Coming Attractions

One of the great benefits of being a teacher is having your summer off. Besides sleeping a lot, working in the garden and doing some travel, it's a great time to catch up on some movies. So far this year, I've seen the 3 big movies I wanted to see along with a few others. Watchmen was great, Star Trek was even better and Terminator Salvation was on par with the first two movies in that series. The summer movie season is just getting started though and here's a list of what I'm looking forward to seeing, in no particular order (click on the movie title to watch the trailer)...

1. Moon- It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. It is a lonely job, made harder by a broken satellite that allows no live communications home. Taped messages are all Sam can send and receive. Thankfully, his time on the moon is nearly over, and Sam will be reunited with his wife, Tess, and their three-year-old daughter, Eve, in only a few short weeks. Finally, he will leave the isolation of “Sarang,” the moon base that has been his home for so long, and he will finally have someone to talk to beyond “Gerty,” the base’s well-intentioned, but rather uncomplicated computer.


The trailer for Moon

2. Surrogates- Starring Bruce Willis, Surrogates is set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate robots, a cop (Willis) is forced to leave his home for the first time in years in order to investigate the murders of others’ surrogates.

3. 9- This Time Burton feature is perhaps my most anticipated movie of the summer and second to only The Road for the year. When 9 (voice of Elijah Wood) first comes to life, he finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world where all humans are gone, and it is only by chance that he discovers a small community of others like him taking refuge from fearsome machines that roam the earth intent on their extinction. Despite being the neophyte of the group, 9 convinces the others that hiding will do them no good. They must take the offensive if they are to survive, and they must discover why the machines want to destroy them in the first place. As they'll soon come to learn, the very future of civilization may depend on them.


The trailer for 9

4. Public Enemies- In the action-thriller Public Enemies, acclaimed filmmaker Michael Mann directs Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Academy Award® winner Marion Cotillard in the story of legendary Depression-era outlaw John Dillinger (Depp)—the charismatic bank robber whose lightning raids made him the number one target of J. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling FBI and its top agent, Melvin Purvis (Bale), and a folk hero to much of the downtrodden public.

5. Life is Hot in Cracktown- LIFE IS HOT IN CRACKTOWN shows the gritty, hard realities of a neighborhood, as well as the struggling, proud people who try to survive them everyday. Marybeth (Kerry Washington) is a pre-op transsexual working as a prostitute and living with her lover, Benny, a small time burglar. In spite of their lines of work, they live a somewhat normal life as a married couple. Marybeth works the streets in the hopes of saving enough money for her final sex change operation, so then she and Benny can be married...


Trailer for Life is Hot in Cracktown

6. The Hangover- Going to go see this tomorrow. Two days before his wedding, Doug and his three friends drive to Las Vegas for a blow-out bachelor party they’ll never forget. But, in fact, when the three groomsmen wake up the next morning, they can’t remember a thing. For some reason, they find a tiger in the bathroom and a six-month-old baby in the closet of their suite at Caesars Palace. The one thing they can’t find is Doug. With no clue as to what transpired and little time to spare, the trio must retrace their hazy steps and all their bad decisions in order to figure out where things went wrong and hopefully get Doug back to L.A. in time to walk down the aisle.

7. Sherlock Holmes- In a dynamic new portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous characters, “Sherlock Holmes” sends Holmes and his stalwart partner Watson on their latest challenge. Revealing fighting skills as lethal as his legendary intellect, Holmes will battle as never before to bring down a new nemesis and unravel a deadly plot that could destroy the country.

8. Inglorious Basterds- In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers

9. Antichrist- A grieving couple retreat to ’Eden’, their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse…

10. The Road- This is perhaps the best book I've ever read and certainly the darkest so I have high hopes for the film that opens in the late fall. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and, when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing: just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.

Trailer for The Road