August is the cruelest month?

The other day, I ran across an article proclaiming that August is where studios dump their cinematic leftovers.

For this August, according to them, only Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express look any good. (They do, of course.) The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is among their (and a lot of people's, apparently) must-avoid titles. I'm not saying that TotDE was a classic, but it's a Mummy movie! If you're expecting high art whether or not you've even heard of the first two films, there's just no talking to you.

Even more, they made a list of August-released films from the last 15 years and labelled them 'lousy' and 'halfway-decent'. It's encouraging that the likes of Superbad, The Iron Giant, Matilda and Red Eye were named 'decent'. However, it was not quite as encouraging to see the following classed as 'lousy': Mystery Men, Stardust (did those pinheads even see the film?!), Osmosis Jones (okay, I will concede that the live-action half belongs here), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Hot Rod, Underdog (I'm in a minority, but the film wasn't that bad), Mortal Kombat and Snakes on a Plane (look at the titles of these last two; again, that's what you get for expecting high art).

In all of this, was any thought given to the fact that January is a far worse month to release movies? Let's look at some of the masterpieces to grace the world of cinema: One Missed Call, Fallen, Just Married, Torque, Blood and Chocolate, Darkness Falls, Virus, White Noise, Kangaroo Jack, Along Came Polly, Are We There Yet?, Big Momma's House 2, Hide and Seek, BloodRayne, Primeval, The Hitcher, Epic Movie, Supernova, Teeth (It's a movie about a girl's snatch that mutilates male gentalia. How good could it possibly be?) and Meet the Spartans. A few halfway decent films managed to squeak by in recent years (Glory Road, Last Holiday, Alpha Dog, First Sunday), but, seriously, I'd rather have my film never released at all than released in January.