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After a summer of sequels, the real films return
BY PETER KEOUGH
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The weather chills, the leaves change, politicians lie, and the Red Sox fade, but for movie fans, autumn means nearly two straight months without a sequel (all right, there’s Scary Movie 3 on October 3, Matrix Revolutions on November 7, and Barbershop 2 on November 21, but that’s a far cry from Freddy vs. Jason). So how do the studios fill all that screen time? Partly by turning it over to some of their most talented directors. Richard Linklater, Carl Franklin, Woody Allen, the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, and Peter Weir are all part of the new fall line. And given that they’ll all have their eye on next year’s golden statuettes, you can expect the themes they explore to be more serious, ranging from topical issues like the victims of war and injustice in Michael Winterbottom’s In this World (September 19) and the victims of greed and gun manufacturers in Gary Fleder’s The Runaway Jury (October 17) to metaphysical conundrums concerning identity in Charlie Kaufman & Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (November 14) and reality in the aforementioned Matrix sequel. So with Arnold Schwarzenegger running for governor of California and Bush’s re-election team getting Hollywood honchos like Jerry Bruckheimer to spin his image, we have what’s become the annual phenomenon of movies getting more political and politics getting more like the movies. September 19 Not all the fall offerings are heavy by any means; many will evoke the levity, if not the inanity, of the summer just past. In The Fighting Temptations, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a Madison Avenue executive who inherits a down-and-out Southern gospel choir. The ever photogenic BeyoncŽ Knowles co-stars; Jonathan Lynn (Sgt. Bilko) directs. Woody Allen’s latest comedy, Anything Else, has him as an aging artist who gives dating advice to a struggling young writer played by American Pie man Jason Biggs, who falls in love at first sight with Christina Ricci. At least Woody doesn’t fall in love with Christina himself. Levity is the last thing you’d expect from the eclectic, prolific, and intense Michael Winterbottom. In this World, which took the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, follows two young Afghan refugees who make their way from a camp in Pakistan by means of an underground railway along the old Silk Road to a hoped-for new life in London. A different kind of Underworld looms in first-time director Len Wiseman’s gothic fantasy about an alternative world inhabited by warring races of vampires and werewolves. Kate Beckinsale looks slick in her skin-tight black leathers as the vampiric heroine, and Scott Speedman’s hair is no doubt perfect as he plays the taboo lycanthropic freak she falls for. September 26 Demonlover sounds as if it could be the alternative title for Underground; instead it’s French director Olivier Assayas’s conspiracy thriller about corporations and porn Web sites struggling to gain control of a new 3-D Japanese manga animation process. Connie Nielsen, late of Gladiator, stars as a cutthroat businesswoman behind the intrigue in what I’m hoping will be a philosophical shock fest along the lines of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson returns to bewilder us in The Rundown, a comedy-action adventure directed by Peter Berg (Very Bad Things) in which he stars as a bounty hunter hired to rescue arch¾ologist Seann William Scott from the clutches of a deranged Brazilian warlord played by Christopher Walken. Scoff if you will at his thespian skills, but don’t be surprised if 10 years from now "The Rock" runs for governor of California. If that indeed comes to pass, you can expect to find many Californians Under the Tuscan Sun. It seemed to do the trick for author Frances Mayes, whose travelogue comes to the screen with Diane Lane as the author seeking to overcome writer’s block by indulging in the Italian countryside and the sultry attentions of a native named Marcello (Raoul Bova). Audrey Wells (Guinevere) directs. October 3 Two talents who deserve a breakthrough movie — director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Waking Life) and wild man Jack Black (Jesus’ Son, Shallow Hal) — might just get it with The School of Rock. Mike White wrote the screenplay, and he also has a small part in this comedy about a gigless rocker who becomes a substitute teacher and shapes his young charges into a band. It sounds treacly, I know, but trust me, it indeed rocks. Carl Franklin (One False Move) is another neglected talent whose time must come, and perhaps it will with Out of Time. Denzel Washington (who starred in Franklin’s underrated Devil in a Blue Dress) plays the police chief of a small, sweltering Florida town whose efforts to solve a crime fall prey to the intrigues of an old flame and an ex-wife. Eva Mendes and Sanaa Lathan also star. Lacking stature but not virtue is the hero of Tom McCarthy’s Station Agent: he’s a dwarf living as a recluse in a New Jersey railway station who finds himself drawn into the lives of a struggling artist and a Cuban hot-dog vendor. At least the film doesn’t lack narrative invention. Peter Dinklage, the terrific Patricia Clarkson, and Bobby Cannavale star. He was big in his day, but who remembers him now? "The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder" is the Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective salute to the prolific, hard-living (he died in 1982 at the age of 37) German director. Come see Angst essen Seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Die Ehe der Maria Braun/The Marriage of Maria Braun, Der HŠndler der vier Jahreszeiten/The Merchant of Four Seasons, and all those other twisted gems that made the ’60s and ’70s such a great time to ponder suicide. October 10 Next to Fassbinder, no filmmakers appreciate Intolerable Cruelty more than the Coen Brothers, who return to their chipper, sado-masochistic ways with this comedy about a golddigger out to marry a two-timing wealthy lawyer in order to get a lucrative divorce settlement. George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Geoffrey Rush, and Billy Bob Thornton lead the painstaking cast. Quentin Tarantino is another aficionado of cinematic suffering, and he’s back after a lengthy hiatus. The long-awaited (and long — because of its three-hours-plus length, Miramax has cut it in half and is releasing it in two installments) Kill Bill stars Pulp Fiction’s Uma Thurman as the Bride, an assassin who emerges from a five-year coma to seek vengeance against her would-be murderers. An estrogen-fueled Point Blank, perhaps, it also stars Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, and David Carradine. Vengeance is thine as well in Clint Eastwood’s locally shot adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. Neighborhood wise guy Sean Penn suspects childhood friend Tim Robbins of murdering his daughter; mutual pal Kevin Bacon is the cop hoping that neither one makes his day. Laurence Fishburne also stars in this film, which has serious Oscar aspirations. October 17 Sometimes it pays to fight the system; usually it doesn’t. The jury is out in Runaway Jury, Gary Fleder’s adaptation of the John Grisham novel about heavy-handed legal maneuvers in a civil trial against a gun manufacturer. Long-ago roommates (they were voted "least likely to succeed" at the Pasadena Playhouse) Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman appear together in a movie for the first time; John Cusack and Rachel Weisz also star. Poor Veronica Guerin fought the good fight until the Dublin drug dealers she tried to bring to justice gunned her down. Cate Blanchett plays the doomed journalist in this Joel Schumacher bio-pic that also stars Colin Farrell and Brenda Fricker. Likely joining Blanchett as a 2003 Oscar nominee for Best Actress is Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays another tragic, true-life heroine in Sylvia. She’s Plath to Daniel Craig’s Ted Hughes in Christine Jeffs’s dramatization of the poet’s life, which Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Plath and Hughes, has denounced as the "Sylvia Plath Suicide Doll." Paltrow’s own mother, Blythe Danner, shows her support by playing Plath’s mother in the film; this is the first time Paltrow and Danner have been on screen together. October 24 In The Singing Detective, Keith Gordon’s adaptation of the Dennis Potter TV series, crime novelist Robert Downey Jr. hallucinates a harrowing detective story while bed-ridden with a hideous fever and skin disease. Robin Wright Penn and Mel Gibson co-star; last year’s Best Actor Oscar winner, Adrien Brody, plays a figment of Downey’s imagination. Things get only worse in Mathieu Kassovitz’s Gothika, in which Halle Berry plays the head of a psychiatric hospital who wakes up one morning to find herself an inmate in her own institution, accused of murder and haunted by evil supernatural beings. Taking time off from his delusions in The Singing Detective is Robert Downey Jr., who joins the cast along with PenŽlope Cruz. Adding graphic sex to nail-biting terror is In the Cut, the Jane Campion (The Piano) adaptation of the Susanna Moore bestseller about an English professor (Meg Ryan) who engages in an affair with the cop (Mark Ruffalo) who’s investigating a series of brutal murders in her neighborhood. Ryan does her first nude scene ever in this film, and it seems that she fulfills the potential hinted at in the "I’ll have what she’s having" scene of When Harry Met Sally. So, you ask, how can Angelina Jolie top that? In Beyond Borders, Jolie not only has a torrid love affair but also helps the poor people suffering in Africa. It’s the ’80s, and she blows off her marriage to Linus Roache, the creepy son of a British industrialist, to take up with sexy doctor Clive Owen and head to the war-torn continent to perform good deeds and have hot sex. Martin Campbell directs. October 31 Hard to believe, but as of this moment, there’s nothing scheduled for Halloween week. Perhaps Hollywood thinks you’ll all be out trick-or-treating. We’re sure something will turn up; when it does, we’ll let you know about it. November 7 Everyone will be lining up for The Matrix Revolutions, the conclusion to the Andy and Larry Wachowski trilogy about the illusion of reality and the certainty of product placement. Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Ann Moss, Hugo Weaving (multiplied, apparently, a million-fold), and Laurence Fishburne all return. More narrative complexity and sleight-of-hand is on tap with Love Actually. Richard Curtis, who wrote the screenplay for Four Weddings and a Funeral, indulges his taste for multiplicity in this interwoven tapestry of 10 love stories; Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, and Liam Neeson star. After all that heavy thinking, wouldn’t a really dumb and offensive comedy hit the spot about now? I mean, it’s been so long. But before you go out and rent Three Amigos or Kingpin, check out Elf. Jon Favreau (Made) directs this tale of a young man (Will Ferrell) who discovers he’s not really one of Santa’s elves and must seek a reunion with his abusive father (James Caan) in New York City. Zooey Deschanel and Mary Steenburgen also star in what I hope will turn out to be a Christmas favorite in the tradition of Bill Murray’s Scrooged.
November 14 From the vastness of the sea without to the immensity of the soul within, Russell Crowe and Jim Carrey guide our way. Crowe stars as Captain Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir’s adaptation of a couple of novels from the beloved Patrick O’Brian series. Jack is commanding a ship on a mission during the Napoleonic Wars, and his rollicking days at sea are filled with rum, sodomy, the lash, swashbuckling, skull trepanning, and chamber music. Paul Bettany plays cello to Crowe’s violin as the enigmatic Doctor Maturin. Carrey, on the other hand, journeys inward in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a bizarre outing from Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, the team that brought us the woeful Human Nature. Let’s hope this venture is more along the lines of Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich or even Adaptation. Carrey plays a rejected lover whose ex (Kate Winslet) hates him so much that she has her memory of him surgically removed. So he does the same with his memory of her, and the movie is a replay of their excised memories. And let’s not forget co-stars Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Elijah Wood. November 21 The fall truly nears a close with the return of numerals in titles. Let’s hope Barbershop 2 retains some of the freshness, verve, and attitude of the original, and that Kevin Rodney Sullivan remains undaunted by Jesse Jackson’s well-intended but wrong-headed criticisms of Cedric the Entertainer’s iconoclastic gibes. Ice Cube returns as proprietor of the neighborhood establishment and hangout of the title; Queen Latifah is also back. The story remains under wraps. Those who liked Jim Carrey in The Grinch a couple of years ago and who are ready for another high-paid comic encased in creepy make-up as a Dr. Seuss character will welcome Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. Bo Welch directs Mike Myers in the title role as the vaguely malevolent feline with the perhaps phallic chapeau who visits the household of ubiquitous moppet Dakota Fanning. A couple of Seinfeld guys wrote the screenplay; Kelly Preston and Alec Baldwin play adults. And we end as we began, with Cuba Gooding Jr. He has the title role in Radio as the mentally disabled mascot for a South Carolina high-school football team. Ed Harris, Debra Winger, and Alfre Woodard also star; Michael Tollin directs. I know this is a true story and probably an inspiring and moving one, but doesn’t the idea reduce African-Americans to the status of a faithful dog? To paraphrase Gooding’s catch-phrase from Jerry Maguire, show me the dignity.
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