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Film Roundup: Upcoming Movies

Previews are the best part of going to the movies. Any good theater experience will start with at least three; two's disappointing, four's thrilling. I get antsy about an hour before showtime, start worrying about traffic and parking. Because I hate getting to the theater late. Some people treat the trailers as a grace period made for buying popcorn, going to the restroom, or plain lollygagging. Me, I'd rather miss the finish than the start. To hell with the credits! And plot resolutions are sooo dreary, it's the rare movie that deserves my efforts to suffer through to the finale kiss. Ah, but trailers, on the other hand, the most genuinely unpredictable moment of the evening, packed with anticipation! What titilating new project will reveal itself tonight! Followed inescapably by that moment or two it takes to recall what silly flic you're actually there to see, and there's always a little disappointment in the remembering, innit? Most movies fall short of what they might be. Previews are pure imagination.

So in keeping with the spirit of pleasure in forecast, a particular batch of looming releases are right begging to be pre-game gossiped, prodded, bandied about. My four favorite active directors are all at once again working on crazy ideas that have the potential to turn out horribly, or worse, bland and mediocre, but will in any event provide broad spectacle in the attempt.

Reader, behold!:


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Sofia Coppola / Marie Antoinette

Asked to rise a second time in judgment of their most conspicuous of queens, the French have rendered much the same verdict. Derided by Screen International as "More Paris Hilton than Paris" and booed in the festival theater, Cannes apparently didn't "get" Coppola's teen-queen post-punk interpretation of the life and circumstance of that greatest of Imelda Marcos' idols.

The French, however, are not infallible. The abrasive Bjork vehicle Dancer in the Dark was famoulsy hissed and booed at its screening before promptly winning the Palm D'Or. Nevertheless, Marie will come to the states needing to convince it's more than just insubstantial bauble. Bring it On's Kirsten Dunst, just maybe, may not be ideally suited to this task. Still, inspiring wackiness surely to ensue.

Because I've yet to be disappointed by this director. If I was born a Coppola, I'm not sure filmmaking would be my pursuit of choice, but Sofia immediately set out for herself a distinct agenda and a lush, languid style. Lost in Translation (2003) may meander aimlessly at times, but always in service of the atmosphere it aspires to. And a featured soundtrack cut from My Bloody Valentine's Loveless? What more can one ask! Let me eat cake.


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Spike Jonze / Where the Wild Things Are

Are you kidding, can this be real? Spike Jonze, the freak who brought us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation after beginning public life with a string of legendary MTV videos like The Beastie Boys' Sabotage and Bjork's It's Oh So Quiet, is to direct a live action version of cherished children's storybook Where the Wild Things Are? With his own script co-writen with Bay Area lit uber-darling David Eggers? Heartbreaking & Staggering, indeed!

post script oh sorry, is that not enough? After these childish things are put away, Jonze is scheduled for another collaboration with Charlie Kaufman, the irrefutably insane author of Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's supposedly vaguely "scary". But not a horror movie. uh huh.


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Wes Anderson / The Fantastic Mr. Fox

1996's Bottle Rocket was one of those middling little works that attracts that wearisome sort of insider buzz, the kind of movie that's constantly coming and going. Wearisome, because it's only the fortunate few that, rather than becoming someone's modest career pinnacle, turn out to be the genuine inchoate beginnings of an accomplished creative arc. And it's fewer still followed-up by something the quality of Rushmore.

Such was Rushmore's seismic impact that it quickly had all Hollywood beating a path to Mr. Anderson, leaving him to hand-pick star-studded casts for later movies The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic.

It was in that last movie that Anderson began tinkering with stop-motion animation to add a sort of bizarre whimsy, recruiting the animators who created Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas for help imagining Bill Murray's "white whale", the jaguar shark, along with numerous other small sea creatures, including a moment's peek at Sanchez the Seahorse. Graduating now to a full-length animation project, this same team will bring to the screen The Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl, the author best known for James and the Giant Peach.

Anderson co-writes the script with Noah Baumbach, his Life Aquatic bedfellow and writer/director of last year's the Squid and the Whale. The story looks at the life of a fox who finds himself and his family targeted for death by the three idiotic, plug-ugly farmers who tire of sharing their chickens with the critter.


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Jean-Pierre Jeunet / Life of Pi



I hold a special place in my film-hardened heart for monsieur Jeunet. Five trips to the theater were not enough to sate my fascination with 1995's mesmerizing The City of Lost Children, for which I will forever extend him the benefit of any doubt. Even his brief and misguided foray into Hollywood with (shudder) Alien Ressurection, his "reward" for his successes, did not diminish my expectations when I saw the trailer for Le Fableux Destin d'Amelie Poulin; in English, the much less lyrical Amelie. By any other name, it remains the best film of 2001 and who knows how many years before and after, wonderfully marrying heart and intelligence to virtuoso visuals. If this unreserved admiration was enough to let me enjoy 2004's A Very Long Engagement despite it being a sappier, paler, duller Amelie, unabashedly covering the same ground (and starring the same actress), then surely I have nothing to fear from Life of Pi.

internet summary for your consideration: "Based on the best-selling novel by Yann Martel, it's a magical adventure story centering on Pi Patel, the precocious son of a zookeeper. Dwellers in Pondicherry, India, the family decides to move to Canada, hitching a ride on a huge freighter. After a shipwreck, Pi is found adrift in the Pacific Ocean on a 26-foot lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, all fighting for survival."

mitigating factors: As, shall we say, "problematic" as the plot sounds (on many levels), the book did win the 2002 Booker Prize, a British literary prize as prestigious as any in the world; past winners include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy. And there's an interesting local angle: Jeunet married a San Mateo film editer and rented a house on Stinson Beach to write the adaptation of Pi. On the California setting: "It's the perfect place to work."

A "parable" shipwreck movie set on, essentially, a raft - with a sole teenage survivor spending the bulk of the movie dealing with jungle animals? Um....by Jean-Pierre Jeunet? How about thank you sir may I have another!




Bonus Track: Steven Soderberg's making a Che Guevara bio-pic...with Benicio Del Toro as Che...