May 2 - Iron Man

The first big summer movie usually gets a pretty decent turn-out from people who are starved for a big summer movie. But can any of you actually imagine Robert Downey Jr. making a good comic book hero? And hey, I liked Elf and all, but what about it suggests that Jon Favreau should do the next superhero flick?

May 9 - Speed Racer

The Wachowski Brothers have apparently made an action movie that is good for families, as well as being as visually dazzling and crazy as their Matrix trilogy was. The trailer is so overblown and hyperkinetic that it would be too easy to come down on it. My curiosity is piqued by its audacity.

May 9 - Redbelt

I'm always up for a David Mamet film. Mamet is one of the greatest working screenwriters. I don't remember where I read it, but I can't put it better in my own words: Mamet is the best writer out there for capturing the rhythms of everyday speech. But his dialogue doesn't sound "everyday" at all. Like Tarantino, his style is instantly recognizable. It scarcely matters what the movie is about, but here is the IMDb summary: "A fateful event leads to a job in the film business for top mixed-martial arts instructor Mike Terry. Though his refuses to participate in prize bouts, circumstances conspire to force him to consider entering such a competition."

May 9 - What Happens In Vegas...

Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher wake up and discover they've married each other the previous night. Ho ho ho.

May 16 - The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

I'm pretty excited about this. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a lot better than I was anticipating. Prince Caspian is a weaker story, but I suspect it's even better suited for a film adaptation, so the potential is high here. But I think it's arriving in theaters about a year too late. The pleasant surprise of the first movie has evolved into an expectation, and fervor over it has cooled. Still, Narnia has been loved for generations, and the availability of a reliably family-friendly action movie should fare well in summer. Here's hoping this franchise sticks around for a long time to come.

May 22 - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

No contest: this is the box office winner of the summer. No movie has been anticipated more since Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. But that very fact should steer us toward caution. The Phantom Menace was a good movie, not at all the terror many call it. But it committed the unforgivable crime of not recreating and living up to the iconic status of the biggest movie phenomenon of the last 50 years.

I never wanted this movie to happen. Indiana Jones is practically as huge and iconic as Star Wars is and has just as far to fall. Action movies have changed dramatically over the last 19 years, and, for that matter, so has Steven Spielberg. How can a fourth installment now not be so different and asynchronous with the first three films as to be a disappointment? The charm of Indiana Jones couldn't possibly survive the CGI and the flashy camera techniques that define action movies today. The best I could envision was a Die Hard period piece, and that didn't sit well with me at all.

Also, Harrison Ford is something like 95 years old. I thought he was too old back when Lucas and Spielberg and Ford started talking about a fourth Indiana Jones film, and that was ten years ago.

I am heartened primarily by one thing only. Spielberg has stated that he's making this movie as if he were the Spielberg of 19 years ago. It's very much a stunt-driven film, rather than a CGI-driven film, and Ford is apparently doing as many or more stunts now as he did as a much younger man. This is perfect. Indiana Jones needs that Spielberg of 19 years ago. The Spielberg of today is a better director...but not for Indiana Jones.

I want to be jumping out of my skin in excitement for this. Raiders of the Lost Ark was one of my favorite theater-going experiences of all time. I was blown away from the opening sequence, which was like nothing I had ever seen in a movie before. But for now, I'm "cautiously optimistic."

May 30 - Sex and the City: The Movie

I don't get the point of this. It's not a revival years after the show ended. It's not a way to crank up the show's sleazy content, either, since HBO series have more freedom in that regard than theatrical movies do. There is literally no reason this had to be a movie instead of a two hour episode.

Oh wait! I know! Cha-ching!

(I'm just grouchy because I hate Sarah Jessica Parker.)

May 30 - Savage Grace

I'll see anything with Julianne Moore in it, but I just can't get interested in this. It's about the Barbara Daly Baekeland murder case from 1972, one of those shocker news stories that happens every once in a while. Admittedly, a great movie can be made about nearly anything, but what are the chances? Most movies about shocking real life events are content simply to replay the shocks for us. Even "To Die For," a well-regarded one, is noteworthy for Nicole Kidman's breakout performance rather than itself as a whole. The problem with this kind of story is that the fact of what happened inevitably overshadows anything one might say about it. A brilliant exception to this is "Zodiac," which solves this problem by getting the murders out of the way early. That was a bold decision, and it took a brilliant screenwriter and a brilliant director to pull it off. Savage Grace has neither.

June 6 - Kung Fu Panda

Does this title make you laugh or groan? It makes me do both. DreamWorks CGI animation hasn't done much for me, though. I liked some of DreamWorks' 2D work, but the CGI stuff is all just too wacky. They try too hard. They're desperate for a laugh and, as such, elicit fewer than something like Ratatouille, which creates characters so real and sympathetic that the humor flows naturally from that. When your starting point is a kung fu fighting panda bear, you're already fighting an uphill battle to establish a character anybody will care about.

This movie might indeed be funny. But it's hard to imagine it'll be a kind of funny that you won't forget about the next morning.

June 13 - The Happening

I was the guy that sort of kind of liked Lady In the Water. But Shyamalan's track record is heading down a path that, mathematically speaking, will lose me on his next movie. I thought his first three signature thrillers were brilliant, The Village good, and Lady In the Water passingly entertaining despite its slipshod construction. At that rate of decline, The Happening will be as intolerable to me as some thought the last two were.

But the fact remains that Shyamalan is a brilliant filmmaker, and I absolutely love his directorial style. He's not afraid to be minimalistic when it's called for. He'll linger on an image that's important. He'll strip out the music when music would only be a distraction. It takes a secure filmmaker to do that and a good one to do it well. So I have to be hopeful about this. The potential is there.

I do, however, think he's time he started directing other people's scripts instead of his own. I think if he wrote the stories, gave them up to a better screenwriter, then took them back to direct them, he couldn't miss.

June 13 - The Incredible Hulk

It's so weird to me that any studio would want to attempt this. We had a big Hulk movie not that long ago, and it didn't perform well. Nobody asked for another one, but here it is -- not a sequel, but a reboot. That makes Hulk the Microsoft Windows of movie franchises: you gotta reboot it all the time.

It's just so strange to see a reboot of a franchise so soon after it FAILED to BECOME a franchise. But here we are. Edward Norton plays Bruce Banner, and the director Louis Leterrier, whose Transporter movies are worth a passing look only because of how absolutely ridiculous they are. (In Transporter 2, our hero learns there's a ticking bomb under his car, so he drives up a pile of junk and corkscrews the car over so that a dangling crane hook can scrape the bomb off the bottom. Then the car continues to spin, righting itself, and it lands on its wheels.)

June 15 - Zombies Ate My Prom Date (Direct To DVD)

This will do until "Blood Car 2: Blood Truck" comes out.

June 20 - Get Smart

I keep having to remind myself that we didn't just have a big Get Smart movie already. A live-action Inspector Gadget is practically the same thing.

June 20 - The Love Guru

A Mike Myers vehicle with Jessica Alba, Jessica Simpson, Justin Timberlake, and...Ben Kingsley!

Ben Kingsley makes such consistently unintuitive acting choices that it should be totally intuitive for him to be cast in a movie with Myers, Alba, Simpson, and Timberlake. This is the guy who played Gandhi and Itzhak Stern? Aargh!

I'm going to guess this movie will be better than BloodRayne, though. Just a hunch.

June 27 - WALL*E

For my money, Ratatouille is the best CG-animated film to date. The next four on the list are also by Pixar. I see nothing to suggest WALL*E will break the pattern. Once again, Pixar has come up with an idea that just looks so rife with potential. Every frame of the trailer looks pitch perfect.

The neat thing about this is that it's so very different from the kinds of animated movies we've gotten recently. It's not like Kung Fu Panda, which I keep forgetting I haven't already seen. But even by Pixar standards, it's an experiment of sorts. It's essentially a *silent* film -- but I'm betting it's done in such a compelling way that nobody notices.

June 27 - Wanted

James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, and Terence Stamp. I am given to understand that fans of the graphic novel should not get their hopes up. As for me, I only hope the movie is as funny as the IMDb synopsis, an excerpt of which follows: "After [Wesley Gibson's] estranged father is murdered, the deadly sexy Fox recruits him into the Fraternity, a secret society that trains Wes to avenge his father's death by unlocking his dormant powers. As she teaches him how to develop lightning-quick reflexes and phenomenal agility, Wes discovers this team lives by an ancient, unbreakable code: carry out the death orders given by fate itself."

June 27 - Dracula Meets Guitar Hero: Fangorious Hoedown

I'm just kidding about that one. But seriously, shouldn't somebody actually make that? Somebody get on the phone with Ben Kingsley.

July 2 - Hancock

Will Smith is the king of the 4th of July. It's been a while since he last claimed the slot, but now here he is with a superhero parody. He plays a superhero with public relations troubles. Action comedies are tricky, because it's easy for the action parts and comedic parts to stomp over each other -- but you can't water them both down to mesh them together, or neither half works. But Will Smith has a good (though far from spotless) record in this genre, and I give this about a thousand percent chance of it being more successful than My Super Ex-Girlfriend was.

July 11 - Meet Dave

This is a hilarious idea, inasmuch as I dread that it will be exploited exclusively for scatological humor. Eddie Murphy plays...a spaceship. It seems a host of miniature aliens have landed on Earth, and their spaceship has a human form. The wacky hijinks ensue when the spaceship falls in love with a human woman.

July 11 - Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Didn't care about the first one. Don't care about this one. But a lot of people liked the cheesy tone of the original. Usually, however, movies like that get too self-conscious in their sequels and fall flat. Still, the summer release date (which the first Hellboy movie didn't even get) may be considered a vote of confidence by the distributing studio.

July 11 - Journey To the Center of the Earth 3D

An adventure film with Brendan Fraser. The original is one of the best sci-fi adventures of its era and stars the incomparable James Mason. Brendan Fraser is Fraser is...well, comparable by comparison, but potentially great in light action hero roles. And this movie isn't one of those movies that defies retelling, like many other movies that get remakes. I don't see any reason why Jules Verne's classic novel shouldn't get an updated adaptation. But I'm reserving judgment on the 3D angle. The 3D process is dazzling and cool, but it's a form that calls attention to itself (even when a movie isn't being self-indulgent about it and constantly throwing things at the camera), and that's not usually a good thing for the story being told.

July 18 - The Dark Knight

Indiana Jones is the summer 2008 movie I have the highest hopes for, but this is the one I'm most confident in. Director Christopher Nolan has yet to make anything less than a borderline great movie. His best, Memento, is one of my favorites of the decade, and his Batman Begins is an easy contender for the best superhero movie of all time. He picks up Batman again with The Dark Knight, which features Heath Ledger as The Joker. Ledger's untimely death makes his performance here, his next-to-last, highly anticipated, and I wonder if a supporting actor Oscar nomination isn't in store.

But let's not let Ledger overshadow the fact that this movie has the best ensemble cast you'll see this summer. Christian Bale is easily the best Batman ever put to film, and add to that Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the living legend Michael Caine, whose role in Batman Begins was one of the best things about the movie.

Admittedly, a great cast can make a bad movie. It's happened countless times. It takes a great director to pull all the pieces together into a cohesive whole. Christopher Nolan knows how to do that. He specializes in psychological thrillers, and Batman, that most psychological of superheroes, is the perfect fit. I'm sure one day Nolan will make a bad movie, until he does, my money says he's as reliable as Pixar for producing great work.

July 18 - Space Chimps

The title says it all, really. The director has no prior directorial credits, but I notice he was a co-producer on Racing Stripes. That's worse than no prior credit at all.

July 18 - Mamma Mia!

A filmed version of the 1999 stage musical, based on the ABBA song of the same name. As is the custom with movie musicals in this day and age, the cast consists of people who never thought would be singing: Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, and Pierce Brosnan, for example. As with the recent Sweeney Todd, sometimes the singing ability of established stars can be surprising (and in the case of Moulin Rouge, stunning). Still, surely it wouldn't hurt to hire an actual singer for a musical once in a while. Dreamgirls did pretty all right with it.

July 25 - The X-Files: I Want To Believe

Why so long before this got a sequel? Mulder and Scully return, this time in a stand-alone story, not part of the ongoing alien conspiracy plotline. I never watched the show much, but I did like the first movie, and I look forward to this one.

July 25 - Step Brothers

The old "two single parents get married, and their children become rivals" plot gets rehashed...this time not with actual kids and teenagers as the children but adults -- at least in the purely biological sense of the word. The step-children are Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. Reilly is accomplished in a variety of different roles, both comedic and dramatic, but "Will Ferrell" tells you all you need to know. The director Adam McKay, who did Anchorman and Talladega Nights, attempts to repeat his earlier successes.

August 1 - Swing Vote

Kevin Costner, Kelsey Grammer, Dennis Hopper, Stanley Tucci, Nathan Lane, Judge Reinhold. A list like that catches the attention, doesn't it? This is a comedy-drama about a presidential election that comes down to one man's vote. Suddenly, everybody starts petitioning this one man for it.

This premise raises so many questions of logistics, I can scarcely begin to enumerate them. If it comes down to one man's vote, how would anybody know that before it's cast? It doesn't make any sense to me at all. I'm sure the movie will have some cheesy, contorted explanation, but it still sounds like a clumsy premise. That said, it also sounds like one with some interesting satirical possibilities to it. If it's intelligently written, it should work.

August 1 - The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Brendan Fraser's second adventure film of the summer is number three (or four, depending on whether you count The Scorpion King) in the Mummy series. Rachel Weisz is missing this time, but Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, and Maria Bello round out an extremely intriguing cast.

But will the movie be any good? The first one was surprisingly good. The second was surprisingly bad. That would suggest a 50% chance. But probably 25% is more realiastic, since the viability of a franchise depends more upon the success of the first sequel than the original.

But no. The actual chances are 0%. Why? The film's director is Rob Cohen. On the great ladder of action film directors, Rob Cohen is two rungs from the bottom: Michael Bay above him and only Renny Harlin and McG below. He made two good movies back in the early 1990s: "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" and "Dragonheart." But his non-dragon movies are so empty of intelligence and wit that they're actually insulting: Daylight, The Skulls, The Fast and the Furious, XXX, Stealth.... All flash and no substance. Vin Diesel in XXX actually gives the single *worst* performance I've ever seen in a big budget movie -- but it wasn't (entirely) Diesel's fault. Just look at him in Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty, where he's quite good, to see just how much the director (and editor) matter in shaping an actor's performance.

August 8 - The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

I have to admit it, and I don't even have the decency to be embarrassed about it. I saw the first movie and loved it. For those who don't know, it's four separate stories about four teenaged girls, who are best friends, but whose lives take them apart from each other, and so they create a sisterhood and a mythology about a pair of jeans that inexplicably fits all four of them. So they trade the jeans around amongst the four of them, spreading its good luck. It sounds, I suppose, like a fantasy film, but it's not. There's never any evidence that the jeans actually do anything.

A movie like this doesn't tend to have anything in it for me to relate to. I'm neither the sex nor the age of its target audience. And yet, the stories are so human, and the characters so eminently likable, that I couldn't help but like the movie.

So against all odds, I find myself anticipating the sequel with interest. The director is unknown to me, but the writers return from the first film, and that's probably more important in this case. The four girls are played by the same very charismatic actresses, one of whom -- America Ferrera -- has since risen to fame as the star of the TV show Ugly Betty.

August 15 - Tropic Thunder

So Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr are off shooting a war movie. They get dressed up as soldiers and dropped somewhere on location in the jungle and wind up fighting a *real* war.

August 15 - Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Star Wars is back, this time in animation. The animated series "The Clone Wars" gets theatrical treatment here.

August 22 - Bangkok Dangerous

Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang probably aren't familiar names to you. They've made big names for themselves in Hong Kong with The Eye, a great ghost movie, recently remade in Hollywood with forgettable results. Prior to that, they made Bangkok Dangerous, a movie about a hit man. Now they're remaking it in English with Nicolas Cage.

Remakes of Asian thrillers haven't turned out well recently. The Departed is great, and I liked The Ring quite a lot. But even when the original filmmakers come to America to direct, as was the case with The Ring 2 and the remake of The Grudge, the results have not been impressive.

Still, we can hope, and if anyone should remake Bangkok Dangerous, it is the Pang Brothers, the film's original directors.

August 22 - Crossing Over

Crash meets Babel? From the IMDb: "Crossing Over is a multi-character canvas about immigrants of different nationalities struggling to achieve legal status in Los Angeles. The film deals with the border, document fraud, the asylum and green card process, work-site enforcement, naturalization, the office of counter terrorism and the clash of cultures."

A movie like this could get pompous and manipulative very easily. "Message" films, especially political message films, love to paint the opposition as pure evil incarnate, which will at best please the converted. But it will not enlighten anyone, on either side. The best movies of this sort portray the humanity in all sides.

I love movies that do that -- that show how individuals can be spokes in a wheel and keep a larger machine going without anybody fully understanding what's happening and why. Some of the greatest political movies have this perceptive quality to them, and I can only hope that this will be one. I'm not that hopeful. For every thoughtful exploration of a socio-political matter, there are ten superficial sermons about it. And Sean Penn, who stars in the movie, is the king of bleeding heart pomposity. Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta, and Ashley Judd are also here.

August 22 - Fly Me To the Moon

In this animated film, three houseflies stow away aboard the Apollo 11 flight to the moon. Buzz Aldrin plays himself. Well, why not?