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Preview of Summer Movies: June
by Sandra Olmsted
In terms of the summer movie season, let’s hope that the lackluster San Andreas, I’ll See You in My Dreams, and Aloha, which earned the lowest box office returns since Memorial Day 2001, aren’t the best the studios have to offer.
Wednesday June 3, Director Doug Ellin’s Entourage (Warner Bros.), the big screen version of the award-winning HBO series, means the return of movie star Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his hanger-oners, relatives, and sycophants. Vince’s talent-agent-turned-studio-boss, Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), may live to regret offering Vince the lead in his film. Billy Bob Thornton and Haley Joel Osment play Texas film investors. The buzz is that the movie is unable to shake off its TV origins, yet its trailers promise fabulous Hollywood locations and beautiful, scantily clad people. Fun-to-spot cameos by athletes, musicians, actors, and culture icons occur about every two minutes on average. (R for pervasive language, strong sexual content, nudity and some drug use; 104 min.)
Friday June 5, Director Paul Feig’s Spy (Fox) provides a humorous look at the cliché character of the geeky but brainy researchers in TV crime dramas; Melissa McCarthy stars as Susan Cooper, that unassuming, deskbound CIA analyst in Spy. When her partner, Bradley Fine (Jude Law), falls off the grid and top agent Rick Ford (Jason Statham) is compromised, Cooper goes undercover. The buzz is extremely good for this comedy, which promises lots of laughs. (R for language throughout, violence, and some sexual content including brief graphic nudity; 122 min.)
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Focus) promises the usual scares and thrills of the franchise. In this prequel, director Leigh Whannell explores the haunting of the Lambert family and gifted psychic Elise Rainier’s (Lin Shaye) ability to contact the dead. (PG-13 for violence, frightening images, some language and thematic elements; 97 min.)
In the biopic Love & Mercy (Roadside Attractions), director Bill Pohlad chronicles the life of singer, songwriter and The Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson (played by Paul Dano and John Cusack), including Wilson’s relationship with Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) and his “care” by the dubious therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). Buzz is good for the film and for the quick cutting between scenes in 1960s and 1980s. The film has numerous nominations for best picture at prestigious film festivals and one original song win for Wilson. (PG-13 for thematic elements, drug content and language; 105 min.).
June 12 Steven Spielberg returns to executive produce the long-awaited next installment of his groundbreaking Jurassic Park series, Jurassic World (Universal). Twenty-two years after its disastrous opening, Isla Nublar now features a fully functioning dinosaur theme park, but when the revenues decline, management creates a new, bigger “attraction” to draw visitors. What could possibly go wrong? Based on the trailers, director Colin Trevorrow’s film promises lots of thrills although some scenes seem to be just updates of ones from the original. (PG-13 for intense sequences of science-fiction violence and peril; 125 min.)
In Saint Laurent (Sony Pictures Classics), director Bertrand Bonello examines the life of Yves Saint Laurent (Gaspard Ulliel) from 1967 to 1976 when the famed fashion designer was at the peak of his career. The buzz varies between limited praise and outright condemnation. (R for graphic nudity/strong sexual situations, substance abuse throughout and some language; 150 min.)
June 19 Co-directors Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen’s Inside Out presents a version of what goes on as our brains figure out the world and form responses. From the control center inside 11-year-old Riley’s mind, five Emotions guide her through the trials of growing up and of moving to a scary new city. (PG for mild thematic elements and some action; 106 min.).
In writer/director Rick Famuyiwa’s coming of age comedy/drama Dope, Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a geek carefully surviving life in a tough Inglewood, CA neighborhood, is anything but cool or “dope.” Then he accepts an invitation to an underground party and gets a gritty adventure filed with offbeat characters and bad choices which will make or break his dreams of going to Harvard. Zoë Kravitz and Forest Whitaker also star. The buzz is good and that the fast-paced Dope has a terrific cast and good dialogue. (R for language, drug content, sexuality/nudity, and some violence-all involving teens; 115 min.)
June 26 In director Seth MacFarlane’s Ted 2 (Universal), the trash-talking teddy bear, Ted (voice of MacFarlane) and his wife Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth) want to have a baby, but must first prove Ted is a person. According to the trailer, a civil rights court case ensues, and Ted’s “owner” John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg) and attorney Samantha L. Jackson (Amanda Seyfried) assist. (R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, and some drug use; 135 min.)
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, is the funny, moving story of Greg (Thomas Mann), a high school senior who is trying to blend in anonymously, avoiding deeper relationships as a survival strategy for navigating the social minefield that is teenage life.
Four other films also open at the end of the month or have no release date: Big Game (Europacorp), A Little Chaos (Focus World), Mangelhorn (IFC), and Slow West (A24). While the opening weekend of summer didn’t offer great films, it seems there are a few worth seeing ahead.
