‘Cine’cism

The front cover of Entertainment Weekly’s Summer Movie Preview features a shot of Angelina Jolie’s back as she promotes her new film “Salt.” It’s about a CIA agent accused of being a Russian sleeper — or something. Frankly, I don’t care what it’s about. If the movie I should be looking forward to this summer is “Salt,” should I really be excited for anything?

The truth is I’d like to be, but I’m curious to gauge interest in this year’s batch of summer movies since there’s a lack of real hype going around. Without hype, I’m really emanating a different kind of skepticism. 

I don’t know anyone overly excited for say, “Robin Hood,” “MacGruber,” “The A-Team,” “The Karate Kid,” “Prince of Persia,” “Jonah Hex,” “The Last Airbender,” “Shrek Forever After” or “Grown Ups.” Naturally, there’s talk, as minimal as it might be (and for many of those, for good reason), but I haven’t gotten the sensation of the one must-see-movie of the summer.
 
Some would say that movie is either “Sex and the City 2” or “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” but let’s just leave those people out of the conversation.

I haven’t even heard a ton of real excitement for some of the movies I’m looking forward to seeing. “Iron Man 2” seems like the best candidate to be a big blockbuster, but I know I’ve been nearly turned off by the extreme over-saturation in advertising the movie as well as the fact that with cast changes and additions galore, it looks like “Spider-Man 3” in the making. 

Then there’s “Inception.” I wish I could I tell you more about it, but I’m afraid no one can. Christopher Nolan’s break in between the Batman sequels looks ready to shake up the box office, but it might fall victim to the fact that no one knows what it is.

My most anticipated movie is “Toy Story 3,” and here is an instance where a number at the end of a movie is scaring people away. I look at this as another chance for a Pixar masterpiece and not a “threequel.” Lee Unkrich, who co-directed the second film, returns for this one, and “Little Miss Sunshine” scribe Michael Arndt has signed on to do the screenplay.

So here’s my feeble attempt to build some hype.

Jesse Eisenberg is starring in two dramas both coming out on May 21. In “Holy Rollers,” he plays a Hasidic Jew turned drug mule, and in “Solitary Man,” he’s side-by-side Michael Douglas, Danny DeVito and Susan Sarandon. Eisenberg is a bright young actor quickly becoming someone other than a Michael Cera wannabe.

Sundance had two films that received some initial buzz, and looking at them, I believe they will perform well for a mainstream audience. In “Cyrus,” John C. Reilly lands Marisa Tomei as a girlfriend, but she has a creepy older son played by Jonah Hill. There’s also “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” which is supposedly a less flattering documentary of the woman we’ve all come to both love and hate.

There are also two dramas that sound too ridiculous to be anything other than awesome. The first is “Get Low” starring Robert Duvall and Bill Murray in a period piece directed by Oscar Winner Aaron Schneider. The second is a film starring, of all people, Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci as a married couple (what?). The film is called “Love Ranch,” and I’ve heard it’s a true story about a couple that started the first brothel in Nevada.