</p><p><strong><span class="infobox-head">OTHER GROWN-UP HIGHLIGHTS</span></strong><br /></p><p><strong>•“Everything Must Go”</strong> (May 13): A relapsed boozer (Will Ferrell) loses it all — his job, his wife, the keys to his house — and decides to camp out on his front lawn for a massive yard sale to unload all the baggage in his life. So there’s definitely a bit of an integration process for them.”</p><p>The prequel “X-Men: First Class” (June 3) features James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as the future Professor X and Magneto — superpowered mutants who start as allies but end up deadly enemies in their quest to find a place for their freak-of-nature kinsmen.</p><p> Another prequel, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (Aug. As the first human to join the Green Lantern Corps — essentially, interstellar cops on the beat — his character becomes the key to stopping an evil force. With Rebecca Hall.</p><p> •<strong>“Our Idiot Brother”</strong> (Aug. </p><p><strong>•“30 Minutes or Less” </strong>(Aug. But he encounters a little alien bigotry along the way.</p><p> “Human beings’ inclusion in the corps is a point of contention for some of the other Green Lanterns,” Reynolds said. <strong><span class="subhead">ACTION</span></strong></p><p>With pirates, wizards, giant robots, aliens and superheroes, Hollywood has one of its most action-packed summers ever in store.</p><p> Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint head back to Hogwarts one last time for the final showdown between good and evil wizards with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” (July 15).</p><p> Radcliffe provides a refresher in case anyone has forgotten where things stand.</p><p> “There are two concepts that you have to understand. When you say Las Vegas, it means something,” said writer-director Todd Phillips. The 3-D “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” (June 29) reunites star Shia LaBeouf and director Michael Bay as an event out of Earth’s past touches off a new round in the struggle between two warring robot races.</p><p> Megan Fox, who co-starred in the first two movies, is gone this time, but other returning cast members include John Turturro and Tyrese Gibson.</p><p> After the original story line was wrapped up in a trilogy, the 3-D “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” arrives May 20 in a stand-alone story that sends Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow on a hunt for the fountain of youth.</p><p> Director Rob Marshall jumped right in on the sword fights and other action in “On Stranger Tides,” saying the song-and-dance moves he crafted in such musicals as “Chicago” and “Nine” were good training ground.</p><p> “I think a lot of people were surprised I was doing action,” Marshall said. It’s absolutely choreography. Now, it’s turned into the aspect that makes it more original and stand out from the crowd,” Favreau said. It’s his exploration of how he fits into the world.”</p><p> While Thor is sent down to the minors, the hero of “Green Lantern” (June 17) is called up from Earth to join a league of galactic peacekeepers.</p><p> Ryan Reynolds stars as an ordinary guy who gains superpowers from a ring bestowed by a dying alien. 12), which has a built-in audience of millions of readers — women who can turn out in huge numbers when the right female-driven film shows up.</p><p> “If you make something new and original and depth-y and true and relatable, women are going to come,” said “The Help” star Emma Stone, who plays an aspiring white writer stirring up her Mississippi home town during the civil-rights movement in 1963 by chronicling the lives of black maids.</p><p> “It’s also great that the face of this movie represents America, because when we talk about women, often times we don’t talk about women of color,” said Viola Davis, who co-stars as one of the maids. There are seven Horcruxes that we’re tracking down. “They feel we’re kind of a subspecies, sort of a laughable group of creatures that inhabit Earth. Because at the time, I had really bad teeth, and now I’ve got new ones.”</p><p> In another animated follow-up, “Kung Fu Panda 2” (May 26), Jack Black’s tubby hero Po has settled in as head of a martial-arts team that includes a menagerie of experts voiced by Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu.</p><p> Gary Oldman provides the voice of a villainous peacock aiming to unleash a terrible new weapon in the ancient Chinese realm that Po and his gang are sworn to defend.</p><p> There’s talk of turning the franchise into a trilogy, Black said.</p><p> “I’m on board for that. 5), has James Franco and Freida Pinto leading the human cast as research into simian intelligence puts the world under new management.</p><p> Interspecies conflict comes to the Old West, too, in “Cowboys & Aliens” (July 29), as a mysterious gunslinger (Daniel Craig) and a cattle baron (Harrison Ford) put together a posse of townsfolk, outlaws and Apache Indians to go after bad guys from space in 1873.</p><p> “Cowboys & Aliens” director Jon Favreau, who made “Iron Man” and its sequel, said the hit Western “True Grit” and the Wild West animated comedy “Rango” were nice lead-ins after a long dry spell for the genre.</p><p> “The Western, that may have been the aspect of the film that made the studio the most cautious when it was first green-lighted. I’d be really bummed if ‘Dexter’ stopped after their first season. Abrams directs his own mashup with “Super 8” (June 10), combining two projects he had been developing: a story inspired by his boyhood filmmaking endeavors and a sci-fi adventure about a train that derails while carrying an alien presence from Area 51.</p><p> The teen filmmaker idea had good characters but lacked plot punch, Abrams said.</p><p> “It needed something to sort of elevate it out of the realm of pure drama into some kind of spectacle, at least for me to want to direct it,” Abrams said.</p><p><strong><span class="infobox-head">OTHER ACTION HIGHLIGHTS</span></strong><br /></p><p><strong>•“Priest”</strong> (May 13): A warrior priest (Paul Bettany) in a world besieged by vampires sets out to rescue his abducted niece before the blood-suckers make her one of their own. My job is to find the best actor, bring aboard an actor who will be able to understand the character in a deep way and bring him to life,” Foster said. Sometimes, you click with a cool character that has life beyond just one film,” Black said. It’s not my job. 19): The remake of the 1980s horror comedy stars Colin Farrell as a newcomer targeting the kid next door (Anton Yelchin), who has discovered his neighbor’s a vampire.</p><p><strong>•“Conan the Barbarian”</strong> (Aug. </p><p><strong><span class="infobox-head">OTHER COMEDY HIGHLIGHTS</span></strong><br /></p><p><strong>•“Mr. “It’s kind of like doing a TV series. “We’re not included in that mixture, and in this story, we are included.”</p><p> Longtime friends Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson, who co-starred in 1994’s “Maverick,” had shot “The Beaver” before Gibson’s ugly breakup with ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva.</p><p> The movie had been in limbo while headlines swirled about Gibson, who already was on the outs in Hollywood for an anti-Semitic rant during a drunken-driving arrest in 2006.</p><p> Now “The Beaver” (May 20) comes out as a provocative alternative to the popcorn pictures of Hollywood’s summer, a season Gibson often dominated as an action hero in the 1980s and ’90s.</p><p> Gibson plays a husband and father in the depths of suicidal depression that runs in his family. Popper’s Penguins” </strong>(June 17): A real-estate kingpin (Jim Carrey) is forced to become caretaker for six penguins he inherits.</p><p><strong>•“Zookeeper” </strong>(July 8): A lonely animal tender (Kevin James) gets lessons on courting women from his charges — a menagerie of talking critters.</p><p><strong>•“Monte Carlo” </strong>(July 1): Selena Gomez, Leighton Meester and Katie Cassidy are friends who land in a fairy-tale European vacation after one of them is mistaken for an heiress.</p><p><strong>•“Winnie the Pooh” </strong>(July 15): The honey-loving bear returns with pals Tigger, Piglet, Roo and Eeyore, who gets some help finding a new tail after losing his own.</p><p><strong> •“Friends With Benefits” </strong>(July 22): Two pals (Justin Timberlake, Mila Kunis) complicate their lives when they decide they can have sex together without messing up their friendship.</p><p><strong>•“Crazy, Stupid, Love” </strong>(July 29): Steve Carell goes awkwardly back on the dating market after his wife (Julianne Moore) gives him the boot, and a smooth operator (Ryan Gosling) takes him on as “wing man.”</p><p><strong>•“The Smurfs”</strong> (July 29): The little blue guys find themselves exiled to Manhattan’s Central Park, scrambling to find their way home after an evil wizard banishes them.</p><p><HR></p><p><strong><span class="subhead">FILMS FOR GROWN-UPS</span></strong></p><p> Movie screens this summer are not entirely booked with superheroes, kiddie fare and goofy buddy flicks. 26): An ex-con (Paul Rudd) with a rosy outlook gets out of jail and becomes an unwanted houseguest with each of his three sisters (Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel and Emily Mortimer) as they all struggle through crises.</p><p>The following films don’t have opening dates in Kansas City:</p><p><strong>•“The Debt”: </strong>Helen Mirren, Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain star in a tale spanning 30 years as a retired Mossad agent goes back on the clock to take care of loose ends from an old mission to hunt down a Nazi war criminal.</p><p><strong>•“The Devil’s Double”:</strong> Dominic Cooper does double duty in the true-life story of an Iraqi army lieutenant drafted to be the body double for Saddam Hussein’s depraved son in the late 1980s.</p><p><strong> •“Beginners”: </strong>Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer star in a tale of family upheaval centered on a man whose 75-year-old father comes out of the closet and embraces a new gay life after 44 years of marriage.</p><p></div>. … The environment is a huge problem for the guys in this movie. “The fun comes from the mashup of genres.”</p><p>“Lost” creator J.J. Voldemort’s looking for those, and it’s a race to see who can get to which ones first.”</p><p> Millions of Potter fans already know the answer, but that should not undermine the film’s prospects of becoming the top-grossing installment in a franchise that already has taken in $6.4 billion worldwide.</p><p> “Deathly Hallows: Part 2” joins other action franchises that are going the 3-D route for the first time. I’m looking for them, and there are the three Deathly Hallows. They couldn’t have found a better voice. That’s exactly what I would look like if I was a truck. “But it’s choreography. The language and customs.”</p><p> Dealing with exotic ways also is at the heart of “Cars 2” (June 24), in which Owen Wilson’s Lightning McQueen heads out on an international racing circuit, where rickety tow-truck buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) is mistaken for an undercover agent and pressed into service by a slick British spymaster (Michael Caine).</p><p> Having a buck-toothed jalopy as his vehicular alter-ego delights Larry the Cable Guy.</p><p> “When I first saw it, my wife said, ‘It looks just like you. 5) with Ryan Reynolds.</p><p> “Horrible Bosses” features Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis as underlings who take bad advice from an ex-con (Jamie Foxx) about how to do away with their awful overseers (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell).</p><p> “The Change-Up” stars Reynolds and Bateman as old friends with drastically different lives — one’s a stressed out lawyer and family man, the other’s a laid-back slacker — who wake up after a drunken night to discover they’ve switched bodies.</p><p> While studios often soften comedies to get a PG-13 rating that allows younger viewers in without an adult, “Horrible Bosses” and “The Change-Up” — as with “Bad Teacher” — take full advantage of the R rating for language and tone, Bateman said.</p><p> “I think the whole strategy of trying to edit certain things out of a movie in order to get a PG-13 rating in hopes of getting a wider audience seems like a pretty antiquated strategy considering the amount of money R-rated comedies have made,” Bateman said. Evans’ Steve Rogers is a 98-pound weakling who volunteers for a military program that bulks him up into super-soldier Captain America, leading a team of heroes battling arch-villain Red Skull (Hugo Weaving).</p><p> “Thor” casts the Norse god of thunder into exile among puny humans on Earth, where he hooks up with a team of scientists (Natalie Portman among them) and joins the fight against a bad guy from his own realm.</p><p> In his fall, Thor has lost much of his power, including the ability to wield his mighty hammer.</p><p> “He’s not quite worthy at that point of possessing it,” said Chris Hemsworth, the Australian actor who landed the role of Thor. 19): The new take on the ancient warrior has Conan (Jason Momoa) on a personal vendetta that turns into a heroic mission against supernatural evil.</p><p><hr></p><p><strong><span class="subhead">COMEDY, ROMANCE, FAMILY FUN</span></strong></p><p> In real life, hangovers make us promise to be good and never do it again, until the next time. It’s just like you,’ ” he said. It’s like I’m on my second season of ‘Kung Fu Panda.’ As long as it’s kick-ass, why stop?”</p><p> While Po was destined to lead, Cameron Diaz’s character in “Bad Teacher” (June 24) was never meant for the classroom. Thrown out of the house by his wife (Foster), Gibson’s Walter Black struggles to pull back from the brink by communicating through a beaver puppet he finds in the trash.</p><p> What begins as a cute, charming self-help regimen gives way to arguably the darkest emotional depths Gibson has ever captured on screen as the beaver becomes a frightening alter-ego.</p><p> Will audiences be willing to look beyond the turmoil of Gibson’s personal life and give the film a chance?</p><p> “I don’t know. “When I say Las Vegas, it means bad decisions. In Hollywood, fans have been eager to do it again ever since they walked out of the surprise comedy blockbuster “The Hangover” two years ago.</p><p> As the posters proclaim, the wolf pack is back, with Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis reuniting for another clueless morning after in “The Hangover Part II” (May 26), which leads a big summer lineup of comedy, romance and family fun.</p><p> It’s part of a rush of wedding and engagement romances: Kate Hudson and Ginnifer Goodwin’s “Something Borrowed” (May 6); the ensemble tale “Jumping the Broom” (also May 6), with Angela Bassett, Paula Patton and Mike Epps; and Kristen Wiig’s “Bridesmaids (May 13).</p><p> But the nuptial bash of the season is the next chapter of “The Hangover.” This time, Stu (Helms) is getting married in Thailand, where he and his buddies (Cooper, Galifianakis and Justin Bartha) aim for a quiet pre-wedding brunch to avoid repeating the mistakes they made in Las Vegas.</p><p> Instead, they manage to pack another lost weekend into a single night, one guy awakening with a new hairdo, another with a tattoo, and all of them with hurting heads and mysteries from the night before to solve on the streets of Bangkok.</p><p> Why Bangkok this time? Same reason as Vegas the first time.</p><p> “Vegas for me is like the fifth character in the first ‘Hangover.’ It’s so important, the location of these movies. She’s rude, raunchy and boozy, with a lesson plan mainly aimed at hooking a rich substitute teacher (Justin Timberlake) while fending off advances from a nice-guy gym instructor (Jason Segel).</p><p> Jason Bateman is similarly unrestrained in “Horrible Bosses” (July 
and a second comedy, “The Change-Up” (Aug. Plenty of mature dramas and comedies about dealing with — or escaping from — the problems of real life arrive alongside the season’s big studio offerings.</p><p> If there’s a grown-up blockbuster in the making for summer, it’s the adaptation of the literary sensation “The Help” (Aug. When I say Bangkok, I think of trouble. “I can’t imagine Mater having another voice. I really think it would be. So I felt the most at home in the big battle scenes with lots of people there, and working with stunt people who are like dancers. Oddly enough, it was right up my alley.”</p><p> Superheroes are everywhere this summer, with the stars of “Thor” (May 6) and “Captain America: The First Avenger” (July 22) making solo debuts before joining the all-star lineup of summer 2012’s “The Avengers.” </p><p> “Captain America” stars Chris Evans, padding his superhero resume after co-starring as the Human Torch in the “Fantastic Four” flicks. “We see Thor as a cocky, brash young warrior who needs to learn some humility, so he’s sent to Earth. 12): Jesse Eisenberg stars in an action comedy about a pizza delivery guy abducted by crooks and forced to rob a bank.</p><p><strong>•“Fright Night”</strong> (Aug. They’re pieces of Voldemort’s soul that we’re going to kill.
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May 19, 2011 by News Gatherer
