I absolutely love this time of year. Starting tonight through the end of the year (and beyond), there is at least one movie release almost every week that has some kind of Oscar buzz, although you may have to wait a little longer for some of them to come to Memphis.
You can start checking off your must-see list tonight with “3:10 to Yuma” (see John Beifuss’ review here), and pencil in “In the Valley of Elah” in a couple of weeks. Be sure to make time for “Ira & Abby” (whenever it gets here), which is one of a couple of comedies this fall getting attention at film festivals. (I just loved writer/producer/actor Jennifer Westfeldt in “Kissing Jessica Stein.”) Brad Pitt follows soon after in the impossibly long-titled “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”
These all look good, but what I’m really waiting for are three films that are adaptations of some of my favorite books. Ian McEwan’s beautifully written tragedy “Atonement” opens in the UK today, but we’ll have to wait till November to see Keira Knightley and my new favorite actor James McAvoy as the ill-fated lovers.
“Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is finally brought to the big screen with Javier Bardem as the romantic Florentino Ariza, who doesn’t get the girl but never stops pining for her over the course of 50 years (while taking solace in the arms of many other women). Hope the film includes my two favorite scenes in the book — when Florentino eats flowers and drinks perfume so that he may know what it is like to be with his beloved Fermina Daza (only to wake up in a pool of fragrant vomit), and when he watches her reflection in a mirror at a restaurant for hours then pesters the owner for months to sell him the mirror that held her reflection. Sigh…
The film that has the most potential to disappoint: “The Kite Runner.” It’s always risky to film an extremely popular book, and already the trailer for Khaled Hosseini’s bestseller has me a little worried. I know you can’t really take too much stock in trailers, but it makes it seem like the war tears apart Amir and Hassan instead of Amir’s cowardice and betrayal. But there is the pomegranate tree, and I love director Marc Forster (”Monster’s Ball” and the enchanting “Finding Neverland“), so I’m crossing my fingers…
What movies are you really looking forward to this fall?
