Summer 04.

The big New York Times Summer Movies special is here, complete with an audio intro by AO Scott who certainly doesn't sound too thrilled about it all. Which is perfectly understandable. Scan the special's front page, scroll up, scroll down... there's not a whole lot to make a cinephile's heart leap.

In fact, the featured preview, Charles McGrath's piece on Troy (you get the idea, right - former editor of the Book Review on the movie based on The Iliad), seems to have been written in sighs. "The toga movie, once the tiredest-seeming of all the Hollywood genres, is suddenly back in fashion." Troy is merely the "newest" but it also "feels like the longest." I don't doubt it. The trailer looks positively ridiculous, but the worst sign I've seen so far is that my daughter, a very serious Lord of the Rings fan, snickered at Orlando Bloom's worried delivery of some line about troops or ramparts or something. Warner Bros might have to write off that niche.

The new month-by-month graphic calendar of summer releases is nifty and all, but with the text version, you get blurbs. Lots and lots of blurbs. That's where the good stuff is going to be tucked away, though Scott does mention at the end of his talk that he expects La Meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth), the Italian award-winning made-for-TV six-hour family saga to wind up on his best-of-04 list at the end of the year.

What else:

• Karen Durbin's spotlighting of actors and actresses that might otherwise go unnoticed is always a highlight of these seasonal specials. This time around: Anne Reid, Fabrice Luchini, Catalina Sandino Morena, Gaspard Ulliel and Julie Delpy.

• I can whole-heartedly endorse Durbin's praise for Delpy, who'll be seen this summer in Richard Linklater's Before Sunset; Sarah Hepola asks Linklater, Delpy and Ethan Hawke what brought them together again.

• Here's a nice change of pace: Snippets from the screenplays for a handful of upcoming movies: Spike Lee's She Hate Me, Michael Cunningham's At Home at the End of the World, Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things, Jay Cocks's De-lovely and Ferzan Ozpetek's Facing Windows.

• Only one flat-out think piece this time around, Terrence Rafferty's riff on the androids of summer. In another piece, Rafferty briefly considers Mike Hodges's I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. The other briefs: Caryn James on Baadasssss!, David Edelstein on the pre-Halle Berry Catwomen and Julie V Iovine on The Terminal.

• Of all the blockbusters lined up for summer, so far the most appealing to me at least is the third Harry Potter movie. Which says a lot about the summer of 2004. But any film by Alfonso Cuarón warrants some degree of anticipation and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban pairs him with a story shot through with adolescent angst - a very promising match. Sarah Lyall talks to Cuarón about his anxieties.

• The other profiles: Kristin Hohenadel on Keira Knightley and Sharon Waxman on Will Ferrell.

• The roundup of the summer's DVD releases, leaning heavily on Salon writers, truly hits only the highlights, but the advantage is that each release gets a healthy chunk of text.

And all in all, DVDs may be a welcome refuge this summer, what with the theaters clogged with monster-killers, tidal waves, togas and Peter Parker. At least there's Cannes. Or is there? Rattled by the number of Hollywood entries in the competition, Tom Charity wonders in the Independent if the French aren't bending over backwards to the breaking point to make up with the Americans: "Never mind the quality, feel the width. If this is not quite wholesale capitulation, it's certainly a brave stab at entente cordiale."

Posted by dwhudson at May 8, 2004 7:55 AM