I don't understand Phipps's dismissal of this summer's roster in his opening. Either it was a poorly worded argument (i.e. the audiences haven't been receptive this summer to big blockbusters--also not true), a really cheap segue for his "look ahead," or he's been under a rock for the past 2 months.

Any summer that contains closing chapters of big blockbuster series (Spiderman 3, Pirates 3, Shrek 3, Ocean's 13), revival of a huge blockbuster series "Die Hard," a Harry Potter movie, and a Pixar flick could hardly be called "not good." As another bewildering choice in argument, P uses a 2 decade-old cartoon, aka Transformers, as a sign of a lackluster summer, then goes on to talk about Speedracer as a "relatively high awesomeness" movie. If Transformers is a bad idea for a blockbuster because it's a 20 years old franchise, then how bad would Speedracer be? It's 40 years old!

Am I missing something? Is there some insight that P should be drawing from this article? Or is it just a rather pedestrian preview with a contentious, but not well thought-out premise?

Thanks to juicefriend for speaking up. I won't add anything more than to say the writing and grammar was bad enough to make me want to criticize Slate for the first time. Usually when a Slate article is poopy I just stop reading. This one was such that it kept me going to the bitter end.

I'd say Phipps is dismissing this summer's roster because most of the movies out so far have been mediocre. "Spider-Man 3" was a big step down from 1 and 2; it tried to be more serious and emotional and only succeeded in being schmaltzy. "Pirates 3" was rambling and incoherent. I haven't seen "Shrek 3," but I'm told it, too, was less than inspired. "Rise of the Silver Surfer" was abysmal. Et cetera.

Of course, there have been some unexpected bright spots--"Live Free or Die Hard" turned out to be an excellent movie, much better than I'd expected. And we do still have the Harry Potter movie coming, which Phipps probably should have mentioned. But overall, I'd have to agree with his assessment that this summer doesn't have much going on.