Never mind the fact that my school just let out for spring break. It’s a beautiful 77 degrees in New York City today, the outdoor bars are open and I’m wearing shorts for the first time this year. Plus, the Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Preview just arrived in my mailbox, giving me the signal that it is officially the blockbuster season. Sure, May 2nd isn’t for two more weeks, when technically Iron Man begins the summer movie stretch (can’t we just pretend The Forbidden Kingdom is the first summer action flick?), but nothing says, “break out the beach ball,” like the bible of blockbuster buzz.
Yet there’s something strange about this year’s issue. There’s a little less marketing-agency-fueled promotion and a little more reality checking. Maybe it’s because these days, thanks to the web, most moviegoers have already heard about the big releases. That would explain why EW devotes most of its two-page spread on The Incredible Hulk to describing its troubles:
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The internet is an evil construct that’s causing us to submissively open our arms to totalitarianism! No, this isn’t another one of my posts about how our society is entering the world of The Matrix. This is the belief and fear of Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of Men in Black, Men in Black II and Wild Wild West, clearly a fan of lighter sci-fi than of the Orwellian sort. Speaking this week at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Vegas, he lashed out against the internet, because of how it’s threatening democracy:
Sonnenfeld fears that children today will grow up with “no concept of the right to privacy and in fact not understand the need for it. Because the Facebook generation is not concerned with what people know about them . . . they will have no problem with additional governmental supervision, spying and intervention. They will be thrilled that the Internet will be able to follow their every move.
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