sitting this down, I was like, that's a movie. That's a movie. You got five Academy Award nominations and what's good is fun. Uh huh. What's not good is long. It's very long. It's over two hours. And I think Whoopi Goldberg is the best part. She's not in it enough. And Demi, she's so beautiful when she's crying and she's so confused. I don't know. It was a movie. I can't believe I was scared of this movie for years. Years.

• 14:38Speaker 09

  I grew up with my parents watching that in the other room.

• 14:41Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 09

  And for me, like especially being raised in a Pentecostal Christian household, I had conflicts with my preacher dad and missionary mom watching this movie where the demons are dragging people to hell. And I didn't even see it. I can only hear it in the other room. Could you imagine being a seven year old child hearing this in the other room? And you're like, why are you watching this? Where's Jesus?

• 15:04Stephen Thompson?

  The thing is, if you're only hearing the sound of someone being dragged to hell, you are being spared some of the jankest special effects.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  There is that.

• 15:16Stephen Thompson?

  But there's one where you basically make out an outline of the scary beastie dragging the person to hell, and it is so cheap looking.

• 15:25Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 15:25Stephen Thompson?

  I loved this movie when it came out. This movie came out the summer I turned 18, and I saw it at least once in the theater and cried all over the place. It is, on balance, still a movie I would recommend. And I agree that Whoopi Goldberg is very funny in it. I mean, that was, it's of an era where the comic relief performance was very likely to get you a Best Supporting Actor or Actress Oscar. And I think Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore are, they're very wet-eyed performers.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 15:57Stephen Thompson?

  I found them very compelling. I think Demi Moore in particular is very compelling in this movie.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I'm gonna tell the story of when I saw this movie in the theater, even though it's a romance, and I wouldn't normally see a romance. I'm gonna tell that story because it begins. So I was backpacking through Europe, and I was a little homesick, I now realize, because there's no other explanation for why I would go see this movie. I had not experienced any kind of mass media in months.

• 16:17Speaker 11

  For a full meal.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I turned this corner, and there's this theater playing this big American movie with stars whose names I recognize, and it was like, why not? And I had never heard of the movie, but then I looked on the poster, and I saw that it was directed by Jerry Zucker, and I was like, oh, right. Airplane, top secret. Police squad, this is gonna be great. It's not what I was expecting. And I sat down in the theater, and the only thing I remember is that Whoopi was funny, and Vincent Sciovele as the subway ghost, what a big swing, what a fun performance.

• 16:47Speaker 11

  Ghost rules, ghost sensei right there, very B. Leaf.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  And those shadows dragging Tony Goldwyn to hell, yes, it looks janky, but in my sleep-derived, low-blood-sugar state, that was more profoundly unsettled than I was prepared to be at that time.

• 17:02Speaker 11

  The music cues are quite ominous.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, nah, can't do it.

• 17:05Stephen Thompson?

  But the visual effects looks like somebody cut ghosts out of black construction paper.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  This also an unchained melody, right?

• 17:13Speaker 11

  It does, the pottery scene.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  There was a big kind of era for Unchained Melody, I think. Yeah. All right. Thank you very much, Liz. Ghost, that's a pick. Okay. So when I looked down this list of top sellers, I was like, well, I've seen all these movies. I must be a special snowflake. Look at me. I'm such an asthete. And then I realized, no, the definition of blockbuster is lots of people say it. It's not a thing that you've seen all these movies, Glenn. There was one franchise that I had not seen anything from, and I started off not seeing it because, you know, just it missed me, right? I mean, like, it wasn't a deliberate choice or anything. I just thought, well, that's probably not for me. Then about the fifth or sixth sequel, this franchise started achieving a kind of a cultural currency. Everyone was talking about them. That's when it became a deliberate choice on my part. I decided I would be the guy who has never seen any of these movies. You

• 18:11Speaker 01

  know, a small but still measurable percentage of my personality would be that I've never seen any films in the Fast and the Furious franchise. Look, in life, sometimes you know that some things are not for you. That's fine. These films don't need me. They have their fans. A discerning critic like Linda Holmes loves these movies. We talk about them all the time. She finds them ridiculous in a satisfying way, and I'm told by other people, oh, they're wild. They're over the top. And they use language that suggests to me that what camp is to gay men, Fast and Furious films are to straight people. Correct. So I've had friends who tried to sell me on these movies, saying, oh, you gotta start with five. Five's when it gets fun. No, you start with four, not five. Okay. Sorry. I have an opinion on this. Go ahead.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  But the thing is, Ronald, I looked it up. Four, five, seven, and eight. And I'm calling them Fast and Furious four, five, seven, and eight, because I refuse to engage with their actual names, which are too stupid for me to acknowledge. It's true. They all opened in April, and I couldn't square that with our brief here, because April is not summer. I'm sorry. Words mean things. So I started with the OG. I started with the Fast and the Furious, which premiered on June 22, 2001. Here's the plot. It stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker. Walker is a cop who is infiltrating the world of street racing to try to find a gang of elite drivers who are hijacking trucks. I would love to sit here and tell you guys, look, I was wrong. What a revelation. What a fun ride. I sincerely hope to sit here and go, I get it now.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  But 20 minutes in, my husband, who had also never seen any of these films, turned to me and he said to me what I was seconds away from turning to him to say, which was, I don't get this movie. People love them. I understand they get bigger and broader and sillier and more fun. That's a phrase people keep throwing at me. Oh, then they become spies. And, and I'm just gonna sit here and dump on this movie that people love for the entire segment here. I'll just say that there is so much posturing and preening and tiresome kind of adolescent performance of masculinity that I just couldn't find a way in. I couldn't get a handle on it. There's like a moment where they pull up to a light, another car pulls up and it's some rich d-bag and they exchange words and then Vin Diesel says, smoke him. And, you know, they, they smoke him.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  He gets smoked and that's the whole sequence. That's the point of it. And I was sitting there going like, Vin Diesel, at the time of this, you were in your 30s. What are you doing? What are you doing? We talked about Swayze, right? This guy had movie star charisma and Diesel, the kind of charisma he has is dirtbag doing donuts in the Wawa parking lot charisma, right? That's, and that's, it's not the same.

• 20:44Speaker 09

  He has lunk charisma. I will say this, like, everything you're saying is accurate. And, and I feel like this entire series is reprehensible, even though I'm a big fan of it, it is also reprehensible.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Reprehensible? Say, say more, why reprehensible?

• 20:58Speaker 09

  Because everything you're saying is 100% true, especially when you get from Fast and the Furious, Too Fast Too Furious, and Tokyo Drift. I have to tell you, I know you've heard this before. Four, five, and six are good action movies. They're good. If you just sit down and have all the information you have about the first couple of movies and just watch four, five, and six, it's good. In seven, eight, nine, it goes off the rails. Paul Walker dies, they decide that they can do anything they want, The Rock is pushing a missile with his bare hands on the ice. Like, it gets real, real, real bad. But there's a trilogy in the middle. It's actually just like Star Wars, if you think about it.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Okay. You're, you're not gonna convince me to keep going with this.

• 21:41Speaker 09

  No, I know I'm not.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  I liked when the car went under the truck. I like the stunts. I liked being introduced to actor Rick Yoon, who plays the rival gang leader Johnny Tran. He is a strikingly hot individual and I will be seeking out his body of work. I liked Ted Levine. He plays Paul Walker's Weirdly sympathetic, boss.

• 22:04Stephen Thompson?

  Yes.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  But if you can spare me a few minutes on Wikipedia, what's to recommend these films?

• 22:08Speaker 11

  Someone told me that the first Fast and Furious was a lot like watching the first Magic Mike.

• 22:12Stephen Thompson?

  Hmm.

• 22:13Speaker 11

  Because it takes itself really seriously and has this really insane filter of T-Patone, where you're like, this is the underbelly. They're doing something not above the law. I think this is a movie that's silly. And I think sometimes you just gotta watch a movie silly. And also stunts, I will say. Maybe that's just me that like, kind of a second screening it where you're like, I'm gonna look up, we're gonna watch a really sick practical effects stunt, more or less.

• 22:39Stephen Thompson?

  Right.

• 22:39Speaker 11

  And then I'm gonna look down and then I'm gonna hear the sound. There's a race, I'm gonna look up and I'm gonna look back down.

• 22:46Stephen Thompson?

  I appreciate the practical effects. I love a cool looking car going fast, but spare me the talk of family.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Uh, we wanna know what you think about our picks. And we also wanna know what summer blockbusters you need to catch up on too. And now that I see it, I'm like, sometimes you don't need to. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com/PCHH. And on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/NPRPopCulture. We'll have a link in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show. Ronald Young Jr., Liz Metzger, Stephen Thompson. Thank you so much for being here.

• 23:17Stephen Thompson?

  Thanks for having me.

• 23:18Speaker 11

  Thank you.

• 23:19Stephen Thompson?

  Thank you.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Hafsa Fathama and Lennon Sherburne and edited by Mike Katzif. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. And Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon and we'll see you all next time.

• 23:36Speaker 09

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.