At the Movies With Peter Travers: Best and Worst of Summer ’09
Labor Day marks the official end of Summer Blockbuster Season, and ’09’s wasn’t a nightmare: this summer was the most profitable in Hollywood history, and critically speaking, the least offensive in recent history. In fact, four of the Top Five highest-grossing films were actually really good! In a special edition of At the Movies With Peter Travers, Rolling Stone‘s film critic hands out his awards for the summer’s best, while banishing the summer’s worst to the Scum Bucket.
You’ll have to watch Travers’ video to find out who earns which honor, but loyal viewers will find some honorees are more obvious than others (cough, Christoph Waltz, cough). The winner of the summer’s Best Movie and Best Director might take you by surprise, however, as it sadly flew under the radar in a summer filled with teen wizards, Austrian fashion reporters, hangovers in Vegas, reboots and giant shape-shifting robots that made really annoying noises.
And just as Travers rewards the best of the summer, he also digs into his Scum Bucket for a little walk down memory lane with some of the season’s biggest time wasters and wallet robbers. Remember Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian? The Will Ferrell bomb Land of the Lost? Neither come close to the magnitude of terrible generated by the summer’s worst movie, which somehow still made $400 million.
Need another hint? Travers is thinking of renaming the Scum Bucket the “Michael Bay Award.” For more on that and Peter’s full recap of the summer, check out the Special Edition of At the Movies up top.