Everyone lets themselves go in the summer. School is over, the sunshine is out, ice cream becomes a regular part of your daily diet. Maybe you don’t get as much work done, maybe you don’t use your time so efficiently, or maybe you go on vacation and gain a few pounds. Summer movies are no different — they’re big, fat, and lazy, but really good fun. For Hollywood, like university students, summer actually starts at the end of April; so although some of these films are not being released during mid-June to mid-September, they are still summer movies.
Mad Max: Fury Road (May 15)
Medical doctor turned cult filmmaker George Miller returns to his post-apocalyptic world with Tom Hardy replacing the iconic Mel Gibson in the title role. Although many details of the production and plotline have been kept secret, the promotional trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road looks excitingly old school yet totally fresh. While Hollywood studios have been giving us blockbusters with trite visual canvases, Mad Max’s trailer bursts with more exciting imagery than anything from the Marvel cinematic universe.
Tomorrowland (May 22)
Brad Bird, the mastermind behind some of Pixar’s greatest, like Ratatouille and The Incredibles, continues his transition into live-action filmmaking (after 2011’s pulse-pounding Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol) with another potentially thrilling film, Tomorrowland. George Clooney and Britt Robertson act opposite each other in a story about a teen girl and a former child prodigy who try to understand the whereabouts of a futuristic place that exists in their collective memory.
Jurassic World (June 12)
After the mishap twenty years earlier in the original Jurassic Park, Isla Nublar now features the theme park that John Hammond had dreamed of. Things go sideways when a corporate mandate tries to respark attendance by genetically modifying dinosaur genes to make a beast that is no longer Jurassic but a new variation on the species. Will our heroes be able to fend off the monster? Perhaps a bigger question is if director Colin Trevorrow can pull off this mammoth project after his endearing yet hyper-indie sci-fi dramedy, Safety Not Guaranteed.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
(June 12)
After the success of small indies, like Boyhood which was released during the summer and not awards season, Fox Searchlight tries its hand at releasing award hopeful and Sundance smash-hit, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (a film chronicling the times of a high school senior that befriends a girl when she is diagnosed with cancer), earlier in the year to offer some endearing counter programming to the usual soulless summer fare. With rave reviews like Peter Debruge from Variety prophesying it to “endure as a touchstone for its generation,” Me and Earl and the Dying Girl looks edgier and funnier than last year’s angsty cry-fest The Fault In Our Stars.
Terminator Genisys (July 1)
Before Terminator Salvation’s release in 2009, my friends and I watched every film in the franchise to gear up for the film. I won’t be doing that for Genisys. Unlike Salvation, which featured a CGI Schwarzenegger, Genisys has the governator in the flesh, but it will hardly matter if Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor can’t infuse the film with the heart and fun of James Cameron’s originals. When I was younger I cried at the end of T2 when the terminator kills himself to save John Connor and his mother while giving them the iconic thumbs up. Let’s just hope this can come up with anything remotely poignant and hokey.
Ant-Man (July 17)
A couple of weeks ago Joss Whedon called Edgar Wright’s (Hot Fuzz, World’s End, Shaun of the Dead) script for Ant-Man “The best Marvel ever had.” Unfortunately, after developing the project for close to ten years, Wright dropped out just before production citing “creative differences” as the issue. Wright has been given a writer’s credit on the project, but it is hard to know how much of the innovative director’s vision will make it on the screen this summer.
My most anticipated film by far is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which seems to be a nice break from the explosions of Avengers: Age Of Ultron and the triteness of Jurassic World and Terminator Genysis. But if you feel like letting yourself go, there’s still lots of fun trash to go with the other indulgences associated with this time of year.
