Fancast Fall Preview: October 2008

By Andy Hunsaker, Fancast Movies
*all release dates subject to change, because movie distributors do that kinda thing

October 3:
***

Flash of Genius [watch the trailer]
Possibly one of the most depressing films with a happy ending ever, director Marc Abraham tells the true life story of Robert Kearns (Greg Kinnear), an inventor in Detroit whose Mona Lisa was the intermittent windshield wiper, which the Ford Motor Company (represented by Mitch Pileggi) proceeded to steal from him and claim for their own, ending his aspirations to manufacture it himself. Yet Kearns feels so egregiously wronged by this development that he decides to take an impossibly dedicated stand against this kind of intellectual fraud, and his determination to see justice win out in the end devastates his family and much of the rest of his life, to the point where this pursuit of the truth is the only thing he has left to sustain him.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People [watch the trailer]
Robert B. Weide, veteran director from Curb Your Enthusiasm, is making his feature film debut with How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a comedy adapted from Toby Young’s novel which, of course, is a play on How to Win Friends and Influence People, the self-help book by Dale Carnegie. Simon Pegg stars as Sidney Young, an ambitious writer who gets his big chance when Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) offers him a job as a contributing editor to the fashion magazine Sharps. Yet his subsequent attempts to smooth his way into all the hip social circles prove to be ridiculously inept. Current crazily It-Girl Megan Fox plays Sophia Maes, the shallow young starlet who Young lusts after, Kirsten Dunst is Alison Olsen, a colleague who believes Young to be an insufferable idiot, and Gillian Anderson plays a manipulative publicist. Comedy ensues.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist [watch the trailer]
Juno’s Michael Cera is Nick, a sensitive musician who can’t get over a devastating breakup with Tris (Alexis Dziena). Charlie Bartlett’s Kat Dennings is Norah, who is relatively straight-laced and often forced to tend to her drunken friend Caroline (Ari Graynor). When Norah meets Nick, she asks him to be her boyfriend for five minutes to spite the girl who teases her for being alone, who just happens to be Tris. The ensuing night of hijinks, shenanigans and attractions becomes part romance and part fiasco.

Blindness [watch the trailer]
Blindness is a terrifying affliction for one to have, but it would be made exponentially more frightening if no one else could see, either. This is what makes the latest film from Fernando Meirelles of The Constant Gardener fame, such a compelling concept. The fact that the characters have no names, but are rather billed as “Doctor” (Mark Ruffalo), “Doctor’s Wife” (Julianne Moore), “Minister of Health” (Sandra Oh) “Bartender” (Gael Garcia Bernal) and “Old Man With The Black Eye Patch” (Danny Glover), just adds to the disquieting tone that the trailers strike as they show us a world where the afflicted are quarantined and left to die, causing a general chaos among them as they slowly realize the depths of their situation. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” - Desiderius Erasmus

Beverly Hills Chihuahua [watch the trailer]
A movie firmly for the kids and people who like to look at dogs. Chloe (Drew Barrymore) is a spoiled purse-dog owned by Jamie Lee Curtis, and when she leaves her precious pooch in the hands of her niece Rachel (Piper Perabo), she winds up getting lost in Mexico, befriending a grizzled ex-police dog named Delgado (Andy Garcia) and finding her true bark, while her dedicated suitor Papi (George Lopez) strives against all odds to rescue her.

An American Carol [watch the trailer]
David Zucker has made an unabashedly right-wing film about a Michael Moore-parody getting visited by three Ghosts of Americans Past who show him how awesome America actually is, including George Washington (Jon Voight), Patton (Kelsey Grammer) and JFK (Chriss Anglin).

Expanding Wide:

Appaloosa [watch the trailer]
Ed Harris hasn’t directed anything since his debut with Pollock back in 2000, which got him nominated for Best Actor (and won Best Supporting Actress for Marcia Gay Harden). So when Harris is in the director’s chair, people stand up and take notice. It may be surprising that he’d move from abstract art to a gritty western, but we’ve all seen Unforgiven - we know what the genre is capable of delivering in the right hands, and it’s hard to believe that Harris’ hands could be wrong. In Appaloosa, he plays Virgil Cole, who blows into town with his partner Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) to find that the place is run by a bastard rancher by the name of Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), who has just left the town marshal and his deputy for dead. This conveniently leave a pair of openings for Cole and Hitch to step into. Being the wily gunmen they are, Appaloosa soon hosts a battle of wits and wills between the cavalier twosome and the ruthless rabble-rouser. Trouble is that they know that feelings get you killed, but Cole finds himself getting closer to Allie (Renee Zellweger) anyway. When Bragg starts playing on their emotions, things start to get heavy.

Limited Release:

Religulous [watch the trailer & clips] (Oct. 1)
Bill Maher, who hosts a controversial HBO news and debate show called Real Time, is now taking his act to the big screen. He’s taken a page out of Michael Moore’s book by doing a documentary with no pretense of being objective. He’s long held the belief that religion in general is a completely ridiculous concept, and he’s incensed a lot of religious leaders in the process, as they tend to be very, very touchy. Maher reins in his tendencies toward smug self-satisfaction (or maybe director Larry Charles reined it in for him), and this film is often compelling viewing - you just don’t see these arguments anywhere else, and you never see them brought up in honest discussion with the faithfully devoted. Maher asserts that 16% of the American populace does not wish to be affiliated with any organized religion, and that many people can no longer be ignored.

Ballast [watch the trailer]
A unique Sundance-award-winning showcase of powerful cinematography from first time writer/director Lance Hammer, focusing on a mother in the rural Mississippi Delta who tries desperately to keep her 12-year-old son away from the drugs and violence that threaten to consume him after a suicide rocks their family. She’s forced to live in the home of a man with whom she fights bitterly, but eventually they have to learn how to move forward with their lives redefined.

Rachel Getting Married [watch the trailer]
Anne Hathaway has earned herself some Oscar buzz from the early reviews of her darker departure from her usual upbeat milieu in Jonathan Demme’s portrait of familial turmoil. She’s playing an ex-addict who leaves rehab to attend or possibly destroy her sister’s wedding, as her acidic and combative attitude forces her family to face issues with each other that they’ve long been ignoring. It’s been appropriately dubbed a “drama with an aggressive sense of humor.”

October 10:
***

Body of Lies [watch the trailer in HD]
From screenwriter William Monahan, the man who adapted Infernal Affairs into the Oscar-winning crime saga The Departed, comes Body of Lies, another tale of intrigue and betrayal starring Leonardo DiCaprio- this time on the world stage. This time, Ridley Scott is at the helm. CIA operative Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) uncovers some major evidence about a terrorist operating out of Jordan, but when he enlists the help of agency vet Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) to infiltrate this network, it starts to become very unclear just who is on whose side, and it puts the two men at each other’s throats.

City of Ember [watch the trailer]
Ember is an underground city, with a massive generator that’s kept it brightly illuminated for centuries… but its time is starting to run out. It’s up to Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadway, with the help of Tim Robbins, to figure out the way to save the people of their city from disaster, if Mayor Cole (Bill Murray) doesn’t stop them before they can unravel the mystery. A darker take, both literaly and figuratively, on the teen fantasy genre.

Quarantine [watch the trailer]
They’ve been churning out remakes of Japanese horror films for years now, so this time we get a remake of a Spanish horror film called [REC] to see how that plays. A TV news crew is following a team of firefighters on a routine 911 call, only to discover cops on the scene investigating disturbing screams from people infected with something terrifying. Their attempts to escape the savage attacks is foiled when they discover the entire building has been quarantined and they’re all trapped inside with whatever lurking horrors await to try and kill them.

The Express [watch the trailer]
This fall’s inspirational sports drama comes in the form of The Express, the story of the first black man to ever win the Heisman Trophy, Ernie Davis of the 1961 Syracuse Orangemen. Rob Brown of Finding Forrester (he’s the man now, dog) plays Davis, who strives to make his mark in the beginning stages of the Civil Rights movement, and Dennis Quaid plays his coach, Ben Schwartzwalder. Only in true stories does anyone in the movies have a name like Schwartzwalder. Davis, nicknamed “The Elmira Express” for the small town in New York where he came of age, had one hell of a college football career, only to be followed by a tragic diagnosis of leukemia that claimed his life before he ever played a professional game. It’s the kind of story that makes legends.

Limited Release:

RocknRolla [watch the trailer] (Oct. 8, expanding wide Oct. 31)
<a href=”Guy Ritchie’s“>Guy Ritchie has admitted that he felt pressured into coming up with a project more along the lines of his two breakthrough films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch once his more recent and esoteric efforts like Revolver and Swept Away both tanked, but he’s said this return to the stylized crime flick strikes a balance between what he used to do and what he wants to do (which makes it seem like he may find himself in George A. Romero’s boat, where he wants to do other films, but no one will give him money to make them if he doesn’t put zombies in them somehow). He’s crafted a movie about new-school corporate gangsters muscling out the old-school like Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson), who’s trying to make sure he gets his cut of a Russian mobster’s real estate scam, competing with street criminals like One-Two (Gerard Butler), shady accountants like Stella (Thandie Newton) and even his own junkie rock star step-son Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell).

Happy Go Lucky [watch the trailer in HD]
Mike Leigh goes in the opposite direction from his abortionist drama Vera Drake with this upbeat feel-good film-festival comedy about a North London schoolteacher named Poppy (Shttp://www.fancast.com/people/Sally-Hawkins/66525/mainally Hawkins) whose optimistic spirit just can’t be broken. When her bike is stolen, she bounces up and takes driving lessons with a high-strung instructor Scott (Eddie Marsan) who spills his worry all over her, and she doesn’t let it get to her. When she starts to fall for a social worker (Samuel Roukin), it turns out Scott’s got more on his mind than just Poppy’s reckless driving.

October 17:
***

Max Payne [watch the trailer]
Max Payne is a video game full of John Woo-styled action and pulp noir flavor. Max Payne is a hard-boiled cop on the edge whose family is brutally murdered, setting him out on a revenge quest with no regard to the rules. Mark Wahlberg is Max Payne. Max Payne also stars Mila Kunis as an assassin named Mona Sax. Max Payne was directed by John Moore, who also directed Behind Enemy Lines, a movie you can watch in its entirety right here on Fancast. Max Payne looks really cool, even though the dark tale just got a PG-13 instead of the R its fans were probably hoping for.

Sex Drive [watch the trailer]
A Chicago dweeb named Ian (Josh Zuckerman) masquerades as a buff hardbody online and manages to convince someone calling herself ‘Ms. Tasty’ down in Knoxville to offer him coitus. So he gets his friends, swipes his crazy brother Rex’s (a whacked-out James Marsden) GTO and goes on the long drive in the hopes of reaching nookyville.

Limited Release:

W. [watch the trailer]
How did an alcoholic cokehead with a long history of failure and a stunning lack of direction manage to find himself behind the wheel of the large automobile that is the United States of America? “You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and you may ask yourself ‘well, how did I get here?’” Josh Brolin, who has compared this film to ‘a W. version of Pulp Fiction,’ plays the man who has become one of the worst presidents in the history of the nation, and Oliver Stone relays his version of the man’s unlikely rise from frat-boy hijinks to the harbinger of complete and total national disaster of every imaginable kind. “You may ask yourself ‘am I right? Am I wrong?’ And you may say to yourself ‘My God, what have I done?’” Let’s cross our fingers and hope it’s only once in a lifetime.

The Secret Life of Bees [watch the trailer]
Dakota Fanning leaves the mess that was Hounddog behind her for this Oscar-buzzing film, playing a troubled girl named Lily Owens, on the run from her abusive father (Paul Bettany) along with her only friend Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson) in 1964 South Carolina. A trio of beekeeping sisters (Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Sophie Okenedo) take them in and show them the kindness they’ve been starving for all their lives - but there’s only so long an idyllic life can last.

Morning Light [watch the trailer]
Roy Disney gathers together a group of 15 young people to enter the Transpac sailing race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, a 2300-mile stretch of the Pacific Ocean, filming them during training and gearing up for the race itself. Stacy Peralta of the surf doc Riding Giants is on hand to document the unique experience.

What Just Happened? [watch the trailer]
Movies about Hollywood can be grating, self-satisfied and full of inside jokes that make many audiences groan. They can also be The Player. The presence of Bruce Willis in this dark comedy about the daily grind of show business hearkens back to his self-parodying cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s benchmark film, although he looks to have a much more substantial presence, both literally and figuratively, in Barry Levinson’s new project. Ol’ Bruno plays a bloated, bearded version of himself that producer Ben (Robert De Niro) has to haggle with in order to get him in proper leading man shape for his disaster of a picture called Fiercely, starring Sean Penn. Ben’s also dealing with his ex-wife Kelly (Robin Wright Penn) and their counseling sessions, his screenwriter friend Scott (Stanley Tucci) messing around her, the creative differences between wastoid director Jeremy (Michael Wincott) and studio chief Lou (Catherine Keener) and his daughter Zoe (Kristen Stewart) apparently coming of age far too soon for him to be comfortable with. It’s a comedy, but since it’s co-written by and based upon the life story of veteran producer Art Linson, chances are it’s a lot more true than untrue.

October 24:
***

Pride and Glory [watch the trailer]
Edward Norton plays Ray Tierney, an honest homicide detective charged with investigating the precinct run by his older brother Francis (Noah Emmerich), who may or may not be a dirty cop. Jon Voight plays their father, the chief of police, who keeps pushing Ray to find out what’s going on. The further the investigation goes, the more it leads to Francis’ best friend Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell), who may have a different idea of what effective policework means.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year [watch the trailer]
The ridiculously popular Disney Channel series makes the leap to the big screen, and children everywhere will be throwing hissy fits if they aren’t taken to see Zac Efron’s last go-around with Vanessa Hudgens, as their impending graduation will send them in different directions. Whatever will they do? They’ll sing their hearts out!

Saw V [watch the trailer]
The modern Halloween tradition is back again. Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw may be dead, but someone new has taken on the legacy of designing elaborate traps based on moral quandaries to torture people. That someone new is none other than Costas Mandylor, and yes, they are making a Saw VI.

Limited Release:

Changeling [watch the trailer] (expanding wide Oct. 31)
Clint Eastwood returns for another Oscar season with Changeling, the dramatic story of one woman’s grueling efforts to stand up to corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department of the 1920s. Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a woman who begins to question the LAPD once her abducted son is supposedly returned to her, even though she doesn’t seem to recognize the boy as her own. Her continuing struggle to convince them they’ve found the wrong boy are met with a stonewall from LAPD Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice) and eventually they get her committed to a psychiatric ward. Yet with the help of Reverend Briegleb (John Malkovich), her fight against corruption continues onward.

I’ve Loved You So Long [watch the trailer]
Where has Kristin Scott Thomas been, you may ask? She was nominated for an Oscar for The English Patient in 1997, she was in the Oscar-nominated Gosford Park in 2001, but we haven’t seen much of her. Aside from an appearance earlier this year in The Other Boleyn Girl, her profile hasn’t been very high lately. However, she’s currently married to a French guy and by now she’s lived in France longer than she ever lived in England, her nation of birth, so it’s no surprise that she’s taking roles in French films instead - such as this summer’s surprise art house hit Tell No One and now in this Philippe Claudel film. Scott plays Juliette, a doctor who is just leaving prison after serving a 15-year sentence after being convicted of murdering her six-year-old son. Her much younger sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) takes her in and is determined to forge a bond with her sibling, who is as much a stranger to her as anyone else, although Lea’s husband (Serge Hazanavicius) is somewhat hostile to the idea. Slowly and with much hardship, Juliette begins to rejoin the world around her, but mysteries still remain to be solved.

Synecdoche New York [watch the trailer]
Charlie Kaufman is known for his challengingly original Oscar-nominated screenplays. Now he’s stepping into the director’s chair with a strange film called Synecdoche, New York. That’s sin-ECK-do-key, which is a play on the real town of Schenectady, New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as a theater director by the name of Caden Cotard, who has come to Broadway after succeeding in regional theater in Schenectady. He’s working on his soulful and brutally realistic masterpiece, which involves gathering a cast of actors and having them live artificial versions of real lives inside a Manhattan warehouse, which contains a miniature mockup of the city outside. While the fictionalized version of his life plays out, his real life begins to unravel until the lines between reality and artifice are blurred, which is a concept Kaufman loves to explore in his work. It features a great cast (Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest and Tom Noonan), but it is not an easily explainable film. It just needs to be seen.

Passengers [watch the trailer]
It’s not quite the same as her Oscar buzz performance in Rachel Getting Married, but this film sees Anne Hathaway helping Lakeview Terrace star Patrick Wilson get prepared for playing in the world of superpowers as he will when he’s featured as Nite Owl in Watchmen. Rodrigo Garcia’s thriller looks to combine the superhuman mysteriousness of Heroes with the plane-crashy mysteriousness of Lost, in that Wilson plays a man who lives through a plane crash and becomes mysteriously superhuman. Hathaway is the grief counselor assigned to help the survivors, only to become mysteriously drawn to Wilson, the quietest one, to the point where she breaches her ethics to make out with him several times in the trailer. What are his powers? What really happened when that plane crashed? How did anybody survive? What is his true goal? When does Watchmen come out?

October 31:
***

Zack and Miri Make a Porno [watch the trailer]
Seth Rogen achieves his lifelong dream of making a movie with Kevin Smith, and the two are a perfect match in this comedy about two broke losers who decide to make a porno as their get-rich-quick scheme. Rogen reunites with his co-star in The 40-Year-Old Virgin Elizabeth Banks for a dirty comedy that gets Smith firmly into the supremely raunchy NC-17-baiting milieu he may never escape (and may never want to) and focuses on love springing forth from the midst of down-home do-it-yourself sleaze.

The Haunting of Molly Hartley [watch the trailer]
Molly (Haley Bennett) has a troubled past that she’s trying to forget at her new high school, and her new love interest (Chace Crawford) is doing a good job of helping her. That is, until she starts to become plagued by nightmares about her deranged mother who tried to kill her, bringing her closer to realizing the full truth about who she will become when she turns 18 - a Knight in Satan’s Service.