The good news: this has already been the summer of Mad Max: Fury Road. The bad news: this is now going to be the summer of movies that aren’t Mad Max: Fury Road. That being said, I concede that June has a couple of films that, in any other context, I’d be excited for. Not now, of course, with cinema having reached its end point and all. But some of it could still be entertaining enough.
3.6.2015
It made me so absolutely happy when Entourage, the feature adaptation of the 4-years-in-the-ground HBO program about the worst kind of American maledom, got moved up to a Wednesday release. Because that meant that it couldn’t possibly win the weekend at the box office. And that meant that there was nothing that could compel me to see it.
Anybody who reads that sentence and makes this film their ACS fundraiser review request goes on my enemies list.
5.6.2015
Melissa McCarthy and her best director, Paul Feig, team up for Spy, which is, I gather, about a spy. The word that it’s the first McCarthy feature that uses here comic talents beyond an ability to spout vulgarisms and be fat makes me incredibly happy, and I’ll happily declare this the comedy I’m most excited about for the whole summer.
And because the universe can’t say “no”, there’s a film called Insidious: Chapter 3, and I am so, so angry that I already used my “Inshittyous: Crapter X” joke, because I think that represents the best I can do relative to this franchise.
12.6.2015
Having been born late in 1981 and thus spending the summer of 1993 as an 11-year-old, I am precisely the audience that Jurassic World wants to hit square in the nostalgia. And boy, is it not doing that. I get that everybody wants to see this movie more than I do, but I cannot to save my life imagine why. Those are some boring, generic trailers.
I mean, of course I will see it, but I’m not looking forward to it.
Over in the world of limited releases: the Sundance-feted teen cancer drama Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a film I’m looking forward almost solely to be furiously pissed-off at it. Not a healthy attitude, I know. But that title. It’s like the last of the mid-’00s indie quirkfests was found frozen in the Arctic ice and has been thawed to terrorise the city before it’s nuked back into oblivion.
19.6.2015
Speaking of films that Sundance kind of liked that seem just awful, awful, awful to me, Dope and Infinitely Polar Bear are both hitting simultaneously, the latter more than one whole year after its premiere. Talk about promising.
But that doesn’t matter! There is a new Pixar film, after two years of nothing and five years since their last clear-cut masterwork! And if the folks at Cannes know what they’re talking about, Inside Out is all kinds of perfect in every way. This was, at the start of the summer, my second most-anticipated after Mad Max; everything that’s happened in the last month has only solidified that position.
26.6.2015
Having not hated Ted, to my absolute shock, I suppose I find myself not-dreading Ted 2. But boy, can I not find a single reason to be excited for it.
And I don’t have any fucking clue what to make of Max, a patriotic story of a soldier dog with PTSD that appears to be at least three totally irreconcilable movies in one, based on the trailer. The unifying thesis seems to be “who doesn’t like dogs?” which, while true, is a weird foundation for a wide releease in the middle of summer.
Also, that’s a really fascinating double-feature, right there.