Think of the world as one big condo and you’ve got An Inconvenient Truth (June 2). First-time director Davis Guggenheim documents Al Gore’s slide show on global warming. Although it gives new meaning to the term “graphic entertainment,” Gore’s show is not as dry as you might expect and the message is a lot scarier.
Scarier than the Antichrist, who’s resurrected 30 years later in this remake of Richard Donner’s The Omen (June 6, or 6/6/06). John Moore (Flight of the Phoenix) sticks to the original’s gleefully hammy and perverse tale of a guy (Liev Schreiber in the Gregory Peck role) who thanks to some hideous and ingenious accidents discovers that his little adopted boy is Satan. Julia Stiles, Mia Farrow, and David Thewlis help out.
How quaint to find in the wake of a documentary about the destruction of the environment and a tale of the Apocalypse a cute, hugely budgeted Pixar animation starring the culprit most likely responsible for both. In Toy Story maven John Lasseter’s Cars (June 9), Owen Wilson gives voice to an arrogant racing car who finds himself leading the simple life among redneck pick-ups and other gas guzzlers. Paul Newman and Bonnie Hunt also give voice.
These movies make you want to fight back, don’t they? Take heart from Jack Black’s Mexican cook in Nacho Libre (June 16), who wrestles on the side to raise funds for an orphanage. Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) directs. Or Adam Sandler in Click (June 23), which takes the TV-remote scene in Being There to heart and uses it to reprise Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty. Kate Beckinsale, Sean Astin, and Christopher Walken also star; Frank Coraci (The Wedding Singer) directs.
As long as we can hold out until Superman Returns (June 30), maybe we’ll be okay. AWOL from X-Men, Bryan Singer revives the franchise with newcomer Brandon Routh as the superhero and Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor.
JULY
To be sure, there’s nothing like the mindlessly fun special effects of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (July 7), Gore Verbinski’s follow-up to the 2003 buried treasure, with Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, and newcomer Stellan Skarsgård, to put one’s mind at ease. Even so, I can’t help thinking that there’s something going on I don’t know about. Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (July 7) won’t help matters. Done in the same creepy live animation style as Waking Life (and those irritating investment ads), it stars Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and Robert Downey Jr. as denizens of drug-war universe where nothing and no one is as they seem.
Neither does Ivan Reitman’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend (July 14) promise much relief. It’s bad enough that Luke Wilson breaks up with Uma Thurman, but then he discovers she has a super-powered secret identity and is determined to make his life miserable.
What happened to the simple pleasures of boy meets girl? In M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water (July 21), Bryce Dallas Howard plays a water nymph whom Paul Giamatti finds in his swimming pool. Didn’t any of these people see Bryce’s dad’s Splash?
