No need to look down at your shoes to see what sort of funky mess you've just stepped in. That overpowering smell is simply the fragrance of the season.
Call it Multiplex Summer — a scent as inevitable and unavoidable as the next Adam Sandler movie (which, happily, we won't have to contend with until this summer is well past us). It's the smell of rubber, leather and vinyl-clad superheroes outrunning billowing balls of fiery death. The smell of outrageously hammy or half-baked live-action cartoons and lavish, impeccably crafted special-effects extravaganzas. The smell of the industry's biggest stars being removed from mothballs and trotted out across the silver screen one more time. The smell of sequels, more sequels and sequels to sequels to sequels. Most of all, it's the smell of money burning as Hollywood once again ups its own ante in an apparently endless cycle of manufacturing bigger and, well, bigger spectacles for this very special time of year.
Four or five safe bets to watch for are the Sundance award-winners Hedwig and the Angry Inch and The Deep End, the acclaimed Japanese psychological thrillers Audition and Cure, and Ghost World — a very different sort of superhero tale from director Terry Zigoff (Crumb). Those films may just turn out to be among the best, but what would summer be without our annual guide in which we look at all the rest? There's a lot to look at, so let's get started. …
May 18: Shrek Yeah, we know, it rhymes with drek and there's all those weird, ugly, little animated guys running around in medieval garb like refugees from The Princess Bride. Still, there's reason to be hopeful about this animated adventure-fantasy from DreamWorks. For one, Mike Myers is on board as the voice and personality of the titular lime-green ogre. Even more tantalizing is that the movie is said to be filled with nasty little jabs at the competition over at Disney.
Moulin Rouge As anyone who saw William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet knows, director Baz Luhrmann specializes in super-stylish films brimming with glamour, energy and a wicked-smart postmodern sensibility. Luhrmann's latest, a lavish musical set in Impressionist-era Paris, looks almost too good for its summer slot. Even with a scantily clad Nicole Kidman swinging from a trapeze, there's a distinct and depressing possibility that, if the film proves too taxing for summer audiences, Moulin Rouge will simply get lost in the pre-Pearl Harbor shuffle.
Angel Eyes Sixth Sense-lite with Jennifer Lopez falling in love with the mysterious stranger who saves her life. The trailers have already given it all away.
May 25: Pearl Harbor Bombs, Bay (as in Michael) and Bruckhemier (as in Jerry). The big guns of summer are here, with this latest spectacle from the director of Armageddon and the producer of just about every successful action movie ever made. Ben Affleck stars as a World War II pilot romancing a nurse in between missions. By far the biggest buzz and probably the most typically summery of this year's batch of summer movies.
June 1: What's the Worst That Could Happen? A punch line waiting to happen. Danny De Vito is a rich target for bungling criminals Martin Lawrence and John Leguizamo.
The Animal If Deuce Bigalow made your skin crawl, wait until you take a gander at Rob Schneider's latest, in which the comedian plays a guy who has the organs of animals transplanted into him. We wish we were making this up, but we're not.
June 8: Evolution Ghostbusters in a brand new suit, with David Duchovny leading a quirky trio of reluctant heroes pledged to save the world from a bunch of slimy creatures. Ivan Reitman, "Mr. Who You Gonna Call" himself, directs.
Swordfish Lots of firepower, lots of stuff blowing up and lots of things going very, very fast in this latest action flick from the director of Gone in Sixty Seconds. John Travolta is at the center of it all, attempting to redeem himself after Battlefield Earth.
Atlantis Jules Verne-ish sounding animated adventure about a group of explorers who discover a civilization beneath the sea. Michael J. Fox, who seems to enjoy this sort of thing, supplies the hero's voice.
June 15: Tomb Raider One of the movies we're most looking forward to this summer, this based-on-a-videogame project had the good sense to secure Angelina Jolie in the in-your-face lead role. Expect lots of goth darkness, lots of bad behavior and no apologies.
Sexy Beast In the wake of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels comes this edgy and offbeat English heist movie starring Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone (The War Zone). Sundance audiences ate it up.
June 22: Dr. Dolittle 2 The doctor is in, along with all his furry, foul-mouthed friends. Lord knows why, but Eddie Murphy reprises his role as the man who talks to the animals. June 29: Baby Boy Another sequel, of sorts, but one that might, just might, actually be interesting. A decade after the fact, director John Singleton revisits the scene of the crime of his groundbreaking Boyz N the Hood.
A.I. Right at the top of this summer's Holy Trinity of Buzz (along with Pearl Harbor and that ape thang), A.I. is based on a long gestating idea by Stanley Kubrick — although, from the looks of the trailers, you'll be lucky to find a shred of Kubrick left. After Kubrick's death, Steven Spielberg took over this project about a little robot boy who wants to be real, and the sweet, slick, sanitized look of A.I. appears to now be pure E.T.
July 4: Scary Movie 2 If at first you make a whole lot of money, try, try again. More horror movie spoofin' from the Wayans.
July 6: Kiss of the Dragon Jet Li kicks ass. Lots of ass. Do you need to know anything else?
July 13: The Score Yet another heist movie, and one with a wimpy director (Frank Oz) on board as well, but with a cast to die for: Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Marlon Brando.
July 18: Jurassic Park 3 They're baaaaaaack. The third installment of this popular but already stale franchise adds Tea Leoni and William H. Macy to the mix, along with a new creature or two. It's all about the special effects, though, and to no one's surprise, they're reportedly better than ever.
July 20: Crazy/Beautiful Romance blossoms between WASPy Kirsten Dunst and a Hispanic classmate. A PG-13 love letter with a message from your politically correct pals at Disney.
Made Swingers team of Vince Vaughan and Jon Favreau team up again in a comedy that also turns out to be — surprise! — the season's umpteenth heist movie.
July 27: Planet of the Apes This is the one you really want to see. After James Cameron and Oliver Stone bolted, Tim Burton settled into the director's chair, which is sure to make for a very different Apes than anyone might have imagined (and certainly radically different from the original). On the down side, Mark Wahlberg is about as bland a lead as we could have imagined, and Helena Bonham Carter just looks way too cute and Burton-stylized for her (or our) own good. We're still excited, though.
Aug. 3: Rush Hour 2 Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker reprise their roles as a mismatched and reluctant crime-fighting team. Add Crouching Tiger's luminous Zhang Ziyi to the mix, and this might be fun.
Aug. 10: American Pie 2 Can the teen comedy that set the mold for gross-out humor live up to its own, er, high standards? The only thing that set the original American Pie apart from a latter-day Porky's was the fact that Pie was actually often quite funny. That'll be tougher this time around, with the element of surprise gone.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back Another sequel, of sorts, but without the explosions, the giant reptiles or the talking animals. Well, maybe the talking animals. Indie icon Kevin Smith claims to be laying to rest his Clerks crew with this last fling into his fabled New Jersey landscape.
Osmosis Jones The Farrelly Brothers' latest re-imagines Fantastic Voyage as a trip through the gnarlier parts of Bill Murray's innards. The trailers looks oddly bland, but that could be misleading. These are the guys who gave us Kingpin, after all.
Curse of the Jade Scorpion Woody Allen's latest comedy, starring Helen Hunt, Dan Aykroyd and — yes! — Elizabeth Berkley. Woody does Showgirls?
Aug. 17: Rollerball If Planet of Apes can strike gold, why not another sci-fi cult fave from yesteryear?
Captain Corelli's Mandolin Expect pretty scenery, pretty faces and lots of big, big emotions in this romantic tragedy starring Nic Cage and Penelope Cruz.
Aug. 24: John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars Do we really need this once-interesting filmmaker's name before the title of every silly little movie he does? Carpenter claims this one's an old-fashioned shoot-em-up western set in outer space.
Aug. 31: All That Glitters If you've made it all the way to the end of the summer movie season, sanity intact, you deserve a reward. How about a big, fat helping of camp with Mariah Carey making her big screen acting debut as — what else? — a tough but sensitive up-and-coming singer.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2001.