Summer Movies I Hope Don't Suck - 2012 Part 1

Ah... spring time.  The month of April is nearly over, and a boy's fancy turns toward those things that all boys dream of when spring is ending and summer is on the doorstep.  Movies.  What did you think I was going to say?

 Last year on my old blog, I wrote a summer preview called, predictably, "Summer Movies I Hope Don't Suck."  It was a smash hit!  The page hits were off the scale.  Ok, they were off the scale if the scale only went from one to eight, but still!  Nine hits on one article?  This sort of audience response demanded a repeat.  And so here is "Summer Movies I Hope Don't Suck - 2012."

A bit of incidental trivia: last year I wrote this post on April 29.  Cool, huh?




The Raven (April 27)



Yes, technically this one is already out, but I don't think this breaks the rules of a preview post, since I haven't seen it yet.  Why am I including it in this list?  Because it looks kinda cool to me.  I prefer the writings of H.P. Lovecraft over those of Edgar Allen Poe, but you gotta admit that Poe had some spooky stuff.

I still remember reading "The Cask of Amontillado" in Junior High.  I didn't get a lot of the language back then, but the idea of a guy being buried alive in a cellar?  Creepy fun.  So when I saw that a movie was coming out that purported to have Poe dealing with various murders taken from his own works, I figured - hey, I'm there.

Probability of suckage: Well, this is a tough one.  For me, as someone who would have seen this one over the past weekend if I wasn't so poor, the possibility of it being bad is irrelevant.  But based on the results of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, I can see how a film like this might suck.  I'd have to say...  30% possibility of suckage.  Yes, let's call it 30%.

Probability of seeing it anyway: I think I made that one clear enough already.  I'm seeing it.  Unfortunately it probably won't be until it is in the cheap seats.  It sucks to be poor.  That's the true suckage, as it were.


The Avengers (May 4)



Hmmm...  this one has last year all over it.  After all, we had Thor, and Captain America last year.  Luckily this one doesn't have Ryan Reynolds in it.  Although I gotta admit, The Green Lantern was a bit better than I speculated it would be.  Not so good that I'd watch it more than once.  Or maybe again if it was on TV and there was nothing better to watch.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, The Avengers.  Well, it looks fun and silly, but not worth a ton of cash required to see it in the big theater.  Except I might pony up big screen dollars to watch Scarlet Johansson do her thing.  I'm only human, after all.

It has Robert Downey Jr. in it as Iron Man.  That alone may save it from totally sucking.  Not that Iron Man 2 was as good as the first one, but I'd probably watch it again instead of last year's sleep-inducing Thor.  And who's this guy with the bow and arrows?  Hmmm... 

Probability of suckage: Let me see.  Iron Man gets a deduction in the suck factor, but then you add in Thor and that tips the scales a bit, divide by the number of big actors in this thing, add in the Hulk (that green rage thing is always cool, even if they can't decide on somebody to play him consistently)... carry the two...  add in some differential equations (whatever those are)...  I'd say.  It's 50-50.  Flip a coin.  It might suck, it might not.

Probability of seeing it anyway: Yes, but not unless my wife begs me to see it in the regular theater.  Otherwise, I'm a sucker for superhero movies.  So I'd probably go to the cheap seats and see The Avengers.


Dark Shadows (May 11)



Johnny Depp as a vampire in the happy 70s with whats-her-face as an evil swingin' witch and lots of tongue-in-cheek humor?  It could be worse.  It could be somebody else playing Barnabas Collins.

I'd actually heard of the TV series this one came from, though I must admit, I've never seen it.  From what I've heard, this was one of the first attempts to make a vampire into a relate-able character.  Anne Rice's book "Interview with the Vampire" was a few years out still, and vamps prior to the 1980s were typically more of the evil blood sucking Dracula-type than they were personable and soulful.  I'd venture that Bram Stoker - who did not invent the vampire, by the way, but can be credited for really kicking the vampire/Gothic horror tale into the world's consciousness - would roll over in his grave at books like the "Twilight" series and shows like The Vampire Diaries.  But maybe he'd be down with it, just the same.  But I can almost guarantee vampire fiction adherents of the pre-twentieth century wouldn't be.  Ok, I'm getting off on another tangent here.  Back to the review.

Based on the trailer alone, I think this one looks entertaining.  It has the potential to end up being really dumb.  1993's Adams Family Values dumb, if you can believe it.  But Depp does have that certain charm that helps to save so many movies that he has been attached to that would otherwise, in all probability, have gone straight to video after a week or two in the box office.  Can Depp do the deed here?  We'll see.

Probability of suckage: I'm gonna give it a 40% chance of suckage.  The TV commercials I've been seeing make me want to go catch it, but the full trailer had a few moments of this could be really a stinker if they weren't careful.  Such as that whole "vampire on witch rolling around the room prior to sex" scene. 

Probability of seeing it anyway:  Unless my wife wants to see it on the big screen and we have the money for such an excursion, I'd say this one is cheap seats on a hot summer night with nothing better going on.  Or Redbox. 


Battleship (May 18)



Ah crap.  I was planning to go to Hawaii someday, but if there are evil aliens out there off shore who are going to come up out of the ocean, just as a U.S. naval task force is doing war games out there (conveniently enough), and start that whole Transformers-blowing-stuff-up thing, I'm just going to have to go to Bermuda instead.  Nothing bad ever happens there.

So they couldn't make another Transformers movie in enough time to release it for this summer, and somebody was just begging for their insurmountable alien robot fix...  And thus we get Battleship.  Oh, and why even call it Battleship?  If there are battleships in this movie, I'm going to throw my popcorn at the screen.  The U.S. stopped using battleships in the '90s after Desert Storm.  And even then they were pulled out of retirement to deliver sixteen inch shells against Saddam Hussein's forces in Kuwait.  The Navy doesn't have enough money for anything, let alone bringing the Missouri class out of mothballs to fight aliens.  Then again, if aliens came out of the ocean, I think the Navy would be throwing garbage scows at them in an effort to thwart the menace.

I love the fact that the trailer has to tell you that this is a movie from the Hasbro people, the same people who brought you Transformers.  I never would have guessed.  Hey Hasbro, go back to making board games and stop dabbling in the film industry, huh?  The money that goes into making one of these Computer Graphics-driven crapfests could feed some hungry kids in Somalia or Ethiopia or East St. Louis or somewhere.

Probability of suckage: 85%.  I'm being generous on that last 15%, as it may be the surprise feel-good movie of the summer.  Maybe it'll have some Steel Magnolias-rivaling moments that will bring the critics to their feet and make audiences cheer and weep.  But I won't count on it.

Probability of seeing it anyway: 20%.  Totally Redbox.


Men In Black III (May 25)



Ten years and they're back now?  What did we do to deserve this?  Why did they have to make a third one?  Why do I keep asking semi-rhetorical questions?  Is there anything better than a hot  shower on a cold evening after you've had a bad night at work?  What is the secret of the universe?  All these questions will be answered someday.  One can only hope.

So, Men In Black III.  They could have stopped at the first and we'd all have been so much happier.  You know, its kinda funny.  I saw the first one with my ex-girlfriend when it came out.  The movie was good but the girl... well, the less said on that, the better.  I saw the second movie with my wife after we'd been married less than a year.  The honey moon was definitely over after sitting through that.  And now, I'll be seeing the third one after my daughter has been in our lives for over five years.  So many memories...

Will it be any good?  How the heck should I know?  Will I go and see it to confirm the suckage factor?  Yeah, I probably will.

Probability of suckage: Another tough call.  If they go with the same dumb plot and tired jokes that made MIB2 such a winner, then the probability is really in the suckage's favor.  But if they play it more like the first one, it could be much lower on the suckage list by the time summer 2012 is in the history books.  So I'm calling this 50/50.  MIB1 was good, MIB2 sucked, so it's a coin flip for MIB3.

Probability of seeing it anyway: 100%, but only on DVD if the wife doesn't want to go.  Or the cheap seats.  I have a feeling that the cheap seats are going to get a fair amount of my business late this summer.


Snow White and the Huntsman (June 1)



Charlize Theron as the evil queen?  Well, based on her performance in the trailer, I'd say she can do evil pretty well.  But Kristen Stewart as Snow White?  Nah.  Sorry all you Twilight fans, but I fall into the camp of those who say that Stewart doesn't have really strong acting chops.  She seems a bit thin in her skills.  They should have gotten that gal from that Once Upon A Time show that my wife watches on Sunday nights.  She seems more approachable than Miss Stewart in the role of everybody's favorite damsel in distress (ok, maybe not everybody's favorite, but let's face it, Snow White is kind of a hapless sort as portrayed thus far, with the exception of the mentioned Once Upon A Time show).

On the other hand, this looks like it took a cue from the Lord of the Rings movie series and is trying to be EPIC.  This has had a tendency of late to make movies over-reach and end up feeling impersonal, in my opinion.  Hey Hollywood!  Whatever happened to movies that didn't have to use all the CGI bells and whistles to sell tickets?  I recall a few movies in the '80s that got along on a thin budget and a good story all on their own.  Are movie-goers so shallow these days that they won't believe a movie that doesn't pull out the CGI tricks?  I certainly hope not.

Probability of suckage:  A live-action movie about Snow White?  This screams made for TV movie that got too big for its britches.  So that would indicate a high probability of suckage.  65% at least.  On the other hand, if the CGI doesn't overwhelm the plot, this could be an entertaining little money grabber.  So I'm gonna settle on 40% as my final evaluation.

Probability of seeing it anyway: Another tough call.  I'd say 100% if my wife wants to, and maybe 50% and only on Redbox if she doesn't.  And again, the local cheap seats theater could well get my hard-earned dollar for this one too, if the wife isn't in a hurry but still wants to see it.  So far it looks like a good year for the cheap seats.




I'd like to continue on into late June and through July and August, but I'm running out of time today.  Therefore, I'm going to break this post up into at least two parts, and finish the rest tomorrow.  Until then, here's the parting comment:

Source: LOL snaps.com

Even Tony Stark has to get his shirts pressed from time to time, and what's a multi-billionarie mechanical genius to do when nobody else has time to do it for him?  Iron, man.