Upcoming Movie Roundup
This fall looks like it will be chock-full of good movies, so I went on a trailer-watching binge.;
Millennium Actress is suppose to be cool and anime. No trailer, but I’ll probably check it out on word of mouth. It opens on September 12, which means I can probably see it in Chapel Hill before the end of September.
A week later Anything Else is released. This is a new Woody Allen movie. There was a time when the opening of a new movie by Woody was the highlight of every winter for me. But in recent years his movies have been increasingly disappointing (and have been released in the summer). What disappoints me isn’t even so much that the movies are not that good, it’s that he doesn’t seem to be putting much effort into them. The Allen cannon is full of ambitious disappointments, but in movies like Hollywood Ending he doesn’t even seem to be trying. They still come out every year, always have great casts, and you get that magical moment when the credits come up in his trademark Windsor font over some great classic jazz. So I’ll keep going for another few years. But I have high hopes for this one. It has Christina Ricci, of whom I have always been fond. And although Woody himself is excised from the trailer (and in fact barely mentioned), it looks to be a touching and fun movie.
Actually, September 19 is a pretty cool release date. On top of Anything Else, we get a movie called Demonlover, about which all I know is that it is scored by Sonic Youth. And Lost in Translation, which is Sofia Coppola’s new movie. I saw a trailer the other day which looked pretty good, and I have a lot of faith in Coppola after The Virgin Suicides.
The next big day is October 10, on which two major films come out. The first is a new movie by the Coen Brothers, who may have inherited Woody’s place as makers of unpredictable and creative films. They’ve never been quite as prolific and their films aren’t as personal, but each one is still a gem. Its trailer makes Intolerable Cruelty look like it is a lot of fun and filled with great performances. It makes the story look a little trite, but I attribute this to bad trailer-making. If you recall, the trailer for The Big Lebowski looked so much like a lame Fargo knockoff that I almost skipped the film. (They substitute a better trailer on the DVD than the one that was shown widely at the time.)
But even if the Coens don’t have Woody’s one movie a year pace, they have still made six movies in the past ten years, and are in the middle of filming another. By contrast, in that period of time Quentin Tarantino has made two. One of them is obviously the classic Pulp Fiction. The first ‘Volume’ of his new martial arts movie Kill Bill also comes out on October 10. The trailer doesn’t make it look like a movie that is going to win many awards, but it certainly looks like fun.
After that we get into November and December, and start to see the return of the Matrix and Lord of the Rings movies we knew were out there. But there is one more film I hope doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. It is directed by Terry Zwigoff, the man behind the fabulous movies Ghost World and Crumb. And it is called Bad Santa. Apparently it stars Billy Bob Thornton as a conman dressed as Santa Claus. No sign of a trailer, but I have high hopes.
That makes six promising movies over the course of two months. Hopefully I can go to school and find a job in the midst of it all.