Mean season This summer the movies have issues BY PETER KEOUGH

In the next few months, all our dreams and nightmares will come true. But then, that’s always the case with summer movies. They give shape to our unformed wishes and terrors, reducing them to escapist entertainment. Every four years, though, summer films have an added significance. Before voting for the presidential candidate of their choice, people make their feelings known by the movies they watch. Campaigns would be wise to heed the summer films and try to determine what they mean.

Some of the issues seem pretty obvious. But are they? Is a blockbuster about catastrophic environmental changes merely a crackpot shot at polluters? Or is it a general expression of uneasiness about the future, distrust of our leadership, and suspicion that ugly truths have been withheld from us that one day will be revealed? And if an f/x-laden thriller can raise such questions, what will happen if Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 ever gets a distributor?

MAY

What can we do if The Day After Tomorrow (May 28) proves to be our last? That’s the prospect offered by Roland Emmerich’s new big-budget disaster movie, which has already been targeted by administration flacks as propaganda for those environmentalists opposing its toxic-gas-spewing policies. In this film, it seems those nutballs were right about global warming after all, since killer tornadoes, ice ages, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes are laying waste to whatever national landmarks survived Emmerich’s Independence Day. Palæo-climatologist Dennis Quaid doesn’t have time to wring his hands in self-pity, though. Not only does he have to save the world, he also has to rescue his boy Jake Gyllenhaal from the glaciers swallowing up New York City.

In the face of disaster, you can always fall back on family values. Such is the lesson learned by the pretty woman of the title in Raising Helen (May 28). Although not as drastic as a world-dooming climate shift, the deaths of her sister and her brother-in-law are enough to detour Manhattan fashionista Kate Hudson from her career path, especially since she’s stuck with raising the three orphaned children. What do you want to bet that director Garry Marshall (The Princess Diaries) helps her find her true maternal calling?

Such conventional endings wouldn’t sit well with the subject of first-time director John Dullaghan’s documentary Bukowski: Born into This (May 28). The notorious author of such cult-favorite novels as Factotum (an adaptation of which is in production starring Matt Dillon and Marisa Tomei) and the hero of the 1987 Barfly takes doom and death as a given and lets the good times roll.

JUNE

Like Helen, the title character in The Mother (June 4) also finds her world upset by tragedy, but she responds quite differently. When her hubby dies, this granny doesn’t fade into the matriarchal woodwork — she shacks up with her daughter’s hunky young boyfriend. Anne Reid and Daniel Craig star; Roger Michell (Changing Lanes) directs.

It’s probably too soon to expect any shacking up in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (June 4), even though Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) has reached the troublesome hormonal age. He might be a little distracted, however, since killer wizard and probable alter ego Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) has just escaped, apparently vowing to do him in. An army of "Dementors" has been assigned to protect Harry, but is the solution worse than the problem? And is it all a veiled allegory for the Iraq imbroglio? The presence of Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también) in the director’s chair suggests this will be a darker installment in the J.K. Rowling mega-franchise.

Conformity returns with a vengeance in The Stepford Wives (June 11), Frank Oz’s remake of the 1975 black comedy about a suburban town whose housewives are a little too perfect. Career women Nicole Kidman and Bette Midler are suspicious; Christopher Walken wants to initiate newcomer Matthew Broderick into the new patriarchal system. Too bad feminism is deader than the equal-rights amendment or this might be almost topical, though its conspiracy-theory atmosphere is in keeping with the times.

Because something is happening and we don’t know what it is. Blame the media. In Control Room (June 11), documentarian Jehane Noujaim (Startup.com) takes a look at an alternative to the Iraq War coverage we’re getting from Fox News and CNN: Aljazeera. Is it a source of suppressed truths or a mouthpiece for al Qaeda? See for yourself and decide.

By now, the paranoia and alienation touched on in this summer’s movies might make you feel as isolated as the hero of Steven Spielberg’s Kafka-esque The Terminal (June 18). Tom Hanks does an inverse of his Cast Away role as a refugee from an Eastern European country who arrives at Kennedy Airport just as his homeland ceases to exist. Deprived of nationality and identity, he must live at the title facility. At least it isn’t Gitmo, which I understand has no vending machines or Duty Free shops. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Stanley Tucci also star.

Here’s a metaphor for the entanglement of the Bush and bin Laden family interests, or maybe of the unholy union between the human and the technological that is the fruit of Western materialism, or maybe it’s just an outlandish comic-book premise designed to reap millions from the undiscriminating and the bored. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 (June 30) pitches the superhero against Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), the mechanically multi-tentacled (an accident fused him with his invention) former mentor and now nemesis of Tobey Maguire’s webslinger. Kirsten Dunst returns as Spidey’s co-dependent girlfriend, Mary Jane.