Special to MSN Movies
'Tis the season for blockbusters and tentpole extravaganzas to raise the temperature in your local multiplex. Wildly diverse species of sexy superheroes are out and about, flexing monster muscles, saving the world and rescuing damsels in distress. Summer screens blaze with all manner of terrifying apocalypse, threatening to end the human race and the planet we call home. Anticipate close encounters with rib-cracking hilarity and hair-raising horror -- and the brand of dramas that make you reassess everything you ever knew about human nature. True to tradition, Dreamworks and Pixar provide family-friendly fare, animations that celebrate the magical and the monstrously silly.
So check out our preview of Summer Movies, May through July, and, as always, keep your Ray-Bans peeled for cinematic wild cards, any one of which might turn out to be the sleeper of the season.
Hunks of Summer:
Men of Steel and Iron, Golden Boy, Kemo Sabe and "Crow" ... and One Hairy Wolverine
Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), that rare superhero blessed with brains and weisenheimer wit, shows his softer side in Iron Man 3 when Ben Kingsley's bad-to-the-bone Mandarin menaces Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow). Will the Man of Iron match Christopher Reeve's lovesick Man of Steel, who literally turned back time to save Lois Lane?
And more to the point, how will Zack Snyder's "clean reboot" (penned by Batman Begins scribe David S. Goyer) of Superman's origin story measure up to the 1978 version, such a deft mix of sweetness, humor and world-saving? Snyder's Man of Steel is Henry Cavill, a studly British stand-out in TV's The Tudors. (Poor Brandon Routh, touted in 2006 as the "new" Superman, was rejected.) Headlining a stellar cast—Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Amy Adams, Laurence Fishburne—can Cavill flex super thespian muscle?
Superman is as American as apple pie, and so is F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, embodiment of the elusive sometimes destructive nature of the American Dream. A new Great Gatsby comes to the screen courtesy of Baz Luhrmann, whose previous extravaganzas of doomed desire include Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet. Once Luhrmann's boyish Romeo, Leonardo DiCaprio seems perfectly cast as the ever-aspiring Gatsby, bewitched by golden girl Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) and her moneyed class. Trust Baz to deliver a jazzier vision of 1920s excess than the 1974 waxworks version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.
Another American pop-culture icon gets the "reboot" treatment in Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger. (Are all our movies sequels and remakes? Gore "Pirates of the Caribbean" Verbinski should know.) Armie Hammer is the mysterious masked man, playing second fiddle to Johnny Depp as Tonto—Jack Sparrow all gussied up as a Crow. (Tonto's bizarro winged headgear owes much to a painting, "I Am Crow," by a Native American artist.) Think frontier derring-do and wise-cracking camaraderie, just like on Verbinski's high seas.
While the Deppster heads out West, The Wolverine travels east, toward the rising sun and a coven of lethal samurai. Hugh Jackman buffs up for his sixth outing as hirsute hero brandishing scissorhands, half in love with death after the loss of Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). Look forward to erasing the cloying taste of saintly Jean Valjean with Logan's magnificently conflicted machismo. It's almost certainly our loss that writer-director Darren Aronovsky got replaced by James Mangold (Knight and Day); reportedly the helmer of Black Swan and The Wrestler turned in a script that fronted overmuch sex and violence.
Read on at http://movies.msn.com/movie-guide-summer/summer-hot-movies-page-one/story/feature/?ocid=mohfpS1L
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