It Must Be Summer in Hollywood

On July 1, when Michael Bay’s “Armageddon” opens, we’ll see an asteroid the size of Texas hurtling toward the Earth at 22,000 miles per hour. With any luck, it will land on “Godzilla.”

But the odds of that aren’t good. In “Armageddon,” NASA is sending superstar oil driller Bruce Willis into space to hitch a ride on the asteroid and plant a path-altering nuclear bomb in its belly. Willis can do this.

Meanwhile, the star of “Godzilla,” a former two-bit piece of Japanese kitsch reborn large in Hollywood, will be stomping Manhattan with essentially only Matthew Broderick in its way. You’ve got to like the lizard.

Welcome to the summer of ‘98, which, according to the Hollywood solar calendar, begins May 15, a month and six days before the summer solstice. Must be El Nin~o. Anyway, the season is upon us. Between now and Labor Day, more than 100 movies are scheduled to open.

Yeah, “Godzilla,” which opens May 20, and “Armageddon” are the consensus favorites to top the box-office charts, but what does that mean anymore? “Titanic” has redefined the blockbuster in terms that no summer movie is likely to know for many years to come. In ways, James Cameron’s love boat has turned this summer into a transitional season for Hollywood, when conventional summer movies, with cartoon heroes in special-effects worlds, lack the suffering heart at the root of “Titanic’s” success. If “Armageddon” were being made now, Willis might be riding the asteroid with Winona Ryder, and “Godzilla” would mate with T. rex. Talk about crocodile tears.

As it is, the summer of ’98 is a hodgepodge of commercial fliers, art films and serious drama, and there are fewer predictable hits than any recent summer season. “Armageddon” and “Godzilla” seem like the only sure things on the board. Disney has a new animated feature, “Mulan,” about the adventures of a Chinese maiden, but ticket sales for Disney’s cartoons have been steadily dropping. Jim Carrey stars in Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show,” but it’s a “serious” Carrey movie and there’s no proven audience for that. Mel Gibson is back as wild cop Martin Riggs in “Lethal Weapon 4,” but surely, that series is close to running its course.

Whether Hollywood can shake its post-”Titanic” recession with a good summer we’ll begin to learn this weekend, when three high-profile items kick things off. They are: Warren Beatty’s “Bulworth,” a romantic comedy about an outrageously inappropriate U.S. senator (Beatty) and the black woman (Halle Berry) who gives him a new perspective; Robert Redford’s adaptation of the bestseller “The Horse Whisperer,” with Redford starring as a man whose gift for healing horses draws him into an unexpected romance; and “Quest for Camelot,” an Arthurian tale that is the first fully animated feature from Warner Bros.

The distributors of these films have given themselves a heady task: to find an audience in what most of us still consider spring and keep them going strong right into summer. The challenge is toughest for “Quest for Camelot,” which will rely on children who won’t be out of school in most parts of the country at least until the end of the month. “Camelot’s” fate will be closely watched by 20th Century Fox, which is banking on having a future in animation, and Disney, which is trying to hang on to the franchise.

The slate of actual family films is slimmer than in previous summers. Besides “Mulan” and “Quest for Camelot,” there’s DreamWorks’ “Small Soldiers,” a combined live-action/computer animated adventure about a toy-box war between overdeveloped mechanical commandos and monsters; TriStar’s “Madeline,” adapted from Ludwig Bemelmans’ stories about a small girl; a Disney remake of the Hayley Mills comedy “The Parent Trap,” and that’s about it.

For romantics, 20th Century Fox, “Titanic’s” home base, provides the lion’s share. The studio has three romance films: Forest Whitaker’s “Hope Floats,” in which Sandra Bullock plays a jilted wife who regains her faith in men and love through her childhood friend and secret admirer (Harry Connick Jr.); “Ever After: A Cinderella Story,” starring Drew Barrymore in a new telling of the rags-to-glass slipper tale; and “There’s Something About Mary,” a romantic comedy about a man (Ben Stiller) who sets out to find the high school prom date (Cameron Diaz) who still haunts him 12 years later.

Elsewhere, there’s Columbia’s “Dance With Me,” a story about a professional dancer who falls in love with one of her students. The first romance for Randa Haines since her 1986 “Children of a Lesser God” may confirm what such recent foreign imports as “Strictly Ballroom” and “Shall We Dance?” have suggested--that contact dancing is back.

While it’s not exactly geezer love, a phrase inspired by 73-year-old Paul Newman’s recent squeeze with 51-year-old Susan Sarandon in “Twilight,” actors of a certain age certainly realize the middle-age male fantasy in: “Bulworth,” in which Beatty (age 60) romances Berry (30); “The Horse Whisperer,” matching Redford (60) with Kristin Scott Thomas (37); and “6 Days, 7 Nights,” a romantic adventure that has Harrison Ford (55) stranded on a desert island with Anne Heche (29).

More conventional pairings are to be found in “Out of Sight,” Steven Soderbergh’s romantic comedy about a U.S. marshal (Jennifer Lopez) who falls in love with the bank robber (George Clooney) she’s after, and David Leland’s “Land Girls,” about a woman (Catherine McCormack) in the British Women’s Land Army and her romance with a young farmer (Steven MacKintosh) during World War II.

In fact, the big story of the summer of ’98 could be the heralding of a return to World War II movies. “Land Girls” won’t sound the alert; it’s a small, independent film with modest ambitions and no combat. If the bell is rung, it will be done by Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” the story of a squad of American soldiers sent behind German lines during the Normandy Invasion to save the life of a stranded GI.

Starring Tom Hanks as the rescue team leader and Matt Damon in the title role, “Saving Private Ryan” promises to be one of the Spielberg’s toughest dramatic films. The invasion sequence, which is said to last more than 20 minutes, had the movie industry ratings board scrambling for proper adjectives to describe it: “Rated R for intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence.”

If “Saving Private Ryan” does succeed, Hollywood will be looking ahead to the next big World War II combat movie, the Thanksgiving release of Terence Malick’s star-studded “The Thin Red Line,” for evidence of a resurgence of interest in the “last good war.”

Among the plentiful thrillers, of course, are “Blade,” starring Wesley Snipes as a half-human, half-vampire with apparent ambivalence about being a hero or villain; “Disturbing Behavior,” whose story (by “Con Air” creator Scott Rosenberg) follows the adventures of a teenager who moves into a town of Stepford gangs; Brian De Palma’s “Snake Eyes,” about an Atlantic City cop (Nicolas Cage) who’s trying to find an assassin in an arena filled with 14,000 suspects.

For those who like their action on a more fantastic or whimsical level, there are: an updated-to-the-’90s version of the ‘60s TV series “The Avengers,” with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman in the roles established by Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, and Sean Connery as their nemesis; “The Mask of Zorro,” with Antonio Banderas assuming the mask of Zorro from retiring Anthony Hopkins; and “Rush Hour,” with gravity-defying Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan on assignment in Los Angeles.

Mostly, the studios are hoping you’ll be in a mood to laugh. There are three movies that are direct descendants of the “Airplane!” model: David Zucker, one of the creators of that trend-setting 1980 disaster movie spoof, takes aim on at least two national pastimes with “BASEketball”; Zucker’s “Airplane!” teammate Jim Abrahams gooses “The Godfather” with “Jane Austen’s Mafia!”; and Pat Proft, a writer on the three “Naked Gun” movies, directs Leslie Nielsen in “Wrongfully Accused,” a parody of “The Fugitive.” And “Plump Fiction” spoofs “Pulp Fiction” and spoof movies in general.

The season’s unlikeliest comedy is Terry Gilliam’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” an adaptation of Hunter Thompson’s fevered chronicle of his experiences with heavy drugs while covering motor sports and a cop convention in ‘70s Las Vegas. The season’s oddest comedy casting is Eddie Murphy in the Rex Harrison role in a remake of “Doctor Dolittle.”

Since you’ve read this far, you deserve to know about some of the more challenging films heading our way via the art-house circuit. Among them: “The Last Days of Disco” from Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”), the auteur arbiter of youthful urbanity; “Your Friends & Neighbors,” a look at love and sexual politics among married couples from Neil LaBute, who made last year’s most controversial (and overrated) film, “In the Company of Men”; and “54,” a drama set in the ripe world of ‘70s Manhattan night-life hedonism.

In the miraculous coincidence category, there are two adaptations of Honore de Balzac works, Des McAnuff’s “Cousin Bette” and Lavinia Currier’s “Passion in the Desert.” All of the independent and foreign films scheduled for summer release are included in the accompanying list, but as they say on television, check your local listings. For most of them, their fate--i.e., their actual dates of release--depend on which theaters the major studios don’t have booked.