A surprisingly decent summer now behind us, it’s time to turn our eyes to Awards Season – those four months of the year when wave after wave of prestige picture gets thrust at our critics in the hopes that maybe just maybe, one of them will be sufficiently intelligent yet at the same time easy enough to understand that it’s worth an Oscar. I don’t know, this is probably the least I’ve ever been existed for the prestige movie crop, but that’s a tale for the next three months of this post. Right now, let’s just take a four-week bite.

5.9.2008
All that bit about prestige pictures? Put it on hold for a second, and come with me to greet Bangkok Dangerous, a very silly-looking movie with a very silly title, and a very silly hairstyle for its very silly star Nicolas Cage. Who plays an assassin wot finds love in Bangkok, against his will. I’m not sure, but this might be the most I’ve been excited to see a film all year, if only because I get to say “Bangkok Dangerous” to a ticket seller.

There’s also something opening called Everybody Wants to Be Italian about which I know nothing, though it surely makes sense that they’d want to avoid opening anything against the powerhouse that is Bangkok Dangerous.

12.9.2008
Now that the Brothers Coen are back in a big way, I get to be unreservedly excited about Burn After Reading, their return to the fertile (for them) screwball comedy subgenre. Malkovich! Swinton! McDormand! Pitt! Clooney! Simmons! Jenkins! Man oh man, unless I’m forgetting something, this is the one film for the rest of the year that I’m positively drooling for.

There’s also a wildly needless remake of The Women, updating the practically-perfect 1939 George Cukor film for a new era that, for my money, isn’t any better at representing the female of the species in a realistic, intelligent way onscreen.

Plus! Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys, with a punning title that I simply cannot unpack, unless it’s about a pack of religious cannibals. And the directorial debut of the compulsively middlebrow Alan Ball, a commentary on the Muslim experience in America titled Towelhead.

For all of this, the cynic in me expects that the big film of the weekend is going to be Righteous Kill, in which, 34 years after The Godfather, Part II and 13 years after Heat, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino finally appear on camera together. More importanly, which reunites Pacino with director Jon Avnet, of the deathless 88 Minutes.

17.9.2008
Ed Harris directs himself a Western, with Viggo Mortensen sharing space in the cast! That seems like a slam-dunk idea, so why haven’t I seen a trace of advertising for Appaloosa? Not promising, not promising at all.

19.9.2008
An abnormally crowded weekend: Neil LaBute continues to toss all of his onetime credibility in the shitcan with Lakeview Terrace, apparently a standard-issue domestic thriller; Dane Cook is once more placed in our multiplexes, where people can actually see him, in My Best Friend’s Girl (bonus points: the continued destruction of Kate Hudson’s career); Ricky Gervais’s first leading role in Hollywood, Ghost Town, looks to be neither more nor less than, “Ghost from Whoopi Goldberg’s perspective, without the love story”; and Igor, a kid’s movie withe the voice of John Cusack and, judging from the trailer, uninspired pseudo-Burton design.

The indie films don’t give us much more to work with: The Duchess is a giant flouncy period movie starring Keira Knightley, which traditionally means that it will be pretty, and everyone will love it but me. Then there’s Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness, which I certainly want to be excited about, but it got such toxic buzz out of Cannes…we shall find out, I guess.

26.9.2008
Let’s sweep the tawdry (on both sides) verbal duel with Clint Eastwood into history’s dustbin; all that I really care about with Miracle at St. Anna is not whether it accurately reflects the Black experience in World War II, but whether it’s going to be Good Spike Lee or Bad Spike Lee who directed it. Lee is almost certainly the most uneven of all great American filmmakers (or Oliver Stone, if you count him as a great filmmaker), but his last two projects – Inside Man and When the Levees Broke – were both great enough that I shall hope for the best.

It’s the clear Oscarbait of a weekend that otherwise looks a bit pokey – Neil Burger, a decent enough filmmaker, has what looks like a fine but minor study of Iraq veterans, The Lucky Ones, and that looks to be a giant step up from the Richard Gere/Diane Lane romantic weeper Nights in Rodanthe (the trailer is one of the sickliest sweet things out there right now) and Eagle Eye, in which executive producer Steven Spielberg continues his fruitless demands that we all acknowledge Shia LaBeouf as the Next Great Action Hero.

You know what I am really excited about? Choke, the first Chuck Palahnuik adaptation since Fight Club. Not a film I loved, but the new one seems to be a flat-out comedy. Best trailer in current release.