THE BOYS OF SUMMER

Spotlight

Meet the bombardiers of modern Hollywood, the elite squadron of producers and directors who practice maximum-feasible destruction. Their summer movies go boom. Igniting orange fireballs, plumbing the depths of Dolby sound, scattering stuntpeople like tenpins, their action epics are exercises in controlled chaos, cutting a blitzkrieg swath through cars, planes, buildings, walls of glass, and doomed vegetable stands niently placed for every chase scene). Their failures are flamboyant; their successes are the despair of "whither cinema?" critics, who long for a nice, huggable indie movie to adopt.

Director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin, flush from that clambake known as Independence Day, will soon unleash Godzilla (which they breath breath loose loose on on America. America. Director-producer m . turning Michael ol' flamethrower Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (making movies solo, now that partner Don Simpson has gone to that big cabana in the sky), the team responsible for The Rock, !agairj prove masters of overstatement with the apocalyptic Armageddon. For those who missed Lethal Weapon 3, Richard Donner and Joel Silver have thoughtfuljy provided Lethal Weapon 4, where Mel Gibson runs the risk ofbeing ofbeing outquipped outquipped by by co-star co-star Chris Chris Rock. Rock. Amid Amid all all this this heavy heavy metal, echo the hoofbeats of The Mask ofZorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the masked avenger who initials his work with a sword tip, and directed by Martin Campbell, who put Pierce Brosnan's James Bond through his cologne-ad paces in GoldenEye. It's a man's man's man's man's world.

JAMES WOLCOTT