With impending finals and looming end-of-the-semester projects starting to darken your horizon, you can at least anticipate the summer 2011 movie season. And this summer is filled to the gills with action-packed blockbusters and intriguing indie hits alike. In fact, this year's summer schedule is so crowded that director Jon Favreau (""Iron Man""), whose flick ""Cowboys and Aliens"" is out July 29, described it as, ""Omaha Beach, it's going to be a blood bath. There's never been a summer like this next summer. It's going to be bloody [for filmmakers and studios].""
There is something promising coming out almost every weekend this summer—whether it be colossal superhero flicks like ""Thor"" (May 6), ""X-Men: First Class"" (June 3), and ""Green Lantern"" (June 17), indie films finally getting off the festival circuit like ""Bellflower"" (August 5) and ""Another Earth"" (July 22) or the sequel to the third-highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, ""The Hangover Part II"" (May 26). The sheer number of movies being released this summer means it will be hard to ever not find something to suit your tastes playing at your local cineplex. Here are a few that I'm particularly excited to beat the heat with:
""Super 8""
""Lost"" creator J.J. Abrams is a busy man these days. Not only is he producing Tom Cruise's ""Mission: Impossible IV,"" out this winter, but he also wrote and directed his new film ""Super 8"" with producer Steven Spielberg, which hits theaters June 10. ""Super 8"" has spent quite a bit of time shrouded in secrecy, as per Abrams' M.O., with bits and pieces creeping out through viral marketing campaigns over the last year. But from what's been revealed so far, the movie seems to follow a group of kids in the ‘70s who, while filming their own zombie movie on a Super 8 camera, unwittingly document the escape of an inhuman (possibly alien?) creature when a train derails.
Abrams has built up quite a following in the past few years—and with good reason. He has proven himself to be a creative and innovative storyteller across mediums. In fact, his name would probably be enough to get me to the theater on opening weekend alone, even if the trailer didn't already make ""Super 8"" look like the next Spielberg epic.
""Hesher""
I was able to catch ""Hesher"" back at Sundance 2010, and it's finally making its way into theaters nationwide May 13. The movie concerns T.J. (Devin Brochu), who, in the wake of his mother's death, must live with his depressed, over-medicated father and elderly grandmother. He becomes obsessed with a checkout worker at the local grocery store, played by Natalie Portman. But T.J.'s life gets turned upside down when Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a heavy-metal-loving nomad-anarchist shows up and simultaneously becomes T.J.'s mentor and tormentor. Levitt certainly shows his range as Hesher, delivering a performance that's the polar opposite of the lovesick Smiths fan he played in ""(500) Days of Summer."" The unrated cut I saw at Sundance had surprisingly coarse language, even for an R-rated film, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it edited down a bit for wide release. But while ""Hesher"" may be a bit extreme, the movie turned out to be quite an interesting post-modern take grief and death.
""The Guard""
One of my favorite movies from this year's Sundance Film Festival was the Irish black comedy ""The Guard."" The film stars Brendan Gleeson as a small-town officer of the Irish Garda who gets paired up with an American FBI agent (Don Cheadle) and is tasked with stopping a shipment of $500 million of cocaine from being smuggled into a local port. It's trans-continental take on the buddy-cop genre, mixed with its distinctive style of dark humor makes for a refreshingly original and entertaining action-dramedy that's a bit more serious than ""Hot Fuzz"" but more up-beat than ""In Bruges."" ""The Guard"" will begin a limited release July 29, and if it comes to Madison, it's a movie that should not be missed.
""Harry Potter 7: Part II""
While I can't say it's the movie I'm looking forward to most, ""Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II"" holds the most sentimental appeal to me. As the final installment of the Harry Potter film franchise, Warner Bros. studio executives and Peter-Pan-Syndrome-stricken bookworms alike will be shedding quite a few tears over the end of an era and one of the biggest cash cows in movie history. It will undoubtedly be one of the biggest blockbusters of the summer, as it's likely to draw every Harry Potter fan there is out of the woodwork for multiple viewings—I plan on seeing it in theaters at least a few times.
Considering Part I took in just shy of a billion dollars worldwide, perhaps Part II will finally take the franchise to the next level by becoming the eighth movie ever to join the billion-dollar box-office club. Either way, I know where I'll be at midnight on July 15. Ahh, summer.
Where is David's preview of ""Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer""? E-mail him at dcottrell@wisc.edu to find out.
