Ones to watch for in 2008 -- guesswork, hunches and tea-leaf-reading division Had enough insiderish reviews of films you won't get to see for many months or years? Well, sorry, but there'll be lots more of that coming when I head to Sundance in two weeks. But before we get there, let's indulge in an annual blind cherry-picking exercise of movies opening in the near future. I haven't seen any of these yet, so this is pure and undiluted guesstimation, based on such factors as A) word of mouth; B) previous track record; C) meaningless hunches; and D) subtle brainwashing by some publicist who bought me a drink last year. Not necessarily in that order.
I'm deliberately omitting movies that I've seen and written about at festivals, or films Salon is likely to cover in the next few weeks, so Jia Zhangke's "Still Life" and Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or-winner, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," aren't here. (Catch both of them, absolutely.) I've also left out forthcoming Sundance premieres that are likely to make headlines and become major Indiewood releases, so Michel Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind" and Michael Haneke's shot-for-shot American remake of his meta-slasher film "Funny Games" are also absent. (Yeah, I'm dying of curiosity about both.)
"Battle in Seattle" Stuart Townsend's docudrama about the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle was one of the audience sensations at Toronto last fall. Mixes real news events with a scripted plot involving Woody Harrelson, Charlize Theron, André Benjamin and many other actors. (Opens in March.)
"Chop Shop" Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani, whose "Man Push Cart" felt considerable love (and got almost no distribution) in 2006, ventures once again into the underbelly of New York with this drama about a street teen working in the notorious body-shop ghetto of Queens. (Opens Feb. 27 in New York.)
"The Duchess of Langeais" The great French director
Jacques Rivette (
"Va Savoir," "La Belle Noiseuse," "Celine and Julie Go Boating," etc.), still with no American audience, adapts a classic by Balzac. The all-star cast of upscale French talent includes Jeanne Balibar, Guillaume Depardieu, Michel Piccoli and Bulle Ogier. (Feb. 22)
"Love Songs" I missed director Christophe Honoré's attempt to revive the French musical when it premiered at Cannes, and reviews were mixed. Then I saw his Truffaut-flavored earlier film
"Dans Paris," which was terrific, and ever since I've been hearing from know-it-all friends that this is absolutely great, somewhat in the spirit of Jacques Demy, Dennis Potter and John Turturro's
"Romance & Cigarettes." (March)
"Mister Foe" This dark character drama about a peculiar Scottish runaway comes from David Mackenzie, for my money one of the most interesting among the new crop of British directors. I loved his Hitchcockian erotic gothic
"Asylum," with its great performance by Natasha Richardson. This was released last year in the United Kingdom as "Hallam Foe" (title of the original novel), but evidently Americans need to know that's a guy's name. (March)
"Orthodox Stance" Jason Hutt's documentary is about New York boxer Dmitriy Salita, a Russian immigrant and observant Orthodox Jew, as he battles for a shot at the championship. Come on, that's golden! If Scott Rudin doesn't already own the rights to a big-budget fictional version of this story, he's buying them tomorrow. (Jan. 25)
"Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead" If you've ever seen any of
Troma Pictures founder and president Lloyd Kaufman's movies (the "Toxic Avenger" series, "Class of Nuke 'Em High," etc.), you know they're reckless, pointedly amateurish, filled with in-jokes, political asides and juvenile gross-out humor -- and darkly, hilariously brilliant. I have no idea what market niche Kaufman and his company think they can fill these days, but they haven't succumbed to economic inevitability yet. And I do have some standards, among them being the fact that if someone makes a movie with this title, it winds up on any damn list I choose. (March)
"A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman" This documentary by Canadian director Peter Raymont (who made the devastating Rwanda doc
"Shake Hands With the Devil") about legendary Chilean dissident and writer Ariel Dorfman is the only non-American film on this year's best-documentary Oscar short list. By all reports it's tremendously moving.
"Shine a Light" I don't know exactly why this is on my list, except that I'm morbidly fascinated by the idea that Martin Scorsese, who was the greatest American filmmaker 20 years ago, has made a film about the Rolling Stones, who were the greatest rock 'n' roll band, uh, let's just say
at least that long ago. This goes so deep into counterintuitive territory that it's got to be worth seeing. Plus, the song the title refers to is really good. (April)
"Shotgun Stories" Another one I skipped at festival screenings, because Jeff Nichols' tale of backwoods incest, intrigue and violent feuding sounded like Appalachian cliché. But word of mouth has been consistently strong, with many viewers reporting that Nichols' debut feature has dazzling cinematography and plays like a Greek tragedy set in Arkansas. (March)
"The Silence Before Bach" Spanish surrealist artist and filmmaker Pere Portabella, now 78, checks in with a documentary, of sorts, that's sort of about Johann Sebastian Bach, or at least about the notion that Bach's "invention" of the classical-music tradition meant the beginning of modern American culture. No, this won't play in Peoria (or much of anywhere else), but I bet it's going to be awesome if you've got the appetite for it. (Jan. 30 in New York)
"Stop-Loss" After nearly a decade,
"Boys Don't Cry" director Kimberly Peirce has finally escaped all the lesbian and/or transgender scripts being flung at her and made another film. Here's the bad news: It's a high-octane Iraq-war drama, starring Ryan Philippe as a young Marine who refuses a second tour of duty in the war zone. I'm eager to see it, but we all know the track record of these Iraq films so far. (March)
