Jane Black,
Nov 08, 2007
Editor's note: Hi there! If you don't mind, I'd like to introduce the newest film.com writer, she'll be going by the shadowy handle of Jane Black. Relax and enjoy her take on a few of next year's promising looking dramas.
Top five lists are, like, so High Fidelity. But okay, this is my mission and thank goodness I can contemplate dramas. And thanks to the rules of the Academy Awards, we get a bumper crop of movie goodness at the end of each year, followed by the cinematic equivalent of fields of stubble. The year 2008 has quite a few movies that will get me into a theater on opening day.
1.) Atonement
I just re-read Atonement, Ian McEwan's page-turner of a novel. Okay, technically it has a 2007 release date, but it'll be 2008 by the time it rolls into the backwaters, like in my fair city where limited releases do not happen. For my money, McEwan is the reigning master of discomfort (it takes a Brit), and this tale of lives ruined by a child's words packs even more tragic oomph than The Children's Hour (either movie version), where the kid was just a wrong 'un. The trailer shows quite promising fireworks between Keira Knightley and the ubiquitous James McAvoy, in keeping with McEwan's purple prose on their coupling. Sex! War! Tears!
2.) There Will Be Blood
Based on Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil!, this film appears to visit tough territory at the intersection of Matewan and Oklahoma Crude. The trailer is an excellent character sketch of a single-minded oilman played by Daniel Day-Lewis (apparently channeling John Huston). Paul Dano, who played a Christian rock musician in The King, shows up this time as a turn-of-the-century faith healer. Ever since Magnolia I've been waiting for the return of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. (Punch-Drunk Love didn't count.) Stories like this -- about the bad old days of unexamined, unfettered capitalism -- are both mesmerizing and a warning.
3.) Cassandra's Dream
I regretfully wrote off girlhood fave Woody Allen for 10+ years. Then came Match Point, which showed what he was capable of when he abandons shtick for suspense and neurotic New York for, well, the land of Hitchcock. Cassandra's Dream, with Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, promises a return to that murky moral neighborhood. Yes, I'd be more reassured if, like Match Point, it had an R rating. But I can't wait to see Allen get hard-boiled on this crime story of Two Cash-Strapped Brothers and a Dame, which should have been the title, I'm thinking.
4.) 21
A few years back, I read, and I mean tore through, Ben Mezrich's cool book Bringing Down the House, about smarty pants, card-counting MIT students who went to Vegas casinos and cleaned up. So I was understandably excited to hear about 21, a movie based on the book. While director Robert Luketic does not inspire confidence (Legally Blonde, anyone?), he's working with great source material. I anticipate all the adrenalinized seediness that is Vegas baby, Vegas.
5.) The Walker
Twenty-seven years after American Gigolo made Richard Gere's name and ushered full-frontal male nudity into the neighborhood theater, Paul Schrader re-examines that story with The Walker. This time Woody Harrelson is the "companion" who winds up in a tight legal spot. One wonders, will he too bare his dangly bits? Schrader's may not be the name that leaps to mind when you think "director," but consider his body of work; there's not a stinker in the bunch. For example, 2002's Auto Focus was a masterpiece of squirmy discomfort and dread, and I look forward to more of the same.
