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Screengrab Fall Preview: Scott Von Doviak’s Picks

Posted by Scott Von Doviak

We’ve reached that part of the summer when Rainn Wilson comedies and films by Fred Durst are considered top new releases, so it must be time to look ahead to the fall. Traditionally this is the movie season for Oscar contenders and challenging indie fare, so let’s put away the robots and superhero tights and play a little 3 Up, 3 Down. (Feel free to weigh in with your own picks, my fellow Screengrabbers – if you dare.)

3 UP

1. Burn After Reading – No Country for Old Men was a return to form for the Coens, and we’re all happy they finally got their Oscars. But it’s been a while since we’ve had a pure shot of that Coen Brothers feeling. No Country was adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, The Ladykillers was a remake, and Intolerable Cruelty originated with other writers. Based on the trailer, Burn After Reading looks like a return to the inventive goofiness of The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which puts it right in my wheelhouse.

2. The Road – Speaking of Cormac McCarthy, the second adaptation of his work in as many years in due in November. The grim post-apocalyptic tale is brought to the screen by John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition, a western that certainly counts McCarthy’s Blood Meridian among its influences. Viggo Mortenson has the lead, and the supporting cast includes Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Garrett Dillahunt and The Wire’s Omar himself, Michael K. Williams.

3. Synecdoche, New York – Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut didn’t exactly wow most critics at Cannes, but the guy hasn’t let me down yet. (Well, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind didn’t really do it for me, but I’ll blame Sam Rockwell for that.) Even if it doesn’t really work, the premise – which has theater director Philip Seymour Hoffman building a replica of New York in a warehouse – should provide more of the Kauf’s trademark reality-bending weirdness.

3 DOWN

1. The Day the Earth Stood Still – Unnecessary remake of a sci-fi classic, with Keanu Reeves as an alien? The first time I saw this trailer, I thought it was a fake. The second time, I just said “No thanks.”

2. Twilight – I understand I’m not the target demographic for this “y.a.” phenomenon, but I still resent the fact that it’s in my face everywhere I go these days, and that’s only going to get worse as the release of this adaptation approaches.

3. The Women – This has got to be the uber-chick flick of the year: Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Bette Midler and Debra Messing in a remake of the George Cukor classic. If I grow a vagina between now and when it comes out, maybe I’ll reconsider.

WILD CARD

Oliver Stone’s W. This can’t possibly be any good, can it? And yet I can’t wait to see it. We might be looking at a train wreck for the ages here.

Related:
Movie Magic: Making Pittsburgh Ugly Enough For "The Road"
Oliver Stone Finds His Dick


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Posted Aug 20 2008, 01:30 PM
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Comments

Mark Maiden said:

"No Country for Old Men was a return to form for the Coens, and we’re all happy they finally got their Oscars."

They won screenplay for Fargo.

August 20, 2008 2:49 PM

Janet said:

I can't imagine who the audience is for W.  Surely liberals won't want to see a film about him and conservatives won't want to see a film by Oliver Stone.  I has to tank, hasn't it?

August 20, 2008 3:50 PM

Phil Nugent said:

I'd love to see a movie about Bush by someone who made the movies that Stone always describes in his interviews and that people sometimes describe in their reviews of his movies. But Stone is the John McCain of movie directors: arch conservatives are so put off his personal style that they're in denial about how much he's their soul brother. He shares their basic political belief that government itself is inherently evil and is only necessary because it sometimes provides us with wars through which boys can bond with other boys and in the process Become Men. He did, after all, make "JFK", in which the last American president to try to enact ambitious social programs for the public good was revealed to have conspired with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to murder his predecessor, and "Nixon", which portrayed its title character not as someone who brought corruption into the White House but as a well-meaning fellow who was destroyed by the "Beast", i.e. the U.S. government itself, and "World Trade Center", which was very pure 9/11 hagiography, complete with a symbolic figure dressed for combat vowing that much blood would have to be spilled to avenge this atrocity.

Like Bush, Stone isn't a thinker, he's a feeler, and also like Bush, he decides what he feels based largely on narcissistic projection. He and Bush have so much in common--they're both rich boys with daddy issues and histories of drug use who, at the age of 40, turned their lives around based on a shared conviction that they were put on earth to settle the battles of the 1960s--that I'd be stunned if the movie doesn't turn out to be a sympathetic portrait. I don't expect him to paint Bush as a successful president, but I do expect him to fall back on the tired cliche that he's a lovable goofball who shouldn't be blamed too hard for the things that meaner, smarter people did in his name.

August 21, 2008 1:36 PM