Texting blamed for summer movie flops.

Yeah, because low quality has absolutely nothing to do with it. And it's always good to blame the audience for ruining "carefully crafted marketing campaigns".

Of the big summer movies I've seen this year, only one can be categorised as pretty good - The Hulk - two were fun, but utterly disposable - Terminator 3, Charlie's Angels - and one was plain awful, especially considering the build-up - The Matrix Reloaded. I've yet to see Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean, both of which I trust are good movies, and which, perhaps not coincidentally, have done amazingly well at the box-office.

But hey, if rampant and disrespectful text messaging forces the studios to improve the quality of their "products" - because now those damn kids can just scupper the carefully crafted marketing campaigns, dammit! - then that's a Good Thing. But come on: Word of mouth was around before mobile phones, and so were great (and awful) summer movies. Fact is, most of the time, bad movies do bad business - and good commercial movies usually (though not always) get the success they deserve.

The summer season may be officially over, but there are still some intriguing big-name potential "blockbusters" heading our way this autumn: Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men; Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the sequel to Desperado; Underworld, with the oh-so-fine Kate Beckinsale; Danny DeVito's dark comedy, Duplex, with Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore; The School of Rock with the Jack Black; Tarantino's twin Kill Bills - separated, rumours now say, by just six weeks; the potentially interesting (or maybe misguided) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake; The Matrix Revolutions (ugh - but I'll give it a chance); the indisputably epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World; Tim Burton's new fable, Big Fish; The Last Samurai, with a sword-wielding Tom Cruise in Japan; and the great-looking live action Peter Pan...

...and, of course - last but by all measures first - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Too bad Harry Potter's not around this year; it's become something of a tradition (in just two short years) to watch Potter and LOTR on the same big screen, a few weeks apart, just prior to Christmas. But book, uh, sorry, film three in the Rings saga will do just fine. Honestly.

(I have, of course, skipped a number of upcoming releases that I'm looking forward to - like Bad Santa - not because I'm not aware of them or don't believe in them, but because I wanted to highlight the most likely chart topping, big budget autumn movies.)  ¶ 14:30