A Disappointing Summer Blockbuster

That time of year is coming when large, expensive would be blockbusters put beautiful people through their paces pretending to have improbable and uninvolving adventures, or in plainer words: the summer movie season is coming. Perhaps things haven't changed much in this respect, as Sam Peypes description of a disappointment from May of 1664 sounds oddly familiar:

There by Captain Ferrers meeting with an opportunity of my Lord’s coach, to carry us to the Parke anon, we directed it to come to the play-house door; and so we walked, my wife and I and Madamoiselle. I paid for her going in, and there saw “The Labyrinth,” the poorest play, methinks, that ever I saw, there being nothing in it but the odd accidents that fell out, by a lady’s being bred up in man’s apparel, and a man in a woman’s. Here was Mrs. Stewart, who is indeed very pretty, but not like my Lady Castlemayne, for all that.

Which for whatever reason reminds me of Chaucer's interview with a young 'lady' who is also not all that...