The good old summertime This season, Hollywood remembers things past BY PETER KEOUGH

Everything old is made new again this summer as Hollywood passes on sequels for adaptations, remakes, and revisions of films, TV shows, and video games. Is this just another sign that the creative world is running out of ideas and must cannibalize such Golden Age achievements as The Dukes of Hazzard? Maybe another factor is at work, another passion besides the need to stake bankrupt imaginations. Perhaps these new versions of old properties are attempts not to rob but to reinvent the past — not just to reprise it but to make it better.

Even the sequels to the major franchises take place in the past, filling out gaps in their invented histories. In next week’s Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas doesn’t just fit in the missing piece of his epic, he seeks to restore its stature and meaning. And Batman Begins (June 15) explores the murky origins of the Dark Knight. Audiences, Hollywood may be speculating, want more than just rehashes of what they enjoyed before, more than nostalgia for an idealized past in the face of an uncertain future. They want to confront what came before in the hope of understanding what has happened since.

On the other hand, such raids on the archives might be just desperate attempts to find another box-office-busting Adam Sandler vehicle. In the 1974 original directed by Robert Aldrich, The Longest Yard (May 26) was a barbed critique of the Watergate era’s social, political, and economic iniquities, with one of Burt Reynolds’s best performances. In the new version, Sandler is the washed-up pro quarterback sent to prison for financial foul-ups who’s enlisted by the sinister warden to lead a squad of inmates in a fixed game against the guards. Will Peter Segal (50 First Dates) retain the subversive edge of the original, or will this devolve into a slap-happy version of The Waterboy? The answer might set the tone of the rest of this summer’s remembrance of things past.

JUNE

Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby has given the old boxing-movie genre the steam to go a few more rounds. Ron Howard reteams with the star of his own Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe, for Cinderella Man (June 3), in which Crowe evokes John Garfield in his portrayal of Jim Braddock, a pug who rose from the Depression soup lines to take on Max Baer in a 1935 heavyweight championship bout. Renée Zellweger plays Braddock’s devoted wife and Paul Giamatti is his scrappy manager. Will Howard emulate Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and confront the dark side of this fairy tale? Or will he resort to his usual sentimentality? Maybe a combination of both will make it an Academy knockout.

Two small-scale films offer alternatives to Zellweger’s traditional-mom role. High Tension/Haute tension (June 3) is described as "a highly evolved slasher flick with a sapphic twist." Cecile De France stars; Alexandre Aja (Furia) directs. And in Alice Wu’s Saving Face (June 3), a lesbian doctor finds her straitlaced, disapproving mother on her Manhattan doorstep pregnant and in need of a husband. Michelle Krusiec and Joan Chen star.

Male roles also get a new look in a pair of offbeat films. The Lords of Dogtown (June 3) dramatizes Stacy Peralta’s skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, with Heath Ledger, Emile Hirsch, and Nikki Reed as outsiders on wheels. Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen) directs. And Danish Dogme director Susanne Bier addresses the cost of the war against terror in Brothers (June 3), where the title pair face a family crisis when one is assigned to duty in Afghanistan.

Not that some American directors don’t have the guts to take on the establishment. Veteran indie Hal Hartley’s The Girl from Monday (June 3) is a slick sci-fi effort about a dystopic future in which corporate consumerism reigns supreme. Bill Sage and Sabrina Lloyd star.

The Honeymooners (June 10) probably won’t win an Oscar, but it sure puts a new face on the past as John Schultz (Like Mike) updates the Jackie Gleason favorite with an African-American cast that includes Cedric the Entertainer, Mike Epps, Regina Hall, and Gabrielle Union. Cedric says he may not be uttering Ralph’s famous "To the moon!" remark for fear of encouraging domestic abuse. That might be a problem also with Mr. and Mrs. Smith (June 10), in which Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play a married pair of undercover assassins who are given assignments to kill each other. Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) directs.

Of course, the whole undercover/secret-identity thing started with superheroes, and that’s where Batman Begins. Christopher Nolan (Memento) directs this prequel with Christian Bale as the Caped Crusader plus Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, and Liam Neeson. Like Batman, the hero of Hustle & Flow (June 15) has to reinvent himself — he’s a down-and-out pimp who tries to become a rap star. Craig Brewer’s debut feature was the Audience Award winner at Sundance, and Terrence Dashon Howard is reported to have put in a career-making performance. But good luck trying to untangle the meaning of the latest mindboggler by Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away). Based on Dianne Wynne Jones young adult novel, Howl’s Moving Castle (June 10) is set in a magic kingdom where young girls are menaced by the Witch of Waste and by the title count, who sucks their souls away.

Speaking of sucking your souls away: the week of June 24 marks the official end of cinema. Almost every film released this week is devoid of originality. There are two remakes of sit-coms that were dumb to begin with. Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (Club Dread), The Dukes of Hazzard stars Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Jessica Simpson, and Burt Reynolds. Bewitched is directed by Norah Ephron and stars Nicole Kidman Will Ferrell, and Shirley MacLaine. Then there’s the remake of an inane ’60s Disney comedy featuring an overexposed pseudo-star, Herbie Fully Loaded, with (who else?) Lindsay Lohan; Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.) directs. The only entry that looks remotely inventive is Land of the Dead; the fourth entry in George Romero’s zombie series stars such living-dead talent as John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, and Asia Argento.

After a week like that, you figure the Second Coming is at hand. And well it might be as Steven Spielberg unveils his remake of the still-terrifying 1953 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds (June 29). Don’t sweat the small stuff like alien tripods devastating cities, though; this is really a family-values story as single dad Tom Cruise learns to dodge the red mold and energy beams and bond with daughter Dakota Fanning.

JULY

Family values and special effects combine also in Fantastic Four (July 1) as director Tim Story (Taxi) brings one of the oldest Marvel Comics books to the screen. This is why NASA doesn’t send siblings and romantic couples into space: Professor Reed Richards, his girlfriend Sue, her brother Johnny, and the curmudgeonly pilot Ben Grimm return from a brush with radioactivity still squabbling and transformed, respectively, into an elastic man, an invisible woman, a human torch, and a thing. Michael Chiklis, Chris Evans, Jessica Alba, and Ioan Gruffudd star.

Johnny Depp reteams with frequent collaborator Tim Burton in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (July 15). In this remake of the classic 1971 adaptation of the misanthropic Roald Dahl children’s book, Depp takes the Gene Wilder role as Willy Wonka, a sinister chocolate mogul who invites kids in for a tour of his plant. Helping out are Freddie Highmore, who was Peter to Depp’s J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland (will this will be the antidote to that film’s cloying sweetness?) and Helena Bonham Carter.

Between Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Wedding Crashers (July 15), we might see a renaissance of crude comedy worthy of The Three Amigos. Crashers has aroused high expectations, with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as the title lotharios sneaking into weddings to take advantage of the bridesmaids’ hymeneal high spirits. David Dobkin (Shanghai Knights) directs. Also promising is The Bad News Bears (July 22). Richard Linklater (House of Rock) remakes the 1976 Walter Matthau comedy about a hard-boiled coach who tries to transform a losing Little League team into champions. With Billy Bob Thornton in the Matthau role drawing on his Bad Santa vibes and Linklater repeating the kid movie magic he showed in School of Rock, this could be a "hit."

Summer wouldn’t be complete without a futuristic dystopia or a film by Michael Bay. The Island (July 22) is both, a Brave New World in which Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson take flight after discovering that they’re clones designed by the Dr. Moreau–ish Sean Bean.

And aren’t we due for a return from occasional auteur Cameron Crowe following the undeserved (in my lonely opinion) flop of Vanilla Sky? Elizabethtown (July 29) stars former Elf Orlando Bloom, who having not made much of an impression as a Crusader tries his hand as a despondent screw-up who finds love and chaos at his father’s funeral in the title Kentucky town. Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, and Alec Baldwin co-star. It’s just one more example of seeking redemption by confronting the past.

So, in its way, is The Brothers Grimm (July 29). At least, it’s a confrontation with, and a possible resurrection of, the defunct career of Terry Gilliam, whom we last saw waning quixotic over another disastrous production in the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. Here he returns to the realms of Baron Münchhausen in a supernatural and surreal adventure starring the title pair as played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger. Monica Bellucci also stars.

AUGUST

Darth Vader, Batman . . . Inspector Clouseau? The long-awaited origins of the bumbling Peter Sellers creation are at last revealed as Steve Martin takes on the role in The Pink Panther (August 5). This is not a remake of the 1963 original but a look at what happened before the events of that film. Directed by Shawn Levy (Cheaper by the Dozen), it also stars Kevin Kline and Beyoncé Knowles.

Like Steve Martin, Bill Murray is a wacky, aging comedian reinventing himself. He joins up with director Jim Jarmusch, for whom he provided a cameo in Coffee & Cigarettes, to play a washed-up Casanova in Broken Flowers (August 5), where he discovers he has a 20-year-old son (stop me if this starts to sound like Steve Zissou) and travels cross-country to determine which ex-love (Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Tilda Swinton . . . this is Bill Murray?) is the mother.

I think it’s time for some positive-male-image reinforcement. How about Grizzly Man (August 12)? Werner Herzog’s documentary investigates the fate of bear-loving macho naturalist Timothy Treadwell, who along with his girlfriend got eaten by an ursine acquaintance in October 2003 in Alaska. Or Four Brothers (August 12)? John Singleton returns to the ’hood, where the mixed-race sibs of the title gather, a la Elizabethtown, at their matriarch’s funeral, confront the past, and proceed to kick ass. Mark Wahlberg and OutKast’s André Benjamin are among the stars.

And finally, John Dahl’s The Great Raid (August 12) is the true story of a commando raid that saved hundreds of Allied POWs from a Japanese camp in the Philippines in WW2. At a time when our own moral purpose seems murky both on the screen and in the real world, such returns to past glory are welcome indeed.