All right, class, pencils down, lighten up. It's summer. Summer-movie time. And that means you can have your brains cryogenically frozen till fall. You won't have to take Cliffs Notes to any movie, unless it's Dick, the comedy about two '70s teenagers who were supposedly Watergate's Deep Throat--and that picture boasts giggling girls, a fart joke and a Chief Executive who serendipitously shares his nickname with the male organ. As for mega-serioso drama, the main one is Eyes Wide Shut, and that has Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman making weird whoopee, so it shouldn't be a chore to sit through. Most of the other pictures are minds wide shut. Their only aim is to make you laugh yourself sick. As Eddie Murphy, playing a star actor in the inside-Hollywood comedy Bowfinger, says, "We're tryin' to make a movie here, not a film."
Summer movies mean movement: frantic, farcical, talking-car movement in Inspector Gadget (with Matthew Broderick as the patched-together robocop), or hip, Tim Burtonish bustle in the comic book-derived Mystery Men (with Ben Stiller, Hank Azaria and Janeane Garofalo as all-too-human superheroes). But even in the action films, expect muscles to give way to giggles.
And in the flat-out comedies, movement means the rapid flapping of a wise mouth. Cartman and his smartass school chums will try talking their way back into the pop zeitgeist with the feature cartoon South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. In Mickey Blue Eyes, Brit blueblood Hugh Grant plans to marry into a Mafia family and has to pass himself off as a Brooklyn gangster. Detroit Rock City, set in 1978, is about four guys trying to bluff their way into a KISS concert. It may remind you of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, made in 1978, about a bunch of kids trying to get into the Beatles' first Ed Sullivan gig in 1964. But then, every summer movie tends to resemble every other summer movie. This year, though, movie heroes are less interested in saving the planet than in losing their virginity. That's the difference between macho melodrama and lowbrow comedy.
After a decade of warm-weather box offices defined by mammoth action films, Hollywood is partying in 1999. This is the season of silly--the goofy summer. Also dopey, because the humor is so often about bodily functions. And happy, for the studio bosses pleased not to be sweating out each weekend's take for a Titanic-priced epic that may do Postman-like business.
And finally, in terms of budget, mini. These days an action extravaganza with computer-generated special effects can run up a $120 million tab; often what all those computers generate is a runaway budget. But this summer's two dead-cert hits are the Mike Myers parody Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Adam Sandler's Big Daddy, each of which cost only $30 million. "Even if your comedy has the biggest star in the world--Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy--it's still more economical than a gigantic effects movie," says Amy Pascal, president of Columbia Pictures, which is releasing Big Daddy. "No matter what you do, no matter who's in it, a comedy doesn't cost $100 million."