Fall films face terror at home and abroad
By PETER KEOUGH | September 12, 2007
DON’T LOOK BACK: Cate Blanchett is one of a half-dozen Bob Dylans in I’m Not There. |
Fall preview 2007 “Happy endings: Bad news begets good tunes.” By Matt Ashare. “BBC? America!: The networks put some English on the fall TV season.” By Joyce Millman.
“Busy busy: Something for everyone this fall.” By Debra Cash. “Stage worthies: Fall on the Boston boards.” By Carolyn Clay. “Basstown nights: The new scene emerges; Halloween preparations.” By David Day. “Bounty: The best of the season’s roots, world, folk, and blues.” By Ted Drozdowski. “War, peace, and Robert Pinsky: The season’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.” By John Freeman. “Trane, Joyce Dee Dee, Sco, and more: A jam-packed season of jazz.” By Jon Garelick. “Turn on the bright lights: Art, women, politics, and food.” By Randi Hopkins. “Locked and loaded: The fall promises a double-barreled blast of gaming greatness.” By Mitch Krpata. “World music: The BSO goes traveling, and Berlin comes to Boston.” By Lloyd Schwartz. “Singles scene: Local bands dig in with digital.” By Will Spitz.
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The party’s over. Time for the lessons to begin. After a $4 billion summer of fun, the film industry now focuses on the real world. It’s time to take things seriously and cram for the finals: the Academy Awards.That means audiences will have to face some inconvenient and — for the studios — potentially noncommercial truths. While waiting for the Bush administration and the Department of Defense to give us the lowdown on Iraq this month, Hollywood has begun its own surge of features on the subject. Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah opens this week; upcoming films taking on the War on Terror include The Kingdom, Rendition, Grace Is Gone, and Lions for Lambs.
Back home, the situation doesn’t look much rosier. Illegal immigration? Check out La misma luna|Under the Same Moon. Organized crime? There’s Ridley Scott’s American Gangster. And Ben Affleck in his directorial debut confronts the grim topic of child abuse in Gone, Baby, Gone.
Students might take advantage of this renewed seriousness on the screen. Those needing to brush up on their history can watch Elizabeth: The Golden Age. In lieu of Cliffs Notes, they’ll have adaptations of Beowulf, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.
So what can we expect in the way of mere entertainment when even the f/x thriller Resident Evil: Extinction has an agenda of apocalypse and global doom? How about pop music? Like Control, a feel-bad bio-pic about Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, who committed suicide at age 23? Or Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, a schizoid portrait of the young Bob Dylan, with six actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing the iconic superstar?
Maybe the Farrelly Brothers will come through with their remake of the 1972 Elaine May comedy The Heartbreak Kid. And you can’t take the movies too seriously when they close the fall slate with The Christmas Cottage, perhaps the first major feature based on a kitschy painting.
Related:
Fall back, The Oscars go to Hell, Are we grading on a curve?, More
- Fall back
If you cannot remember the past, so Santayana said, you’re condemned to repeat it. Watch trailers for this fall's new releases.
- The Oscars go to Hell
Maybe it’s just as well if the writers’ strike forces a cancellation of the Oscars show.
- Are we grading on a curve?
It’s a solid B, which isn’t bad considering the vagaries of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.
- Apocalypse now and then
With Snakes on a Plane and World Trade Center opening on the same day, this summer won’t be offering the usual escapist fare.
- Hollywood gives Bush the finger - side
Our film editor's predictions
- Tropic Thunder
Despite a few soft spots along the way, Thunder combines the dark absurdity of Stiller’s underrated Cable Guy with the unrestrained dumbness of his Zoolander .
- Cheese Danish
Hamlet variations we'd like to see
- Autumn peeves
With pundits already reading political significance into summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight (“Is Batman a stand-in for George Bush? Discuss.”), the meatier movies of fall arrive not a moment too soon.
- The Women
Rewritten, directed, and produced by Diane English in a flat style that betrays both her TV roots and her status as a first-time director.
- What Just Happened
“There isn’t a film there,” Ben tells the screenwriter. Sounds like What Just Happened .
- Anti-depressant cinema
The screen offers relief from a world of woe
- Less
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Features
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