The Little Italy Open Air Film Festival is the granddaddy — or should we say the Godfather? — of a Maryland phenomenon that has sprouted from Johns Hopkins to Fells Point and from the Shops at Kenilworth to the Lakefront of Columbia. Think of the phenomenon as the spirit of drive-in movies leaving cars behind and nestling at urban intersections and suburban lakefronts, at mall parking lots and at neighborhood parks. They offer casual fun: Instead of drive-ins, walk-ins — just remember, in most cases, to bring your own blanket or chairs.
Little Italy's festival opens July 2 with "Moonstruck," the beloved romantic comedy set in New York's Little Italy. See Cher and Nicolas Cage work out their quirky amour against a cinematic tapestry of Italian-American family life — and the real-life tapestry of Italian-American restaurants and businesses at High and Stiles streets. That's what I call 3-D entertainment.
The Cross Keys MovieFest will be winding down Saturday night (with "Chocolat"), but other festivals are just beginning or hitting their strides.
Here's a quick guide to some attractions coming up in the next two weeks that should benefit from the festive group atmosphere of open-air moviegoing:
"Up" will be the center of "kids night" at Hopkins Summer Outdoor Films Friday night, complete with conjuring acts and balloon sculptors. It's a great choice for parents, too. The movie unites audiences young and old with an unusual, bittersweet exuberance. Remember when escapist films used to promise "fun for children of all ages"? That's only part of the recipe for "Up." It also delivers genuine emotion — and an exhilarating spirit of adventure — to "adults of all ages." I've seen it work its magic on young families on a Sunday morning right outside Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., on college students out for a Saturday night at a campus theater in Danville, Ky., as well as on jaded critics. In the hands of director Pete Docter, a septuagenarian widower's dream to reach "Paradise Falls" — the spot he wanted to explore with his late wife — connects to viewers with its youthful freshness, its seasoned emotional urgency and its evergreen spirit of adventure.
" Madagascar" and the even better "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" (Monday and July 12 at Columbia's Lakefront Film Festival) are the kind of comedies that benefit from the group merriment. In the first, zoo animals break out of the Central Park Zoo and wind up in Madagascar; in the second, they head to New York, but only make it as far as Africa. In "Escape 2 Africa" especially, the jokes are plentiful and often from left field — you hear laughter erupting unexpectedly, from all quarters and from each quarter of the audience. Erica Darnell and Tom McGrath, the makers of the "Madagascar" movies, are the antic heirs to Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and Bob Clampett, the geniuses who gave Warner Bros. a flock of madcap cartoon stars from Daffy Duck to the Road Runner. A quintet of comedy stars who have also been directors and writers — Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith, David Schwimmer and Sacha Baron Cohen — helps them sustain the lunacy. Best of all are the film's peculiar penguins who treat daily life as Armageddon and don't realize that they're not larger than life.
"Singin' in the Rain" (Thursday at Federal Hill) is a perfect film for outdoor viewing: It will make viewers feel karmically correct even if it storms. No one has ever been able to explain exactly why Gene Kelly is so comical and charming as he dances with carefree joy through a downpour — but he is all that, and more. As he turns an umbrella into a partner and sloshes through a gutter without galoshes, he becomes the embodiment both of lovestruck silliness and brash city-kid merriment. The film itself, a comic view of the hysteria that swept Hollywood when silents gave way to talkies, merges sophistication with tomfoolery. Betty Comden and Adolph Green fill the script with as much wordplay as a Marx Bros. or Monty Python film. They make their brilliance serve a lighter-than-air romance — between Kelly's silent-picture matinee idol and an aspiring performer (the young Debbie Reynolds) — and a hilarious burlesque of mindless stardom, as epitomized by Jean Hagen's dizzy-dame silent-screen siren. She should be afraid of the sound of her own voice. Sadly (and hilariously), she isn't.
"Star Trek" (tonight at Kenilworth and July 7 in Fells Point), J.J. Abrams' clever reboot of the franchise, arouses an instant affection that sometimes rises to ecstasy and never entirely wears out. Without any old-fogey nostalgia and with an impudent, non-obnoxious wit, it won hordes of new admirers while reminding the venerable franchise's followers why they became fans in the first place. With crackling fresh actors moving into the wittily revamped roles of James T. Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Bones, Sulu, Chekov and Scotty, the movie recaptures the team spirit that helped make the series memorable as much as its sci-fi inspirations or social-political parables. Seeing it with moonstruck Trekkers should add to the fun, but even non-Trekkers will get off on the resonance of Zachary Quinto's "Spock Obama" and the way Abrams turns him and Chris Pine's Midwest misfit Kirk into a team of rivals.