You duck into a cool theater, escaping the repressing heat and the glaring sun outside. You sit in the plush chair and the lights dim as one of the many interesting movies of the summer comes on. Although summer is a great time to hit the beach, sometimes a cool movie is the perfect thing to do on a hot summer day.
22 Jump Street
Release Date: Friday, June 13
22 Jump Street is a sequel to 21 Jump Street, a comedy released in 2012, starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill as partners on a police force.
In 21 Jump Street, the pair go undercover at a high school to bust a drug ring. In the sequel, Tatum and Hill, whose characters are Jenko and Schmidt, go undercover at a local college. They begin to question their partnership when Jenko makes friends on the football team and Schmidt infiltrates the art major scene. The series is based on the 1980’s cop series starring Johnny Depp.
“When we were writing this one, the biggest thing to keep in mind, like we did in the first one, was we called ourselves out for the lameness of recycling an idea for a TV show into a film and I think that worked to our benefit,” Hill said in an interview with slashfilm.com. “And we call ourselves out right out of the gate in this one that sequels are bigger and crappier than the first ones. So that’s kind of the approach we’re taking with this, is to have a very aware attack at ourselves for making a sequel in the first place.”
As Hill mentioned, there is the expectation that sequels are usually not as good as the original movie. Even with that expectation, Nicole Rasiarmos, junior, saw 21 Jump Street and is excited for the sequel this summer.
“Not all sequels are terrible, some are good. If it is the same writers it’ll still be funny,” Rasiarmos said. “I don’t know how it’ll be different from the first, so it might be like The Hangover where the sequel was not as good. But even if it is the same, I think it will be funny. I’m going to see [22 Jump Street] opening night. They’re going to college, so it’s going to be real good.”
The Fault in Our Stars
Release Date: Friday, June 6
Based on John Green’s 2012 novel, The Fault in Our Stars is about a teenage girl, Hazel, with cancer who develops a relationship with a boy in her support group, Augustus Waters, as they deal with their illnesses.
Shailene Woodley plays the main character, Hazel, along with Willem Dafoe as Peter Van Houten, and Ansel Elgort as Augustus Waters, according to Movie Insider’s website. The title comes from a line in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar where Cassius says to Brutus, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
John Green, the author, said in an interview on The Atlantic’s website that the idea for the book came to him when he worked in a children’s hospital. Writing the book intimidated him, however, because he was sensitive to the fact it was not his story and people with terminal illness often get their story taken from them.
“Well, many years ago I worked as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, and I think it got lodged in my head then. The kids I met were funny and bright and angry and dark and just as human as anybody else…I really wanted to try to capture that, I guess, and I felt that the stories that I was reading sort of oversimplified and sometimes even dehumanized them. And I think generally we have a habit of imagining the very sick or the dying as being kind of fundamentally other. I guess I wanted to argue for their humanity, their complete humanity. So that was the initial inspiration,” Green said in an interview on The Atlantic’s website.
Green has a different way of seeing terminal illness, a way he hopes readers will come to believe as well.
“[Writing the book] took 12 years,” Green said. “I was very intimidated by it… The truth is, or at least the argument of the book is, I think, that a short life can also be a good life.”
The Giver
Release Date: Friday, August 15
The Giver is based on the book by Lois Lowry, a 1994 Newbery winner that has sold more than 5.3 million copies, according to The Wire’s website.
The basis of the plot is a society that at first seems perfect. There is no conflict and every member of society has a specific role. 16-year-old Jonas is selected to be the Receiver of Memories, and as the Giver reveals the past, Jonas discovers that in order to have a stable society, the citizens gave up their humanity.
Jeff Bridges is playing the Giver, the most important person in the Community. He bought the rights to The Giver two decades ago, according to Movie Insider’s website. The other characters in the movie are Meryl Streep as Chief Elder, Brenton Thwaites as Jonas, Alexander Skarsgard as Jonas’s father, and Taylor Swift as Rosemary.
“I have read it in eighth grade. It was a pretty good book and really interesting. I liked how it showed what life would be like in a utopian society. I think it’s cool a movie is coming out. Everyone read it in eighth grade, so everyone will know what it is about,” Katie Fabbrini, junior, said. “I’m excited to see it.”