The rust beneath the summer-movie sheen

After all, who wouldn't want to see the first Indiana Jones film in nearly 20 years, the wonders the gifted Guillermo del Toro has cooked up for "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," Russian director Timur Bekmambetov's American debut in "Wanted" or what director Christopher Nolan and Batman Christian Bale have in store for "The Dark Knight"?

Even comedies are looking more promising than usual. Will Smith as a terminally grumpy superhero in "Hancock," Steve Carell as secret agent Maxwell Smart in "Get Smart" and Adam Sandler as a Mossad assassin turned Manhattan hairdresser in "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" look to be ideally cast (fingers crossed, of course, about the movies themselves). And a new picture from Pixar (this one's about a robot named WALL-E) is always the best bet of any season.

It used to be that every summer held this high degree of anticipation for me. In fact, I used to look forward to everything coming out, no matter what the season. Though critics are often derided as people who don't like films, the truth is you couldn't have this job unless you cared passionately enough about movies to sit through the waves of nonsense that routinely get tossed at today's audiences.

But over the last few years, I've noticed a change in what the studios were doing with the summer, the season Hollywood counts on for making most of its money. In a business in which the average cost of making and marketing a studio film is more than $100 million, the summer movies have been tailored more and more to the mindlessness often associated with the tastes of young males, still Hollywood's most loyal audience.

This youth-pandering has become so relentless that it has put a crimp into one of my favorite rituals: walking through theater lobbies in the spring and looking at the posters for upcoming summer films. In some years things got so dire that I couldn't find a film I even wanted to see, let alone review.

As if this tendency weren't bad enough in and of itself, it began leaking into and infecting the rest of the year. The reality is that, except for the ghettoized adult window in the fall, this dumber-is-better attitude is threatening to take over all of the major studios' output. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the summer is killing American movie culture.