Mash-up by Screen Rant's Mike Eisenberg
This is the weekend that the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times unload their summer movie preview packages.
Both are primarily bundles of profiles and interviews laced with extras — trailers and photos in the LAT, mostly, while, in the NYT, "insiders" (Erin Cressida Wilson, James Mangold, George Romero and Neil Jordan) pick films from the past that cry out "summer" and Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek look ahead to the season's most promising DVD releases.
Also in the NYT, Leah Rozen talks with Julia Roberts and others about Julia Roberts — Eat Pray Love is coming in August, and Amy Kaufman has more on the film in the LAT; Dennis Lim talks with Mark Wahlberg (The Other Guys) and Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are Alright); and Ella Taylor profiles Debra Granik, whose Sundance award-winner, Winter's Bone, sees a limited release in June.
Karen Durbin flags five "Breakthrough Performances" to watch out for: John Hawkes in Winter's Bone, Jonah Hill in Cyrus (more from Michael Ordoña in the LAT), Alexander Siddig in Cairo Time, Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom and Katie Aselton in The Freebie. The LAT's "Faces to Watch" are Josh Hutcherson in The Kids Are Alright (profiled by Patrick Kevin Day), Christopher Egan in Letters to Juliet (Day again) and Charlie Day in Going the Distance (Scott Sandell).
There are over two dozen storylets in the LAT's "Summer Movie Sneaks," among them but a few that may be of possible interest to readers of The Notebook. John Horn's sneak peek at Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, for example, simply because it's Cannes' choice for opening this year's edition; and The Envelope picks six "little films that could become Oscar favorites": Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child with Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Samuel L Jackson, David Levien and Brian Koppelman's Solitary Man with Michael Douglas, Jesse Eisenberg, Susan Sarandon, Mary-Louise Parker, Danny DeVito and Jenna Fischer, Neil Jordan's Ondine with Colin Farrell and Alicja Bachleda, Winter's Bone, The Kids Are Alright and Aaron Schneider's Get Low with Robert Duvall and Bill Murray.
More summer movie preview packages: Entertainment Weekly, Peter Hartlaub's compact but clip-sprinkled overview for the Houston Chronicle, the IMDb, Screen Rant and, for the Hollywood Reporter, Todd Longwell's look ahead to the hot weather festivals. More roundups'll be added to this entry as they appear.
Meantime, a couple of items in the Independent. Arifa Akbar: "Concern is high within Hollywood that World Cup fever, which is expected to grip most of Europe between 11 June and 11 July, will undermine box office sales at a time traditionally regarded as high season for cinemas."
And Geoffrey Macnab: "This summer, we'll see Stallone, Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger together on screen in The Expendables. Remakes of Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja and even a big-screen version of TV's The A-Team are in the works. Meanwhile, Stallone has already successfully re-branded Rambo and Rocky. So what is behind the revival of high-testosterone yarns about sweaty men with big muscles? Is it to do with compensating for the waning of US influence as a superpower? Is it a belated reaction to Bush's war on terror? Is this celebration of lawless individualism cinema's answer to the Tea Party protest movement? The answer is much simpler." And not as fun as it might have been: "Audiences are still looking for the same adrenalin-filled escapism that the best action movies have always provided."
Listening (3'35"). On NPR, Bob Mondello explains why May is the new June and March is the new May.
The films featured in the "Ultimate 2010 Summer Movie Trailer" are Inception, Iron Man 2, Robin Hood, Predators, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, Salt, Knight and Day, The A-Team, MacGruber, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Killers, Splice, The Other Guys, The Karate Kid, Shrek Forever After, Toy Story 3, Despicable Me, The Last Airbender, The Expendables, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Dinner for Schmucks, Get Him to the Greek, Grown Ups and Sex and the City 2.
Updates, 5/3: Here in The Notebook, Neil Young presents an "entirely subjective rundown of the 20+ most-anticipated British films scheduled to have their first public screenings between April 20th and December 31st 2010."
Brad Brevet previews "60 Movies to Watch Once It's Hot."
Update, 5/4: PopMatters is spending the week previewing the summer.
Update, 5/5: Time Out New York picks "summer's 30 must-sees."
Update, 5/6: For IFC, Stephen Saito previews the season's independent slate as well as the releases that'll be "Anywhere But a Movie Theater."
Updates, 5/7: The Boston Globe's package.
Listening. At the AV Club, Nathan Rabin, Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps discuss what's coming our way.
Update, 5/9: Time Out New York writes up its "30 best summer blockbusters ever."
Update, 5/15: Shawn Levy's "big fat summer movie guide" in the Oregonian.
Update, 5/18: Jonathan Kiefer at the Faster Times: "Summer Movies 2010: A Superfluous Preview, with Easy Quips, Odd Omissions and a Pervasive Sense of Unwitting PR Flackery."
For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @theauteursdaily (RSS).