Guardians of the Galaxy — the next entry in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” that comprises the Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America films, as well as the team-up movie The Avengers (not to mention its much-anticipated sequel Avengers: Age of Ultron, coming next year) — looks utterly ridiculous… and that’s a good thing.

Seriously, summertime movies are supposed to be fun, something a lot of film-makers (and film-goers, too) seem to have forgotten in recent years. Guardians looks like exactly the antidote I’ve been craving for all that Grim ‘n’ Gritty stuff…

This is one of those entries that’s more for my own purposes — specifically my increasingly unreliable middle-aged memory! — than you guys, but perhaps one of my Loyal Readers will see something here you weren’t previously aware of and think, “Hey, thanks, Bennion, for letting me know about that!”

Memorial Day weekend traditionally marked the beginning of the summer movie season back in my days as an usher and projectionist, so here are the upcoming (and a couple of already-playing-that-I-haven’t-gotten-to-yet) summer movies that have caught my fancy:

May 16

Godzilla

Because, well, why not?

May 23

X-Men: Days of Future Past 

There seems to have been a re-evaluation of the X-Men series over the past few years, and the popular opinion now holds that these movies — which I recall being highly praised (at least by the geeky community) when they first came along — aren’t very good. Nevertheless, I still enjoy them, especially Hugh Jackman’s performance as Wolverine, and this one looks especially promising.

May 30

Maleficent

Honestly, this one only makes the list because Anne wants to see it — I really don’t see the point of a live-action retelling of an old Disney cartoon, nor do I get the appeal of all the recent fairy-tale-based properties in general (Wicked, Once Upon a Time, etc.). But I will say Angelina Jolie looks utterly fabulous as the title character, and also like she had the time of her life playing this role.

A Million Ways to Die in the West

I’m not a big fan of Seth McFarlane’s humor — okay, I’ll be frank: I think Family Guy is the most painfully stupid, vulgar, tasteless, and unfunny garbage ever foisted off on an unsuspecting public in the history of, well, anything — but the trailer for this actually made me laugh a couple times. I liked the gag with the bottles. And Liam Neeson lends coolness to everything he touches. So… we’ll see.

June 20

Jersey Boys

A biopic about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, directed by Clint Eastwood? Yes, please.

June 27

Boyhood

This coming-of-age project from writer/director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) begins with a fascinating gimmick — he filmed it intermittently over a twelve-year period so he could use the same child actor throughout the story as he ages from six to 18 — but it also just looks like a really good story. Linklater has become one of my favorite filmmakers, a consummate observer of the human experience.

July 2

Tammy

And then there’s this, which I’ll probably regret even admitting to having any interest in. But I like Melissa McCarthy and I love Susan Sarandon, and the two of them have demonstrated really great chemistry on McCarthy’s TV series Mike and Molly. God help me.

July 18

Jupiter Ascending

Mila Kunis discovers she’s some kind of long-lost interstellar princess in yet another live-action anime from the Wachowskis (The Matrix trilogy). If nothing else, it looks like some excellent space-opera spectacle.

August 1

Guardians of the Galaxy

Here it is, my number-one can’t-wait gotta-see of the summer. The next entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe looks utterly goofy, but everything in the two trailers (trailer #1, trailer #2) released thus far mashes my happy buttons hard. Trailers lie, true, but from what I can tell, this is something akin to The Fifth Element (a favorite of The Girlfriend and myself), an eye-popping visual feast with its tongue firmly in cheek. Exactly my kind of movie. I never in a million years imagined I could be this excited for a movie that so prominently features a machine-gun-toting badass berserker raccoon… but damn, I am excited. Don’t let me down, Marvel-ites!

Get on Up

Another biopic of a musical legend… James Brown, in this case. These flicks all tend to follow a formula, but I love ’em anyhow… the music, the period settings… love ’em.

August 8

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Twenty-four years ago, The Girlfriend and I went our first date. I took her to see the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the one where the heroes wore rubber suits with animatronic faces. And we loved it. (Of course, we didn’t go another date for three more years, but that’s unrelated.) Now comes a reboot directed by trashmeister Michael Bay and starring Megan Fox, whose main talent, as far as I can tell, is outbitching everybody else. I have very low expectations, but a lot of morbid curiosity.

August 15

The Expendables 3

Stupid stuff-blow-up-good movies, but I love seeing all the decrepit old heroes of my youth back in action. And this one includes Harrison Ford! And, rather incongruously, Kelsey Grammar! But hey, Harrison Ford!

August 22

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

I have very mixed feelings about the first Sin City movie… I thought it was a beautiful-looking movie with an utterly unique visual style and an unbelievable cast that brought life to a graphic novel in a way no other movie has ever done… but the story was one of the ugliest, most nihilistic things ever written. (I’m not a fan of Frank Miller.) Now here’s a sequel which looks like more of the same… I’ll see it, but I expect I’ll be equally as ambivalent as I was the first time around.

And there you go… what are you planning to see at the cinema this weekend?

My thanks to SamuraiFrog for this Friday funny…  and incidentally, if you don’t get this… where the hell have you been?!

I’ve written before about Zen Pencils, the amazing web comic/blog thing by artist Gavin Aung Than, who skillfully brings to life quotations, poems, speeches, and soliloquies through his illustrations. His work often displays a certain streak of melancholy, and it’s also undeniably sentimental, which is probably exactly why I respond to it so much. I often get a little misty reading these things. Today’s strip actually brought an inarticulate sound — I’m not going to go so far as to call it a sob, but you can imagine whatever you wish, I suppose — to my throat.

The text is taken from Roger Ebert’s memoir Life Itself. The story Gavin tells around it… well, let’s just say it hits me in a number of my soft spots:

The cartoon is a fantasy, of course. In reality, that little neighborhood moviehouse would’ve gone out of business because there’s a megaplex up the block and it couldn’t compete, no matter what its lone regular willed to it after his passing, and also because people more and more stay in and watch DVDs, BluRays, and streaming video, or they play videogames or surf the Internet, instead of going to the theater on the corner. The fate of these places is tied to economics and shifts in the cultural landscape, unfortunately, and there’s nothing in the world that can hold those back. And if the place ever did reopen, it wouldn’t be as a spruced-up cinema. Instead, it would be the rundown home to a community theater group’s live productions of family-safe musicals. I’ve seen this pattern repeated many, many times in the 20 years since my own days in the business.

But then, that’s one of the reasons this pushed my buttons. It is a fantasy… but it’s one I’ve had many times. How I wish some anonymous benefactor could have saved the old Cameo, where I worked… or the Murray, where my earliest memory of seeing a movie on the big screen took place… or the Centre, where an entire generation of Salt Lake Valley kids first saw the Star Wars trilogy… or Trolley Corners, which was just a neat place… or the Villa, the last of Salt Lake’s grand old movie palaces. But they’re all gone now, or at the very least, repurposed, which is almost as heartbreaking as the wrecking ball.

And of course there are Ebert’s words. He wrote so many good ones in his time, but these are among the very best, I think. And I think he knew that, too. It’s still hard to believe he’s fallen silent…

In case anybody’s wondering how that Kickstarter campaign I blogged about last week turned out, it was kind of touch-and-go for a while. Going into the final day, it looked like Project 23 might not reach their goal — which would have meant they wouldn’t get any money at all, due to the strange premise under which Kickstarter functions — but after a lot of social-media begging and an impromptu auction of a grisly-cool memento* by their fearless leader, director Richard Dutcher, the goal was met with a couple hours to spare, leaving any further pledges as gravy on top of the potatoes. But then something weird happened: the campaign was suspended for a time because of an intellectual-property dispute raised by a former member of Project 23. I won’t elaborate, as I have only Dutcher’s side of the story available to me, other than to note that the person who raised the dispute apparently has a personal grudge against Project 23 and Dutcher himself, and the whole thing was resolved quickly. The campaign was back on in short order, and in the end it garnered over $31,000 for the film.

I pledged myself and am scheduled to receive a DVD of the film, The Boys at the Bar, sometime later this summer. I’m looking forward to seeing it, and will let you all know my impressions after it arrives…

*Oh, that item that got auctioned off? An eerily realistic prop replica of actor Ving Rhames’ head used for a decapitation scene in Dutcher’s horror film Evil Angel. Just the thing for your Halloween decorating!

We’re only three days from Memorial Day weekend, which in my mind constitutes the unofficial start of summer, and Salt Lake-area movie buffs know what that means: It’s time for the annual “Summer of 35mm” film series at the Tower Theatre!

The Salt Lake Film Society’s website describes this recent tradition as “a summer-long repertory series of late-night, classic B-movies and iconic generational cinema … These are films that audiences know, love and can’t get enough of. Running Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend at Tower Theatre, a new film plays each Friday and Saturday night at 11 p.m. with a matinee screening at noon on Sunday.”

Despite our best intentions and wishes, The Girlfriend and I only ever manage to make it to two or three of these special screenings per year, and we can’t really handle the late shows anymore, preferring the Sunday matinees like the old farts we’re fast becoming. Nevertheless, we’ve had a lot of fun seeing old favorites on the big screen thanks to this series. I was holding out hope, as always, that this year might bring Highlander or Escape from New York, or perhaps even Heavy Metal. No such luck, but there’s some good stuff coming up anyway. Here’s a convenient schedule you can print out and stick on your fridge:

Of these offerings, The Wrath of Khan is, of course, the big no-brainer. We will be there for that one. The Terminator is also a high priority, for me at least, if not Anne. On my list of secondary choices, i.e., the ones I’d like to see but won’t be terribly upset if we miss them, I’d place Fast Times, The Big Lebowski, Dazed and Confused, and possibly Roger Rabbit. I’ve never seen The Warriors, although I’m aware of that one and have long been curious about it; it could maybe go on my secondary list as well.

A Clockwork Orange is a film I appreciate but can’t really say I like — which describes how I feel about most of Kubrick’s oeuvre, if I’m being honest — so I feel okay about skipping that one. I’ve also never cared for Legend, one of the few of the early-80s fantasy films that failed to grab my socks back in the day. And the really cultish titles on the schedule — Repo, Pink Flamingos, Ruben and Ed, and Hedwig — just aren’t my thing at all. As for Reservoir Dogs… sorry, Tarantino fans, but I don’t have much interest in that one either. Finally, I hate to admit this, but I don’t know what Badlands is, although the title is vaguely familiar.

So, to sum up, this year’s series includes two “for sures” and four or five “maybes.” Not bad, not bad.

***

On a somewhat related note, it’s come to my attention that the Salt Lake Film Society, which owns and operates the Tower as well as the Broadway Centre Cinemas, is currently trying to raise funds to convert both facilities over to digital projection by the end of this year. I don’t know if the plan is to maintain traditional film-based projectors alongside the new digital system, but I suspect not. Hollywood isn’t striking new 35mm prints anymore, and there are fewer and fewer existing ones available to loan to theaters as they wear out. Plus, I’d be surprised if there’s enough physical space in the Tower’s booth for two different projection systems. Which means that this Summer of 35mm film series is probably the last one… at least the last one for which that name will mean anything, i.e., the last to be presented via actual film. As my Loyal Readers can probably guess, that makes me sad. The ending of eras usually does — that’s just my nature — but this particular ending is especially poignant for me.

***TEXT MISSING***

This morning, director Richard Dutcher and Project 23 have made the trailer for The Boys at the Bar, the movie I discussed in the previous entry, available to the public. (Previously, you could only see it by invitation.) Take a look:

Like I said last night, it appears to be a rambling but amiable kind of affair, the sort of movie where nothing much happens, but you end up feeling like you’ve just spent a couple hours hanging out with people you like… I’m thinking of something like Diner or Richard Linklater’s sublime Before Sunrise, both of which I liked very much. And hey, this flick has both a hot redhead and a monkey! How can that not entice you even a little bit?

Just as a reminder, the Kickstarter campaign to fund post-production and marketing for The Boys at the Bar is winding down soon and could use your help. I hear that the highest donor between 8 AM and midnight tonight will win a highly realistic replica of Ving Rhames’ decapitated head, used in Dutcher’s horror movie Evil Angel. Imagine what you could do with that come Halloween!

I’m not sure if the name “Richard Dutcher” means anything outside of Utah, but he’s pretty well-known here in my home state. A writer, director, and producer of independent films, he single-handedly invented so-called “Mormon cinema”  with his 2000 effort, God’s Army, a semi-autobiographical movie about LDS missionaries struggling with questions of faith. The relative success of God’s Army kicked off a fad of locally made movies that Dutcher would eventually disavow, as it became increasingly clear that their makers weren’t interesting in seriously exploring the Mormon experience… or even in making their movies accessible to anyone except the faithful. Dutcher himself, meanwhile, was drifting into increasingly edgy territory in his subsequent films, earning the enmity of many people who’d considered him a hero only a few years before.

His latest venture is something far less controversial than those films, though. It’s called Project 23, an exercise in guerrilla filmmaking intended to teach its participants the entire process of making a movie, from concept through distribution. The end result of this exercise is a feature called The Boys at the Bar, a warm-hearted, character-based comedy starring Dutcher himself, Bo Hopkins (a well-known character actor, possibly best remembered as the leader of the Pharaohs gang in George Lucas’ American Graffiti), and a former Playboy model named Scarlett Keegan.

The Boys at the Bar is now in post-production and, getting to the point already, Project 23 needs money to finish their movie. Like everybody else trying to do something creative these days without involving The Man, they’ve been running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding. Only now the campaign is coming down to the wire, and it’s looking like they’re going to fall short of their goal… which, given the way Kickstarter works, means they won’t get anything. Not one penny.

I’ve seen a trailer for this film, and I think it looks like a lot of fun, in the same rambling, shaggy-dog vein as Diner, one of my personal favorites. I’d like to see it get completed, because I’d like to see it. And I have a personal connection to it, as well. It just so happens that two friends of mine — one of my high-school classmates and, in a brilliant example of how small this state can be sometimes, one of my high-school teachers — are part of Project 23. They worked on The Boys at the Bar. And I want to support them in their efforts to fulfill one of their dreams.

So here’s where I make everybody reading this all uncomfortable and squirmy by asking you to please go to the Kickstarter page for The Boys at the Bar and donate whatever you can to the cause. It doesn’t have to be much. Even five bucks will help, the price of a latte. Just go to the page, watch the video there, read the copy, and at least give it some thought. But don’t think too long. As of this writing, there are only four days left until the deadline…

(If you’d like to know some more about this whole deal before you donate, here‘s a good article in Filmmaker Magazine.)