Summertime is pretty much here, which means that we’ll all be having fun, playing at the beach, roller skating to Daft Punk and all those radical things we love to do when the kids are on summer vacation. But, most of all, there are the colossal blockbuster movies that come barreling in from the first weekend of May all the way through August. So, aside from ‘Iron Man 3′ which is this year’s summer-launch-superhero-movie-that-releases-the-first-Friday-of-May-that-literally-everyone-and-their-aunt-goes-to-see-every-year, here are the top ten movies to look forward to while escaping from the brutal heat in an air conditioned theater with a bucket of popcorn.
Obviously. ‘Nuff said. This is a no brainer, it’s already old news. Go see it.
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Toby Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher. – Directed by: Baz Lurhmann
Based on the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, shot in roaring 20’s 3D. Leonardo Dicaprio plays the enigmatic Gatsby in Baz Lurhmanm’s visually mind boggling musical effort with a soundtrack produced by Jay-Z to tell a story of a love affair torn asunder by the World War. The film was due out in the winter of last year, and now it has finally come back and there couldn’t be more buzz about how it could turn out. It will certainly be a movie that audiences will have a love/hate relationship with, as the fans of Lurhmann’s films (Moulon Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) are a very niche crowd, and some wonder how such a classic story will translate with this larger than life visual style. Needless to say, everyone will be seeing it, and everyone will be talking about it.
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Benedict Cumberbatch – Directed by: J.J. Abrams
Lets not kid ourselves, Star Trek has always been relevant, but when J.J. Abrams rekindled the series in 2009, everybody wanted to be a Star Trek fan, and since then people have been excited to see a sequel. Not only that, but Abrams is always very good at marketing a film with little to no details given away to the point that the general public is still unsure if Cumberbatch is or isn’t playing Khan. Needless to say, ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ will be an event of a movie, and maybe even one that people will return to the theater to see many times.
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Staring: Clark Gregg, Nathan Fillion, Alexis Denisof, Amy Acker and Emma Bates – Directed by: Joss Whedon
When Joss Whedon finished filming the Avengers last spring, he had two weeks of free time on his hands. What did he do with that time? He had all of his actor friends over for lunch and said “Hey, we’re filming Shakespeare.” The film received nothing but praise when it premiered at Sundance, and fans of Whedon and Shakespeare alike are excited for this adaptation.
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Starring: Henry Cavill, Michael Shannon, Amy Adams, Russell Crowe, and Kevin Costner – Directed by: Zach Snyder
Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy has come and gone, and Marvel has been dominating the scene. Warner Brothers and DC have quickly realized that Kal-El needs to, and now can, be relevant again. With Nolan writing the story and producing the film, Zach Snyder’s incredible eye for cinematography is being used for the better it seems in this reinvention of Superman in a technological era. Supes has always been a character who’s relevance has been in question for decades. As the original superhero, many find the character to be over-powered, over done, and sometimes even boring. But now, in the technologically advanced world we live in, and a society that is more comfortable with men in silly costumes saving lives on a movie screen, it may very well be the time for Superman to make his return.
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Starring: Emma Watson, James Franco, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Jason Segel, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jay Baruchel, Mindy Kaling, Danny McBride, Aziz Ansari, etc. – Directed by: Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogan
The story of this movie is very heavily being kept under wraps, but the general idea at this point is a comedy staring a bunch of comedy actors who attend a party at James Franco’s awesome pad, and then the apocalypse strikes. Typical Seth Rogan, James Franco shenanigans, which, to many, is a very very good thing.
Starring: Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Helen Mirren, Frank Oz – Directed by: Dan Scanlon
It’s almost as though Pixar is making these sequels with the knowledge of how it’s demographic shifts. ‘Toy Story 3’ came out when millions of young people who grew up with these movies were graduating high school and moving on to college just as Andy was in the movie, and we bawled our eyes out upon the realization that we weren’t kids anymore. Now Pixar is giving the same audience a relatable prequel to ‘Monsters Inc.,’ with Mike and Sully in their first year of college at ‘Monsters University.’ Needless to say, it’s the annual Pixar movie that everybody will go to see.
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, Charlie Day – Directed by: Guillermo Del Toro
Okay, okay. guys. Hear me out. It’s got giant monsters, AND giant robots! Sure, it won’t be the most deep of movies, but Del Toro’s pet project is a love letter to everything from old ‘Godzilla’ films, to all types of flight mech anime (mostly Gundam). Not only that, but the director of ‘Hellboy’ and ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ knows full well how to make a visually stunning theater experience. Also, the voice of the robot suit AI is blatantly GLaDOS from ‘Portal.’
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Famke Janssen, Brian Tee, WIll Yun Lee, Svetlana Khodchenkova – Directed by: James Mangold
‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ was awful, so was ‘X-3’ a few years ago. But the most recent efforts in the X-Men franchise with the prequel, ‘First Class,’ made a quality redefining of one of the biggest superhero franchises. Now we have a new film with Wolverine where we left him at the end of ‘The Last Stand,’ dumped off in Japan. The movie looks like it’s taking Wolverine and putting him on a personal journey to encounter the ghosts of his past, and is put into a film that looks like a sleek style of contemporary Bushido. People are going to be seeing this in massive crowds since it’s the first film featuring Wolverine in anything but a cameo in about 4 years, and Jackman is just as synonymous with the image of the character, if not more than, Robert Downey Jr. is as Iron Man.
Starring: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, William Fichner, Sharlto Copley – Directed by: Niell Blomkamp
If you enjoyed the Oscar nominated ‘District 9’ a few years ago, this will be a a great late summer flick. The movie looks like a brutally beautiful piece of action-adventure with the message of segregation that has been prevalent since the dawn of science fiction. In the far future, humanity is segregated into a space station paradise for the wealthy where the rest of the human race is left on earth struggling for survival, when Matt Daemon’s character decides to turn himself into a Robocop type of entity to triumph for those forgotten on the rock that once was a thriving earth.
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Rosamund Pike. – Directed by: Edgar Wright.
This is that OTHER apocalypse comedy for this summer. Though there’s no trailer for it quite yet, The World’s End is the finale of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright’s “Blood and Cornetto” trilogy, the first two of which were ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Hot Fuzz,’ both of which are simultaneously homages and parodies to their respective genres. The trio took a break so Edgar Wright could direct 2010’s ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. The World’, and now the dream team is back together to spend a night achieving the greatest of Pub Crawls in all of the United Kingdom. It’s going to be devilishly silly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjeMZLVlaAI
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