No doubt about it -- this will be the summer of The Clones. The
zealously hyped and awaited Star Wars: Episode II (May 16) and about a
dozen other major releases will sport numerals in the titles -- and then there
are the numberless other remakes and adaptations. No one looks to summer movies
for originality, and as for escape, these films venture more into the realm of
the familiar and the compulsively repetitive than into anything new or
imaginative. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it still makes a killing at
the box office.
For this state of affairs we can thank clone master George Lucas, whose
original Star Wars, which seemed so fresh and invigorating 25 years ago,
has spawned the evil empire of high-concept, market-driven genetic duplication
that passes for summer filmmaking. The attack of the movie clones looks to be
irresistible: The Sum of All Fears (May 31; Clones aside, all
these release dates are subject to change), Men in Black II (July 3),
Halloween:Resurrection (July 19) Stuart Little 2 (July 19),
Austin Powers in Goldmember (July 26). The assault isn't limited to
mainstream films -- Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal (August 2) follows
up his breakthrough sex, lies and videotape -- and it won't end with the
summer, since we'll still have Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(November 15) and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (December 18) to
look forward to.
'Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones'
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Still, there's more than simple duplication and repetition at work here. Almost
all these films involve a secret of some kind, a concealed identity, past,
weapon, code, or desire, or else they revolve around a cabal or conspiracy or
alternate reality. The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, Memento,
and even A Beautiful Mind touched on paranoid suspicions, but not to the
extent of this summer's movies. Even the "original" efforts -- Sam Raimi's
big-screen version of the Marvel Comics superhero Spider-Man (it opened
last week), Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Minority
Report (June 21), and M. Night Shyamalan's new paranormal blockbuster,
Signs (August 2) -- seem obsessed with the enigma of appearance and
reality.
Has this all arisen from the national mood of dread and suspicion following
September 11 and been nurtured by the Enron and Catholic-priest pedophilia
scandals? Most of the summer's films were conceived a year or more ago, of
course, but Hollywood, despite its own superficiality, has a knack for going
beyond the obvious issues bruited in other media. It's in the business of
selling dreams -- or nightmares -- and sometimes it can probe the cultural
subconscious, turn our darkest and dirtiest little secrets into marketable
fantasies, and so provide a prophetic look at future shocks.
Secret agents
'The Bourne Identity'
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Not since the heyday of the Iron Curtain have there been so many films
about secret agents -- I guess a worldwide war against terrorism can do that.
The current atmosphere suits bestselling writers Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy,
whose brand of potboiling espionage thriller looked in danger of being left out
in the cold with the fall of the Evil Empire.
In Phil Alden Robinson's adaptation of Clancy's 1991 opus The Sum of All
Fears (May 31), Ben Affleck takes over the role of Jack Ryan from
Harrison Ford as the grumpy CIA spook. Here he combats a nuclear threat from an
Austrian neo-Nazi (now that's a demographic we don't need to worry about
offending; the original novel's villains were Arabs). Morgan Freeman co-stars.
Meanwhile, Ben's pal Matt Damon does a variation on his Tom Ripley in former
indie director Doug Liman's adaptation of Ludlum's 1980 The Bourne
Identity (June 14). He's a bullet-riddled amnesiac who needs to find
out who he is before terrorists and various bad guys do him in. Sounds like a
metaphor for the US, and in fact seems the film itself has undergone its own
identity crisis in the form of rewrites and reshoots that have delayed its
release. The eclectic cast includes Franka Potente, Clive Owen, Julia Stiles,
and Brian Cox.
If we can't laugh at the things that threaten our very existence, what are
movies good for? Hence the proliferation of spy-thriller parodies. Joel
Schumacher's Bad Company (June 7), like the woeful Big
Trouble, got sidetracked by September 11, since its plot also involved a
suitcase nuke, this one wielded by terrorists in NYC. Chris Rock is the raffish
twin brother of a murdered CIA agent who must take his place on the case.
Whether the affair requires more than 48 hours is unclear; Anthony Hopkins has
the Nick Nolte role as Chris's grizzled superior.
Joking about terrorism is one thing; taking the name of a movie franchise in
vain another. Austin Powers in Goldmember (July 26) almost had
the offending member in the title cut when the James Bond people threatened
litigation because of the similarity to a famous 007 film. Goldmember is the
name of another baddy played by Mike Myers, whose multiple identities in this
sequel include familiar faces Fat Bastard, Dr. Evil, and, of course, the title
international man of mystery. Throw in time travel to the '50s and the '70s, a
cameo by Michael Caine as Austin's dad, and Destiny's Child's Beyoncé
Knowles as kick-ass blaxploitation agent Foxxy Cleopatra and the result is
bound to be a distraction from whatever awful things are happening in the real
world at the time. Jay Roach helms again.
'Minority Report'
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Amnesia, shape shifting, and alien terrorists return in Barry Sonnenfeld's
Men in Black II (July 5). In a reversal of the original film,
Will Smith plays the veteran agent who must enlist his now retired and
memory-erased former partner (Tommy Lee Jones) back into the extraterrestrial
INS agency of the title. Together they combat the sultry Serleena (Lara Flynn
Boyle), an evil E.T. who can morph into a Victoria's Secret model. Expect a
cameo from the ultimate morphing alien, Michael Jackson.
Secret lives
Secret agents working for the government might arouse more suspicion
than sympathy in a world where they know everything about us and we know
nothing about them. Case in point: Minority Report (June 24), the
long-awaited adaptation of the Philip K. Dick story by Steven Spielberg about a
future dystopia in which crimefighters employ precognition to incarcerate
felons before they break the law. Why hasn't John Ashcroft thought of this? Tom
Cruise as a police agent gets hoisted by his own petard when he's pegged as a
future murderer and becomes a fugitive seeking vindication.
Given this kind of social oppression, who wouldn't invent a secret identity in
order to have a good time? Oscar Wilde had the idea a century ago in the arch
farce The Importance of Being Earnest (May 17), and it's being
adapted by Oliver Parker (who did a fair job on An Ideal Husband), with
Rupert Everett and Colin Firth as the pair of hedonistic fops who go
Bunberrying. Reese Witherspoon as Cecily and Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell also
get to swap bons mots.
This need for an alter ego to act out one's taboo desires provides the premise
for several more films. A selfish, unmarried and childless slacker (Hugh Grant
at his best) gets in touch with his inner single parent (all right, it's partly
a ploy to get into the pants of Rachel Weisz) in About a Boy (May
17), an adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel from Chris and Paul Weitz
(American Pie). A Yeshiva student played by rising star Ryan Gosling
gets in touch with his inner Jew-bashing skinhead in Henry Bean's provocative
The Believer (May 31). And a Rodmanesque basketball player
(Miguel A. Núñez Jr.) gets in touch with his feminine side when
he takes on the WNBA in Jesse Vaughan's Juwanna Mann (June 21).
Sometimes a secret identity is just a matter of survival or making a living, as
is the case in The Road to Perdition (July 12). Sam Mendes's
follow-up to American Beauty adapts the Max Allan Collins &
Richard Piers Rayner graphic novel about a Depression-era family man, played by
Tom Hanks, who makes ends meet by making hits for the mob. Paul Newman, Jude
Law, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Anthony LaPaglia fill out the outstanding cast.
In the postmodern Simone (August 16), Al Pacino (who should know
better about twisting the truth -- see Insomnia, below) plays a
washed-up director who revives his career when he invents a computer-generated
Galatea -- the digitalized star of the title. Catherine Keener and Jay Mohr
co-star; Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) directs.
Secrets and lies
We all know what happens when we first practice to deceive -- just look
at the latest intergalactic mess of betrayal, lies, and mistaken identity in
George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones (May
16). Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) enlists an army of clones (talk about
duplicity!) to protect Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman); meanwhile young Anakin
Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) is getting the hots for her, and that distracts
him from his Jedi Knight training with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan MacGregor). Almost
makes you long for the simple-minded inanity of Jar Jar Binks!
Or maybe something more down to earth, like Christopher Nolan's Insomnia
(May 24), a remake of the 1997 Norwegian psychological thriller. Al
Pacino plays a veteran LA police detective who accidentally -- or is it? --
shoots his partner while pursuing a killer in Alaska. He ends up collaborating
with the suspect he was pursuing, a detective-story writer played by Robin
Williams, to cover up the deed. If that's not enough to keep you awake, there's
the 24-hour summer Arctic days and Nolan's knack for re-creating subjective
mental derangement à la Memento.
As for Soderbergh's Full Frontal (August 2), his alleged sequel
to sex, lies and videotape, it apparently confronts the deception of
cinema itself, with a film within a film and lots of raw improv from a cast
including Julia Roberts, Blair Underwood, and Catherine Keener. Then there's
Shyamalan's Signs (August 2). Mel Gibson joins the director in
this tale of a farmer who's lost his wife and his faith and then wakes up one
morning to find crop circles in the cornfields. Is it a prank? An alien
marking? A warning of the Apocalypse? Kevin Costner from Field of Dreams
messing with his head? Like many of this summer's movies, this one may well
offer us signs of things to come.
Issue Date: May 10 - 16, 2002
