RottenTomatoes recently came out with a very nice feature on the upcoming feature films for the period of May to August 2008 (referred to as “summer” in other countries, although it’s decidedly a bit more wet than that here). The article linked above is a lot more comprehensive than this one, but I’m a busy guy and I’m assuming that the people that read this blog will not have the time to watch every single summer movie coming out this year. So below is my list of must- and will-probably-see movies over the next four months, compressed to suit my tastes and summarized to fit your available time:

Iron Man, May 2nd.

Not much to say about this one other than it was a high watermark for superhero movies, and kicked off the season with an arc-reactor-powered bang.

Speed Racer, May 9th.

The only reason why I even mention this movie is because I thought I’d give the Wachowskis another chance and saw Speedy on his opening night. This movie is about as bad as it gets — cliche-ridden (or I should say, driven) plot, seriously bizarre production design, camera work that tries to be funky and just ends up clunky … the list goes on. The races themselves are alright, but I can’t say they’re any more or less memorable than your average Fast and the Furious fare.

Prince Caspian, May 16th.

The sequel to Narnia has been thus far getting some pretty good reviews, and although I didn’t love the first picture, I’m willing to give this one a shot. (Note that the Philippines will be getting this movie a few weeks late; possibly after Indy IV.)

Indiana Jones IV, May 22nd.

I have already made up my mind that I will love Indy IV, and I am counting mostly on Steven Spielberg to bring this one home. (George Lucas, you better not screw me again.)

Postal, May 22nd (likely sometime in mid-June over here).

I’ll see this one if I can drag some friends along with me. I played the video game for all of 30 minutes before getting tired of the tongue-in-cheek political-incorrectness but maybe Uwe Boll can come up with something witty and compelling. Or, more likely, something totally insipid and obtuse, and I’ll laugh my ass off watching it.

The Happening, June 13th.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest twist-fest should be interesting to see. Say what you will about his recent self-indulgences (The Village and Lady in the Water were twisty piles of crap), but all Shyamalan movies consistently have really great acting and really stellar cinematography. Sometimes, it’s enough.

Incredible Hulk, June 13th.

Please, oh please, Edward Norton, don’t let me down.

Wall-E, June 27th.Pixar makes a sci-fi. How can I not love this?

Wanted, June 27th.

Angelina Jolie as an evil Lara Croft. Well, not exactly, but she holds her guns exactly the same way. The comic this was based on was a brilliant piece of nihilist writing, but I don’t really expect any of that to translate to the movie. Mostly you’ll watch this for the stunts and some snarky dialogue between Jolie and James McAvoy.

Hellboy 2, July 11th (probably on the 16th or 23rd here).

Director del Toro has been churning out some real gems since the first Hellboy (he directed Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006 and produced The Orphanage in 2007) so I’m expecting this sequel to top the first. Mignola’s comic books have always been a bit of a strange brew and del Toro shouldn’t find himself bereft of weird story material to throw at us.

The Dark Knight, July 18th.

There are a couple of things I was hoping for with Chris Nolan’s sequel: 1) Better action sequences (you could tell that Nolan had never previously directed fight scenes in Batman Begins), and 2) No more Katie Holmes. I already got the latter.

X-Files 2, July 25th (probably in early August here).

I remember watching the pilot episode of X-Files on RPN 9 back when I was in grade school (this was in 1993), and it scared the living crap out of me. I followed the show for about 4 seasons before it started to really meander, but I dutifully watched the movie like any loyal fan when it came out in 1998. Now it’s 2008, a whole decade later, and Mulder and Scully have returned. I am awed more by the passage of time than anything else, which is why I’ll see this movie no matter what.

Midnight Meat Train, August 1st (probably on the 6th here, if this ever makes it past the MTRCB)

Clive Barker’s serial killer short story is brought to the screen by Ryuhei Kitamura (known to geekboys as the director of Versus). A match made in heaven? We’ll see. Personally, I’m happy to see this as an uncut, extended bittorrent edition if the local movie review board blocks it.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, August 15th.

There are a couple of reasons to watch this movie, and I’m going to completely avoid the obvious “Because It’s Star Wars, Stupid.” The first is that I seriously love Kilian Plunkett’s character design (I first noticed his work on the graphic novel Unknown Soldier back in 98, and again in Superman: Red Son in 2004).  The second reason is that the Clone Wars movie is essentially a 90-minute commercial for the animated TV series starting in October this year, which will be followed by a live-action TV series in 2010. Hey, and we like commercials right?

The International, August 15th (probably on the 20th or 27th here).

Clive Owen as an international secret agent. Naomi Watts as his damsel-in-distress. Seems like a winning combination to me. 

Images from Zack Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen adaptation found their way online yesterday, and you can immediately see why Alan Moore has pretty much given up on Hollywood. You can check out the rest of the images here, but the Comedian depicted above says it all. Now, before I embark on this geekboy rant, I want to first say that when I saw Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, I was thoroughly impressed. It was a great start for a young director; it was creepy, funny and thrilling in most of the right places.

I was less impressed by his take on Frank Miller’s 300, because it showed exactly how young this guy really was. 300 was a song played with a single note, and the volume cranked all the way up. Visually it was quite engaging, but then again so is pornography, or a UFC match. Neither of them are what you would ordinarily refer to as a "feature film."

Which brings me to Watchmen and the dark, gritty stills that they just released of its main characters. Now again, these stills have a great visual styling to them. Very "Dark Knight" in its retro/modern, desaturated, shiny-leather look. But sadly, they totally miss the point of the story, which is why it depresses me a little to see them.

Alan Moore’s Watchmen, for those of you who haven’t had the good fortune of reading it, is a story about a team of Golden Age superheroes, after their "golden age" has passed. They’re old and retired, but some of them continue to work behind the scenes, quietly maneuvering global politics and economics towards one unbelievable outcome. I’ve always thought that Watchmen was impossible to adapt to another medium because of its complexity. It’s got about a dozen separate plotlines that come together at the perfect moment towards the end, and the epic nature of the story can’t really be felt if you experience the whole thing in a 2-hour movie session.

Likewise, you couldn’t adapt it into a traditional text-only novel either, because a huge part of what makes Watchmen so special is the cornball "Golden Age" look of the superheroes. The story itself was a commentary on the comic-book medium you see, and how "real life" has finally caught up with our aging lead characters. Snyder’s images above are disappointing because he’s traded the feel of "old cowboys on their last ride" for chrome gear and glossy leather straps. Sure to please the general moviegoing audience, but unlikely to satisfy anyone who’s actually read this book.

I’m not really in the habit of uploading comics anymore these days, but when I stumbled across this bit of illustrated dementia by Shintaro Kago, I just had to share it with everyone. I’ve compiled the 16-page short into a single PDF, downloadable here. Word of warning: there’s nudity, gore and violence galore here, so try not to view it with your boss around.

(Spotted at Same Hat! Same Hat!)

• Robot Chicken does Star Wars parody. I love Robot Chicken, and I love Star Wars. How could you possibly go wrong with this combination? (Family Guy pulled something similar off a couple of weeks back as well. Must be the whole Star Wars 30th anniversary thingamajig.)
• A not-so-exciting trailer of the upcoming Superman/Doomsday animated feature from the WB. Trailers for Direct-to-DVD releases are never very good, but I have a lot of faith in the DC cartoons so I’ll probably grab this one regardless.
• This Dane Cook/Jessica Alba sendoff of the classic John & Yoko Rolling Stone cover is just appalling, don’t you think?
• Amazingly, production on Starship Troopers 3 was kicked off recently under the auspices of director Ed Nuemeier. Amazing because I had no idea they made a Starship Troopers 2.
• Everybody seen the new Batsuit for the upcoming Dark Knight Returns by now, but here’s an interesting side-by-side comparison with the costume from Batman Begins.
• New Bond movie to be directed by Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Stranger than Fiction). Not exactly Paul Greengrass — which is who I would’ve picked if I could choose anyone — but at least his previous films didn’t suck.

Saw Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer yesterday, although not on purpose. (We were originally supposed to catch Arthur and the Invisibles at the French Film Festival at the Shang, but did not find the rather dismal 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes very encouraging. On the other hand, it’s been 13 years since Luc Besson made a decent movie; why do I even bother?)

Now, I should probably say that I didn’t think the first Fantastic Four was a total waste of time (unlike say, Spider-man III), although I need to qualify that further by saying that it was really due to extremely low expectations. Spider-man II was a phenomenal movie … very nearly my favorite comic films of all-time, so III was a major letdown. The Fantastic Four, meanwhile, have never quite been my cup of tea, and as such, I go into each FF movie expecting it to suck.

Don’t get me wrong though. Both FF movies were crap. I wouldn’t go out of my way to see either one again. However, they also didn’t make me want to jump out of my seat, rip my shirt apart, curse the Marvel universe, and run screaming out of the theater (again, like Spider-man III did).

If you’ve already seen the first FF, the sequel is more of the same. The FF is easily Marvel’s most archetypal superhero movie franchise. Loved and revered by their fans, impervious to emotional weakness, facing down world-threatening enemies on a daily basis … these guys are postcards with super-powers. In the movie’s overly-long opening scenes, we are reintroduced to the Fantastic Four at a random American airport. They’re signing autographs left and right while watching themselves on the news. Later, we see what is apparently Reed and Sue’s nth attempt to have a proper wedding ceremony without some new crisis erupting in some remote part of the world. It’s a media circus; there are thousands of fans waiting outside the Baxter Building for news. Of course (and we know this from the trailer, so I’m not spoiling anything), the Silver Surfer chooses this as the perfect moment to make an appearance and ruins everything.

As an aside: both Spidey III and FF II featured their principal characters dancing. Apparently it’s a newly-revived comics tradition, you know, like Batman used to do. For some reason though, I thought that Tobey Maguire’s dance number was absolutely horrific, while Ioan Gruffud’s was only mildly nauseating. (There’re those lower expectations again.)

A couple of minor, spoiler-laced comments:

1. The Silver Surfer likes making holes. Throughout most of the middle-third of this movie, the Surfer goes around making these huge 200-meter holes in the ground and generally laying waste to well-known landmarks. Why he does this is never adequately explained. I was under the impression that he was making giant tunnels to the center of the Earth to allow for easier access upon Galactus’ arrival but why were they not spewing magma then?

2. Galactus is a cloud. People who aren’t familiar with Galactus should probably know what he looks like in the comics:

Cool huh? And totally un-cloud-like. To be fair, there is one version of Galactus, used in the alternate-universe version of the Fantastic Four penned by Ellis & Millar (in the Ultimate Extinction series) in which Galactus is depicted as a hive-like alien race bent on destroying the Earth. Still not a sentient gas cloud, but a bit closer than the classical mega-robot Galactus.

I have a number of issues with the cloud Galactus, the most important being that it’s visually boring. There is no sense of dread seeing this massive gas cloud approach the Earth (it has about the same amount of dramatic tension as the killer ice in The Day After Tomorrow). The secondary issue is how far this really falls from the comic book mythology: Galactus is one of the 5 cosmic forces that bring balance to the universe. Like Shiva in Hinduism, Galactus is a destroyer. In this movie, there’s no clear reason for his (its) arrival, and no clear reason how the Surfer could become the herald of a gas cloud that doesn’t even communicate.

3. The Fantastic Torch. In a very peculiar showdown between Doom and the Human Torch, Johnny absorbs the combined powers of the entire team and becomes what I can only describe as “The Fantastic Torch.” This is a strange thing to do, and is totally audience-pandering; the movie fans love Chris Evans a bit too much, and the screenwriters capitalized on that fact shamelessly. I’m not saying it wasn’t interesting, but the motivation behind it was just a little too obvious for me to become completely comfortable with the decision.

Over all, I’d probably give this movie a 2.5 out of five. Kids in a certain age group will love it to death, just because it’s got cool fights and visual effects up the wazoo, and comic fans who aren’t total purists will probably be able to forgive its various misrepresentations. If you don’t fall into either of these two categories, my advice is to stay well away.

Thought it’d be interesting to do a quick visual comparison of the Fantastic Four’s Fantasticar in both its current comics and upcoming movie incarnations. Like the ubiquitous Batmobile, the Fantasticar went through a rather rigorous makeover (courtesy of Dodge motors) to get a Hollywood-friendly face on what was essentially a flying bathtub. It’ll be interesting to see exactly what they use this vehicle for in the movie, as it’s certainly not going to be capable to chasing down the Silver Surfer. (Accoding to the Dodge TV spot, the car can only do about 500mph.)