With the trees in full bloom and school kids getting antsy, the summer season is nearly upon us. But how to spend the year’s happiest months? At the movies, of course. To help you sort out the slate of films both big and small on offer this year, Vanity Fair critics Richard Lawson and K. Austin Collins talk through what they’re most intrigued by—and perhaps dreading the most.
Richard: First off, I want to say welcome, Kameron! I’m very excited to have your sharp critical voice at V.F. And I’m excited that I get to have another film critic to gripe and debate and maybe argue with!
Now that Avengers: Infinity War has made more in a few moments than either you or I make in a year (I’m assuming; I don’t know what kind of deal you got), I suppose that means summer movie season has arrived. Though another big Marvel movie, Black Panther, already debuted in February. So was that the start of summer movie season? Does such a thing even exist anymore?
Lately, the movie calendar seems to work like this: January is for dumping leftover stuff or doing a slow rollout for an awards movie after a December qualifying run. And then from February on—with lulls in early April and late August—there’s a steady stream of big tentpole movies and some scattered indies until awards movies and darker stuff starts up again around September. That’s half the year devoted to superheroes and sequels and spin-offs. (Not to mention the superheroes and sequels and spin-offs that come to us around the holidays.) So perhaps for the purposes of a “summer movie preview,” we should go by the traditional social calendar and determine that the summer season officially starts Memorial Day weekend.
By that metric, this year’s season kicks off with Solo: A Star Wars Story (5/25), a movie with a troubled production and only mild buzz that could cast a pallor over the revived, robust Star Wars franchise—which could suggest fatigue or oversaturation. Then again, reviews have been pretty solid—so it could be a hit despite all the early negative press, and the machine will keep churning on like normal.
Honestly? I’d be happy if it were a hit. Even though we have probably had too much Star Wars in the past few years, it’s the one franchise—well, X-Men, too, to an extent—that I’m still eager to engage with. I like Alden Ehrenreich and Emilia Clarke and Thandie Newton. And I like Han Solo! And so, yes, I liked the movie. It certainly helped that I saw the film when it premiered in Cannes—the French Riviera can lend a certain sparkle to most any movie.
Now that I’ve made you jealous (gotta haze the new kid), Kameron, what are you excited to see this summer? And do you tend to like “summer movies” as a nebulous genre?
Kam: It’s funny—before working full-time as a critic, I’d stopped getting excited for summer movie season. My childhood was all about the big, splashy summer blockbuster: I delight at the memory of my jittery excitement over Independence Day’s “ID4” (signifying its July 4 release day) ad campaign, which spanned to even Macintosh computers. And I remember the distinct pleasure of summer movie season as a season—walking out of the muggy suburban night into the cool pleasure, and promise, of a movie theater.
As an adult, I’d begun to feel very “in this economy?” about it all. Too many blockbusters turned out not to be worth my $15—let alone my two and a half hours. That’s partially a symptom of a closed-purse-string approach to adulthood, but it’s more so a matter of increased options. “Summer movies” became something I could pay about a third as much to rent later that fall—and at least curb my boredom and disappointment with a friend, on our couches, abetted by a fridge full of beer. Lately, it’s the summer’s pre-Oscar season indie fare—ostensibly less directly geared toward award campaigns—that’s gotten me out of the house.
This summer, though, it’s the blockbusters I’m mostly excited for—probably because it’s a summer of sequels, largely to properties I already like or love. Will they all be great movies? We’ll sooner see an impeachment. But Incredibles 2 (6/15) ought to be pretty cute; sort of hard to mess that one up. I stand by my affection for Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man—as the director of The Break-Up, Down with Love, and Bring It On, he’s a continual favorite—and hope Ant-Man and the Wasp (7/6) proves me right, though as a rule I don’t let myself get too excited about Marvel Studios fare anymore, for fear of feeling disproportionately deflated afterward. Unfriended: Dark Web (7/20) is probably—hopefully—a goofy grime-fest. I’m not sure Oceans 8 (6/8) needed to be good for me to want to bathe in it—but I suspect people will love it.
And two actors in my “If they’re in it, I’m seeing it” popcorn movie pantheon—Denzel Washington and Dwayne Johnson—are hitting us with The Equalizer 2 (7/20) and Skyscraper (7/13)—the latter of which isn’t a sequel, but may as well be Rampage 2, so far as I’m concerned.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (6/22), meanwhile, will probably be the movie event of the summer, at least per the box office. I wish it the best. But my money’s on Mission: Impossible — Fallout (7/27) for the movie of the summer. It’s the latest entry in the only current film franchise that, for my money, consistently continues to surprise, delight, and re-invent itself. Tom Cruise is still a movie star; give me the movie that makes me forget The Mummy ever happened.
Which is to say nothing of the summer’s buzzy, boutique, but still crucial releases: Sorry to Bother You (7/6), Hereditary (6/8), Under the Silver Lake (6/22) . . . is it just me, Richard, or could we be in for a pretty satisfying summer at the movies? Summer movie season has, for me, become synonymous with indistinguishable, high-budget drags—but extending the season into February, as you’ve said, feels like an occasion to make the actual summer releases stand out, like they used to. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
Richard: Your evocation of the magical, almost transgressive childhood feeling of walking across a mall parking lot on the way to see a movie on a summer night—a weeknight, no less—made me feel nostalgic for my youth, which then made me remember that Eighth Grade (7/13) is coming out this summer. Though the film isn’t a rose-colored reminiscence of early adolescence by any interpretation (in fact, it’s often downright brutal to watch), writer-director Bo Burnham (yes, him!) manages to steer his film away from becoming a Todd Solondz-y miserablist slog. No knock against Todd Solondz-y miserablist slogs—they’re just not exactly what I’m in the mood for this summer.
What I am in the mood for this summer is a Glenn Close performance that could have the glint of awards potential, which is what I’m told we’ll find in The Wife (8/3), a drama about writing and marriage that earned Close rave reviews from the Toronto Film Festival last year. Normally, early August counter-programming is reserved for a Meryl Streep dramedy of some kind, but judging by the Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again (7/20) trailer, Meryl’s gone missing off the coast of Kalokairi. So a Glenn drama will have to step in this year. I’m fine with that.
A shark movie essentially invented the modern blockbuster, so it’s fitting that in the half-century since, Hollywood has occasionally paid dutiful homage to the water-dwelling beasts that gifted them summer. In 1999, it was Samuel L. Jackson getting chomped on in Deep Blue Sea. Just two years ago, Blake Lively was menaced by a shark while befriending a seagull in 2016’s greatest epic, The Shallows. And this year, Jason Statham does battle with The Meg (8/10), a mega-shark (hence the name) who is probably the true star of this expensive, August-y, American-Chinese co-production. The latter dog days of summer are sometimes a dumping ground for blockbusters doomed to failure—anyone remember last year’s major August release, The Dark Tower?—but Statham can tell the arch from the truly awful, so I have wary confidence in The Meg. And anyway, how could Jon Turteltaub, the man who gave us 3 Ninjas, While You Were Sleeping, and National Treasure, do us wrong?
One big summer movie we haven’t talked about yet is Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (8/10), which I just saw at Cannes, where it won second prize. Kam, you recently wrote about the 20th anniversary of the Spike Lee summer-release classic He Got Game, so I’m curious what your expectations are for his new film. Should it even be a summer movie? Lee has said he always wanted an August release, to sync up with the anniversary of the Charlottesville protests and because he just likes putting movies out in the summer. But could BlacKkKlansman get lost in the shuffle somehow—or register a bit too early for the Oscar race?
Kam: You raise an interesting question about BlacKkKlansman, Richard—should it be coming out in the summer? I almost want to set aside the question of the Oscar race, which in this case seems unpredictable for too many reasons. With the Oscar success of Get Out (a February release), who really even knows how Oscar voters think in terms of calendar anymore—especially when it comes to zeitgeist-y projects (which, it’s clear, Lee’s movie intends to be). But also, simply: who even knows what Spike Lee means to the Academy? Particularly on the occasion a movie as bluntly satirical as this one. If they didn’t heap love on Malcolm X . . .
It’s funny, though—when I think of Spike Lee, I think of the heat, the sweat, the stultifying sense of “shit’s about to hit the fan” pervading a film like Do the Right Thing. It’s a heat that courses through plenty of his films—not least of them BlacKkKlansman, which as you’ve pointed out has a release pegged to a significant anniversary. So if anything, when but the summer should a Spike Lee joint be dropping?
Intriguingly, BlacKkklansman is not the only polemical black indie on our plates this summer. Sorry To Bother You—probably the most talked-about movie out of Sundance this year—and Carlos López Estrada’s Blindspotting (7/20), an Oakland-set story of gentrification and police brutality made in collaboration with the rapping Hamilton star Daveed Diggs, are both on their way. And by the time those drop, we’ll have gotten the glossy, cryptocurrency-era SuperFly (6/15) remake, which—if it’s true to its blaxploitation roots—has polemical potential, too. The trailer doesn’t make me think so, but who knows; I’d love to get more fiery, socially pointed genre thrills in front of our faces sometime soon.
’Til then, there’s at least this healthy serving of black cinema. It’s not often the summer is so crowded with black movies of this ilk; you get the sense the Selma–Moonlight–Get Out wave—to say nothing of Straight Outta Compton, Hidden Figures, and the like—has really taken root. It’s exciting.
Less exciting (for me, anyway): Sicario: Day of the Soldado (6/29). Man, I don’t know. I’m not so beholden to Denis Villeneuve’s slick, gothically procedural original, from 2015, and I’m always here for a dark Benicio Del Toro role. I have confidence that Taylor Sheridan’s script will pack some satisfying punch. But doesn’t the whole thing, from the title onward, seem a little goofy? Then again, isn’t summer a pretty swell time for well-made, brand-name, but-not-totally prestige-y prestige movies? Like Oscar movies, without the stuffy ambition.
Richard: Yeah, the Sicario sequel took the most cartoony, and thus least interesting, part of the first film (which is stylish but frustratingly unthoughtful) and made a whole movie about it. It’s a no from me. Speaking of well-made, not-totally prestige-y prestige movies, I’m similarly not jazzed about Under the Silver Lake, another Cannes entry this year. The talented writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s L.A. noir follow-up to his moody and captivating horror film It Follows just didn’t work on me; its Angeleno quirk didn’t do enough to drown out the irksome nature of its design. But plenty of people have liked it, and it features a great performance from Andrew Garfield, making the most of being in a summer movie in which he’s not wearing a Spidey suit.
The studio movie I’m probably most curious about this summer is the Warner Bros. adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians (8/17), the first American studio film since 2005’s Memoirs of a Geisha to feature an Asian lead cast. The trailer makes the movie look like saucy fun, giving us fabulous clothes, Michelle Yeoh as an imperious matriarch, and the welcome comedy stylings of Awkwafina, who between this and Ocean’s 8 could have a pretty good summer. Also it must be said that the prospect of spending two hours in some air conditioning with Henry Golding doesn’t sound half bad.
Something else to see on a hot summer night is, uh, Hot Summer Nights (7/27), an A24 release starring 2017 It boy Timothée Chalamet. In theory I like the idea of a Cape Cod coming-of-age movie with a drug-thriller twist (if you’re not tired of Cape Cod coming-of-age stories, please do buy All We Can Do Is Wait, in stores now), though how could any Chalamet movie about one steamy teen summer ever live up to Call Me By Your Name?
I’ll leave you with a few more questions, Kam. One: do you want to see puppets swear and have sex in The Happytime Murders (8/17)? Two: was anyone clamoring to see Christopher Robin (8/3) as an adult? And three: how on earth is a movie starring Kevin Spacey called Billionaire Boys Club (8/3) actually getting released?
Kam: Phew. Firstly, I’m with you on Crazy Rich Asians—there’s something Vanderpumpish about the title alone, which excites me. (That seems like a low standard; I assure you it’s a high one.) I think “Michelle Yeoh as an imperious matriarch” is a dream premise. I hope she beats someone up—give me a “crossover event” I actually care about, for once.
I approach Christopher Robin as a fan of one of its writers, Alex Ross Perry, a New York indie filmmaker of note, and an intriguing choice for this project. I can’t help but be curious about what the guy who wrote and directed the mildly incestuous sibling comedy The Color Wheel and the Phillip Roth–spoofing Listen Up Philip can lend to the Hundred Acre Wood. I only just today saw the trailer. Initial thought: Is Pooh . . . stoned?
Which is a question I also have for the muppets of Happytime Murders, but in that case I think I know the answer. Am I excited for vulgar muppets? A limited joke, but sure. The real question is whether I’m excited for vulgar Melissa McCarthy, and the answer there is 1,000 times yes. She’s one of my favorite comic actors now working, but I have to admit, too many of her movies (including this year’s Life of the Party) seem to deflate her magic a little. When she’s freewheeling, profane, performing off the cuff—as in scenes from Judd Apatow’s This Is 40—she’s off the charts. Otherwise, she gets a bit hemmed in. Happytime Murders looks like it’s going to be the McCarthy I love.
As for Kevin Spacey . . . there’s the rub, isn’t it? More than any other “season” of movies I can think of, we treasure summer movies for their pure entertainment value—for their ability to convince us to relinquish the sunshine and summer air for a few hours in favor of getting chummy with a bunch of strangers who still kind of reek of old sweat. But one of the lessons of the #MeToo movement and parallel zeitgeists has been the cost of that entertainment. The fact that this can distract us from the pure pleasure of the movies is much less important, of course, than the political accomplishments of those movements—but it’s true that many of us can’t watch Kevin Spacey or other actors’ films without this context nagging at us from offscreen. Summer movies can do their best to distract us from that, bit by bit. But they can no longer totally outrun it.
Red, White, Blue
Behind the summer-y patriotism of its title lies a heady espionage novel. (Author Lea Carpenter also co-wrote the screenplay for Mile 22, a film about the C.I.A.’s Special Activities Division directed by Peter Berg, out later this summer.) Red, White, Blue (Knopf) traces the lives of a C.I.A. officer and a young woman confronting her late father’s complicated past. For an author whose end-of-book note reads simply, “This is a work of fiction. No one I interviewed during the course of my research disclosed classified information,” Carpenter provides highly realistic details about recruitment, the Agency’s relationship with the media, and life as a C.I.A. officer. “At any one time, you will have 5 to 10 different mobile phones. . . . One of those phones is the one that may ring if there’s a bomb threat. One is the one that rings if an asset is in trouble,” the protagonist says, adding, “A table full of phones is not a life.” (Amazon.com)
Photo: Courtesy of Random House LLC.
Kudos
Award-winning novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk closes out her autofictional trilogy (the first two installments, Outline and Transit, were published in 2014 and 2016, respectively) with Kudos (FSG), which finds its narrator on her way to Europe to speak at a literary festival. Characteristically, the novel is propelled by its narrator’s ability to draw out stories from the strangers and acquaintances she runs into. A fellow passenger on the plane details the emotional distances in his family; an interviewer describes the demise of her close friend’s marriage. There is commentary on art, the personal vs. political, and the state of literature: a woman on the board of the literary festival muses that “the unstoppable juggernaut of commercial literary success pressed on, though she had the sense that the marriage between the two principles—commerce and literature—was not in the best of health.” (Amazon.com)
Photo: Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
