The Summer of Our Discontent: June
Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Stinking up multiplexes June 24.
After a few cinematic bright spots in May, the summer wide release calendar takes a dump in June. Unless Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro goes wide, there is little worth mentioning beyond the mild hope that Harold Ramis can capture a little of his former glory.
June 5
The Hangover. It’s R-rated summer silliness from the director of Old School as a group of friends embark upon the ultimate bachelor party in Las Vegas only to lose the groom. Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms star. The trailer supposedly killed at the recent ShoWest convention in Las Vegas, but that just makes me suspect the folks in the cinema exhibition business are a pretty humorless lot. On the other hand, several members of the suburban audience I saw it with nearly choked on their tongues with laughter – the baby getting smashed by the car door was a big hit – so maybe I’m the one with a humor impairment here.
The Land of the Lost. A big-screen comic redo of the cheesy ’70s Krofft kids’ show. Will Ferrell, Danny R. McBride and a bunch of dinosaur special effects star. I’d run home from school to watch this show when I was a kid. The Sleestacks scared me but I had a crush on Holly, the braided blonde girl in Tuffskins and a shirt that looked like it was made from a tablecloth at a corny Italian restaurant. Having said that, I’m not feeling this one at all. Are they going for families with parents who loved the show as kids? Are they going for the more crass Will Farrell comedy crowd? I don’t know, but it isn’t me.
My Life in Ruins. AKA My Big Fat Greek Life in Ruins. Nia Vardalos reworks her inexplicably successful 2002 hit. This time she’s an aimless tour guide in Greece looking for meaning in life and in love. Greek Wedding wasn’t without its charms, but there weren’t enough of them to justify another movie along the same lines. Obviously millions of people feel otherwise and they’ll probably have fun with this.
June 12
Tetro (6/11). I’m not sure if the latest from Francis Ford Coppola is actually going to be a wide release but I’m including it anyway until I learn otherwise. Youth Without Youth wasn’t perfect, but much better than its reputation and it was gratifying to see that Coppola still had plenty of creative fire left in him. I’ve avoided knowing much about Tetro though it’s loosely inspired by Coppola’s own experiences growing up and the story centers on two brothers in an Argentine-Italian family. It stars Vincent Gallo, Carmen Maura and Maribel Verdu.
Imagine That. I thought this was an unimaginatively titled sequel to a film called Imagine This. Instead it’s a tepid Eddie Murphy family comedy about a businessman and neglectful father who finds the solution to all his problems in the imaginary world created by his daughter. I miss the old, funny Eddie Murphy, but his paycheck track record with these middle-of-the-road family friendly comedies is hard to argue with.
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Joseph Sargent’s gritty 1974 thriller about the hijack and ransoming of a New York City subway car gets the Tony Scott treatment. In other words it’ll be a macho, pointlessly slick and nice looking feature-length commercial. The original cast of great character actors will be replaced by John Travolta and Denzel Washington and instead of the atmospheric, seedy 1970s version of New York, it’ll be the Disneyfied post-Giuliani variety. The result: It’ll probably make gobs of cash. Me? I’ll be renting the original with Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo and James Broderick.
June 19
The Proposal. When uptight urban book editor Sandra Bullock finds herself in danger of being deported to Canada, she ropes her assistant Ryan Reynolds into pretending they’re engaged so she can stay in the country. The twist is that the two really hate each other (insert ’70s sitcom laugh track). For some reason, they’re forced to go to Alaska to meet Reynolds’ kooky family and all manner of crazy fish-out-of-water high jinks ensue. The Proposal is either guaran-damn-teed to make you piss in your popcorn or, if the laugh-free trailer is any indication, make you wish you’d stayed home to scrub the toilet.
Year One. As a member of SCTV; the screenwriter of Animal House and Meatballs; the director of Vacation; the director / screenwriter of Caddyshack; and the director / screenwriter / co-star of Stripes and Ghostbusters, Harold Ramis was something of a comedy god when I was just a future movie-blogger in short pants. In 1993 he proved he still had it with the great Groundhog Day, but he’s mostly been sucking air ever since. Sorry, no, I’m not a fan of the self-regarding Billy Crystal/Robert De Nero Analyze smirk fests. Can he redeem himself with this tale of a couple of slackers (Michael Cera and Jack Black) who are booted out of their primitive tribe and left to cause trouble in the ancient world? I hope so.
June 26
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (6/24). Thanks to Spielberg, the first Transformers was probably the high water mark of 12-year-old-in-a-man’s-body Michael Bay’s directing career. A lot of people will argue for The Rock and a few others are fans of Bad Boys, but you won’t find me willingly chatting those people up at cocktail parties. I hated those movies and don’t even get me started on Armageddon or Pearl Harbor. I’ll allow the guy has a certain flair for carnage – the same flair I showed as a lad blowing up airplane models with firecrackers and setting plastic army men on fire – and there is no point in arguing his lack of facility with story and character because it doesn’t apply here, but I don’t even like how he puts together an action scene. It’s all noise and activity with no sense of scale, geography or coherence. They’re like the inevitable close-ups in a porn movie: fetishistically photographed and kind of interesting if you’ve never been laid, but utterly devoid of context and completely absent the build up and all the little interesting details that appeal to anyone whose brain has finished forming. Transformers opens on a Wednesday to help artificially inflate the opening-weekend box office. There are dozens of ways I’d rather spend a summer evening than this.
My Sisters Keeper. The trailer for this melodrama from Nick (son of John) Casavettes induced belly laughs in me when I saw it in the theater but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the intention. Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric play parents whose daughter is stricken by some terminal disease. In order to provide compatible organs or bone marrow or whatever, they have a second daughter who grows up to be Abigail Breslin (whose only disease is terminal cuteness). The thing is, no one ever asked Abigail if she was cool with that. It turns out she’s kinda not. Much crying, hanky pulling and legal battling ensues and then Diaz shaves her head in a show of support for her dying child. “Sorry my bone marrow is no good for you honey, but look I’m bald and weird looking now just like you!” If ever a film was carefully crafted as counter-programming for a Michael Bay film, this is it…and I have to say the Bay film is looking better and better.
Up next: July
Filed under: Upcoming
Ow, this rundown of movies isn’t pretty at all. I have no interest in any of these. Man, June looks like a good month to go camping, do yard work, and otherwise avoid the multiplex. Tetro is about the only thing even worth mentioning here.
Someone over at A.D. pointed everyone to this article over at the New York Times. Most of it is pretty spot on in my opinion.
Here’s hoping July is a bit better.
Groundhog Day is a masterpiece, and I even enjoyed The Ice Harvest, but Year One has an awful High Concept idea that I just can’t get over. It looks like a feature length version of one of those Simpsons episodes where the Simpsons pop up in famous stories throughout time. (I generally don’t go for those types of Simpsons episodes either.)
Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock both have crackerjack timing, they could be ideal for a real movie, though this doesn’t look to be it.
I’m not much a fan of anything Bullock has done, but I’ve always been rooting for Ryan Reynolds ever since that worthless ABC sitcom he used to be on. Hell, I even liked they annoyingly titled Definitely Maybe last year.
This movie looks horrible.
You’re right about the high concept idea too. When I think back at the Harold Ramis movies I like, they’re much fuzzier concepts, though Groundhog Day is pretty high concept.
Ooh, My Sister’s Keeper looks about 15 times worse than I imagined. I know countless women and girls who LOVE the book, but I’ve never gone withing 20 feet of one of Picoult’s novels. Looks like my instincts might have been right. Ugh.
Great description of what’s wrong with Michael Bay films. In the first Transformers movie I was alternately bored and laughing out loud at the rediculousness of it all whenever the big smashy robots were on screen. And god, whenever they talked! (Pulls hair out of head a la Cameron Diaz) The dialogue is sooooo awful. Some things should just stay children’s cartoons. You might could pay me to go see the sequel, but you wouldn’t be happy about how much it would cost you.
Very curious about Tetro. Not at all about Peham 123 or the other crap for the reasons specified. Alarmed last night to find my husband laughing out loud several times at the Land of the Lost trailer. Strangeness.
I can imagine Sister’s Keeper working on the page as long as you drank a bottle of Pepto Bismol first, but acted out on the big screen it just looks painful. Probably great counter-programming for Transformers though.
The thing about Transformers is that in principle I don’t have a problem with big robots breaking stuff….in fact I could really get into that if it was done right.
I’ve heard the new Land of the Lost trailer is funny, so maybe your husband is on to something. But then you were watching it too so…