The Other Summer Movies

So here we are at the beginning of summer. There might be 20 movies that have potential to make $100 million or more scheduled for release in the next three months. But as Citizen Kane constantly reminds me, "It's no trick to make a lot of money... if what you want to do is make a lot of money." There are just as many movies that aren't aiming as high financially but may be lots better than the majority of the popcorn flicks that actually get TV commercials. And because you won't see a lot of advertising for these movies, we thought it would be a good idea to give you a list of The Other Summer Movies. Keep in mind that we're using the release dates for these films in New York and/or Los Angeles. Very few of these will open in a lot of cities on that date. And some of these release dates may not stick for one reason or another. Check your local listings... The Brothers Bloom (May 15th) The follow-up to Brick from director Rian Johnson, about con men Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody, which also stars Rachel Weisz. The film played at Toronto last fall, but was moved out of the crowded fall line-up for the...just as crowded summer line-up. Departures (May 29th) The Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, and if it's anything like the last five or six winners in that category, it can easily stand with the best movies of the year. And this was something of a surprise winner, so I'm sure there will be a lot of curiosity about this Japanese drama. Away We Go (June 5th) Is this Sam Mendes' bid to be Alexander Payne and Noah Baumbach, or is just marketed to those audiences? The trailers aren't very compelling, but Mendes is still due a little bit of leeway. This roadtrip dramedy stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, so the Tina Fey/NBC Comedy crowd should eat this up. Tetro (June 11th) Francis Ford Coppola hasn't made a great film in a while, but you could argue that his steamrolling through American cinema in the 1970s has bought him all the vanity projects he wants to fiddle around with. Tetro doesn't sound like it's mass appeal, either, but it does promise another peculiar performance by Vincent Gallo, so that's something. Right? Dead Snow (June 12th) Nazi zombies in Norway? Hell yeah! Food, Inc. (June 12th) One of the more anticipated documentaries of the year, a look inside the corporate-run food industry in the U.S. A little more serious in tone than Super Size Me, and it will no doubt spark a lot of discussion where it's released. Moon (June 12th) Of all the non-summer summer movies, Moon might be the one I'm looking forward to the most. Sam Rockwell stars as an astronaut at the tail end of a years-long mission on the moon when weird stuff starts happening. It's a throwback sci-fi, directed by Duncan Jones, David Bowie's kid. Whatever Works (June 19th) Combining Woody Allen with Larry David might make Whatever Works the most neurotic comedy ever made, but you could give me that duo every year and I don't think I'd mind. Allen hasn't hit a broad comedy out of the park since Deconstructing Harry, so the odds are against it, but since Scoop is the only relative failure he's made in five years, Woody could just be in a zone. Cheri (June 26th) Stephen Frears is one of the more underrated filmmakers going, even with High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, and The Queen on his resume in the past ten years. Almost any active director would love to have three movies like that in their entire careers. Cheri is a period romance with Michelle Pfeiffer, which was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The Hurt Locker (June 26th) War movies have been disappointing commercially over the past few years, and a fair percentage of them have been just as disappointing artistically. The Hurt Locker was a hit at the Venice Film Festival last year, and it picked up a couple of Independent Spirit Awards. Unfortunately, it's an indie that has a young audience in mind and it's being released on the same weekend as Transformers. This should really be out earlier in June. 500 Days of Summer (July 15th) A smart, entertaining film with Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 500 Days is really only a romantic comedy because you have to call it something. It certainly doesn't fit a lot of the traditional genre trappings. The audience that made Juno a sleeper hit should pay close attention to this one. Paper Heart (August 7th) Another movie the Juno crowd will take a liking to, a pseudo-documentary co-starring Michael Cera and his real-life girlfriend Charlyne Yi, who co-wrote the script, as well. Cera is a brand, believe it or not, and I would expect Overture Films to try to take advantage of that. Ponyo (August 14th) It's Miyazaki, and if you've never seen one of his films, shame on you. His Spirited Away won the Best Animated Oscar a few years ago, and I've never seen a Miyazaki movie I've regretted watching. They're smart, colorful, entertaining, and rewarding. Taking Woodstock (Augst 14th) Ang Lee has made one movie this decade that's not really worth the price of admission, and he sets the bar really high most of the time. Perhaps not since The Ice Storm has Lee set his sights on a story so modest, but Taking Woodstock looks like it might be a pretty solid ensemble comedy, and because of the setting, you know the soundtrack will be good.

Comments

[Brandon M. Sergent]

I agree completely about Moon, that movie has me Very excited. Drama SciFi is extremely rare, as most of them tend to dive right into omg lasers pew pew.

I loved solaris even though that was pretty much a date movie, it still played around with identity, ethics, and other serious topics.

Great work finding the other movies.

And it's also great to hear about another Miyazaki film. howl's moving castle owns along with spirited away. You should make a list of your fav animé. Perfect blue, Paprika, Vampire hunter d 2000, blood the last vampire, and of course everything Ghost in the shell, and even that CGI appleseed was pretty awesome.

Not really big into the comedies, they end up being large episodes of friends to me where some hapless guy is tortured until he's worthy of the cute girl with the personality of a potato.