Hemanth
Kissoon Takes a Look at Some of the Movie Highlights Playing
at a Cinema Near You in 2007
With
the dust settling on 2006, it is now time to look forward
to 2007’s offerings.
Will this be a celebrated year or a lamented one? Being a
film lover means that my fingers are firmly crossed and the
movie gods properly beseeched.
The Films that have the 2007 Oscar Ceremony in their Sights
Cinema in the UK over the next few
months should be packed with the award contenders. The
big favourites for Best Picture are Dreamgirls and Babel.
Heralded as one of the best stage to screen adaptations
since Cabaret and starring Jamie
Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles and Eddie
Murphy, Dreamgirls is the film to beat. Babel,
which closed the London Film Festival, is an ambitious
and moving mosaic of connected global stories.
Clint Eastwood is a force of nature
and has an allegedly superior companion piece to Flags
of our Fathers – Letters
from Iwo Jima – that looks at the Second World War
battle from the Japanese perspective. Will Rocky
Balboa get
Stallone a nomination for acting-writing-directing? Movies
about war, government machinations and dictatorships are
looking award-worthy: Steven Soderbergh’s The
Good German, Robert De Niro’s The
Good Shepherd and The
Last King of Scotland with Forest Whitaker.
There are the ensembles such as Emilio
Estevez’s Bobby,
Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation and Robert
Altman’s swansong A
Prairie Home Companion. Acting nominations are
possibly going to Peter O’Toole in Venus, Judi
Dench and Cate
Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal, Will
Smith in The
Pursuit of Happyness, Edward
Norton and Naomi Watts in The
Painted Veil and Maggie Gyllenhaal in SherryBaby. Hero/House
of Flying Daggers director, Zhang Yimou, will be completing
his martial arts trilogy with Curse
of the Golden Flower.
All of the above should be winging their way to our shores,
with or without silverware, soon.
Blockbuster Sequels
The glut of sequels in 2003 were generally
unwanted (Charlie’s
Angels, Tomb Raider, Terminator) or disappointing (The
Matrix debacles). Hollywood is again relying on the money-shot of
huge budget film franchises that will push the studios into
profit. I am all for follow-up movies where there is a story
to tell and not just a cynical cash-in. The sequels this
year will hopefully be a lot better than four years ago:
Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Ocean’s 13, Harry Potter
and the Order of the Phoenix, Pirates of the Caribbean: At
World’s End, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,
The Bourne Ultimatum and Live
Free and Die Hard.
The Originals
To counteract the remakes/sequel juggernauts,
the fresh fare will hopefully invigorate. There are the
sci-fi director driven films that whether flawed or not
will hopefully offer up something interesting: The
Fountain (Darren Aronofsky), Stardust (Matthew Vaughn),
Southland Tales (Richard Kelly), Sunshine (Danny Boyle),
The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry) and Grind House (Robert
Rodriguez /Quentin Tarantino). Britain has the one-two punch of Hot
Fuzz (from the Spaced/Shaun of the Dead team) and This
is England (from Shane Meadows). Bullets will be flying
in Shooter with Mark
Wahlberg, Joe Carnhan’s Smokin’ Aces, and Shoot ’Em
Up with Clive Owen.
War is obviously and unavoidably on
the mind both as allegory to our troubled times – Christian
Bale in Werner Herzog’s
Rescue Dawn - as well as a direct probing – Stop-Loss
(Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and
Timothy Olyphant) about Iraq, and The
Kingdom (Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner) concerning terrorism.
Two Davids with avid fanbases each
have a new one, Inland Empire (Lynch) and Zodiac
(Fincher).
The idiosyncratic are alive and well: Samuel
L. Jackson and Christina
Ricci in Black Snake Moan, Australian drama
Jindabyne, ‘Beat’ Takeshi
Kitano’s exploration of his personas in Takeshis',
Edward Norton and Paul
Giamatti are magicians in The
Illusionist.
Could this be the dumbest/coolest action flick of the year:
Pathfinder, Mohicans and Vikings at
War?
The Comic Books
Since Blade and X-Men, a year does
not go by without a slew of comic book/graphic novel adaptations.
Along with Spider-Man and Fantastic
Four, there is Nicholas
Cage’s delayed
Ghost Rider, Robert
De Niro in Stardust, vampire thriller
30 Days of Night from the director of Hard
Candy, and the
quite frankly awesome looking 300 directed by Zach
Snyder (Dawn of the Dead remake) and starring Gerald
Butler.
Animation
After the dozen or so animated pictures
of ’06 that
were mostly unimaginative talking animal movies, 2007 has
less but a more appealing selection. Pixar gives us their
new one, Ratatouille, and PDI hands out a third helping of
Shrek. Disney has a Jetsons-esque film called Meet
the Robinsons.
Luc Besson’s tenth stint in the director’s chair
is his first animated offering, Arthur
and the Invisibles.
Jerry Seinfeld is in Bee
Movie and there is a CGI Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Penguins who surf (in Surf’s
Up) sounds like a film
dreamed up by a financial committee looking at the wave (ahem!)
of current penguin popularity. The two other big boys are
The Simpsons Movie and Robert
Zemeckis’ Beowulf. (As
a side note, I cannot wait for Kung
Fu Panda in 2008!)
The Worrisome Sequels/Remakes
Help us!! Do we need more Resident
Evil? More Mr. Bean?
Another Hostel? Sequels to Are
We There Yet?, Goal, Bruce Almighty, Saw and National Treasure? There are the remakes
of Halloween, School for Scoundrels or How to Win Without
Actually Cheating! and The Hitcher. Can 28
Weeks Later be
any good? The two anticipated, but shrouded in doubt as to
their quality, are The Invasion (a re-imagining of Invasion
of the Body Snatchers) from the director of Downfall and
starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel
Craig, and Transformers,
with Michael Bay calling the shots.
The Films that have the 2008 Oscar Ceremony in their Sights
They are still only a twinkle in the
eye of a movie lover but their potential is great. Brad
Pitt will be donning his spurs for Andrew ‘Chopper’ Domink’s
The Assassination of Jesse James by
the Coward Robert Ford. Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Sacha
Baron Cohen go Sondheim with
Sweeney Todd. Cate
Blanchett gets Elizabethan again in Shekhar
Kapur’s follow-up, The
Golden Age. There is another
Tudor-set period piece with The Other
Boleyn Girl (starring Natalie
Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Eric Bana). If Meryl
Streep gets her 14th Academy Award nomination for The
Devil Wears Prada, her 15th could be for Dark
Matter, a drama concerning
the Nobel Prize. George Clooney goes all lawyerly, without
the Coen Brothers this time, as Michael
Clayton. In Chapter
27 Jared Leto is John Lennon assassin Mark Chapman.
Daniel Craig and Nicole
Kidman re-team
for the eagerly awaited adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials opener.
Mr Oscar appears to love a good war film and Iraq-centric
Stop-Loss could fill that hole. After the Crash Best Picture
upset, Ang Lee leaves behind Wyoming for Shanghai and his
next - Lust, Caution – a romantic spy thriller with
Tony Leung and Joan
Chen. Russell and Ridley hope thrice
is the charm, and sprinkle on a generous helping of Denzel,
for Vietnam drug-smuggling in American
Gangster.
This Reviewer is Most Looking Forward to:
1. American Gangster
2. Zodiac
3. Lust, Caution
4. 300
5. Beowulf
6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert
Ford
7. Shoot ’Em Up
8. Curse of the Golden Flower
9. This is England
10. Ocean’s 13
|
