Fall Movie Season

I do this prior to every new movie season, where I look ahead at the films to be released and pick out which ones I’m eyeing to eventually see, listing them week by week. For the Summer Movie Season, I listed a total of 14 movies of varying levels of interest. I ended up seeing 6 of them, but of the 8 I missed, I’m still only interested in seeing Hancock, American Teen, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Towelhead, which was pushed back to this season. The other four are already dead to me.

But this season, I’ll be taking in 30 (or 31) movies in a week and a half at the Toronto International Film Festival, so my desire to continue going to movies throughout the month will be fairly slim (this also explains why I didn’t bother finishing off the summer movie season with American Teen or Vicky Cristina Barcelona), so to qualify for this list, a movie has to sound pretty darn interesting. But, since some of my favourite movies of 2007 came out in September and October (including 3:10 to Yuma, Gone Baby Gone, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), I didn’t want to ignore the season completely (and yes, the season only includes September and October for me, since November is pretty wintery where I come from).

September 12
Burn After Reading – If all goes well, I’ll have already seen this at the gala premiere on Friday, but I’m not counting on it. So who knows? Maybe we get home Sunday afternoon from TIFF, then go to an evening showing. More likely we’ll wait a week, but probably not much longer for a movie that is one of my most anticipated of the year.

Towelhead – A holdover from my summer list, this one will have to get a lot of buzz and probably hang around until November for me to get around to seeing it after a festival’s worth of indie dramas.

September 19
The Duchess – We were shut out of this one for TIFF, as it has nothing but expensive screenings unavailable to us with our Festival passes (which is bullshit, but whatevs). Luckily, the 19th is its limited release date, so by the time it comes to Calgary, we should be ready to go to movies again. This one is a lock for at least some Oscar noms (in the costuming/makeup/set design departments, if not Best Actress), so it’ll be good to get it out of the way early, even if seeing it is more an obligation for my wife than of true interest to me.

Appaloosa – Seeing this at TIFF. Unless we accidentally sleep in.

September 26
Miracle at St. Anna – Seeing this at TIFF.

Choke – I actually haven’t ever read any Chuck Palahniuk, but this one interests me nonetheless. I probably should read at least one of his books.

October 3
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People – I still haven’t seen Run Fatboy Run, so I’m not exactly sure how funny Simon Pegg is in things he didn’t write, but I’m at least open to finding out. We’ll see how the trailers for this one look.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist – Seeing this at TIFF.

Rachel Getting Married – Another TIFF movie the system kept us out of, I’m guessing its limited release schedule will probably push this back into November for those of us not in NY/LA. That’ll give me enough time to decide if it’s worth seeing. Right now, it looks like a more pleasant version of Margot at the Wedding, which wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing.

Body of Lies – Here we go, an honest-to-goodness wide release that I won’t be seeing in the next week and a half. Ridley Scott often leaves me cold, but this spy thriller seems to play more into his strengths than do the faux-epics he’s been trying of late. Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio should hurt either.

October 24
Changeling – Clint Eastwood’s movies are practically stamped with Oscar nominations prior to release now, so I may as well check this one out too. It’s gotten encouraging buzz from Cannes, so hopefully it won’t just be an obligatory viewing.

Synecdoche, New York – Seeing this at TIFF.

October 31
Zack and Miri Make a Porno – Seeing this at TIFF.

RocknRolla – Seeing this at TIFF.

At first glance, this is a long list at 14 titles. But, I’ll be clearing 6, possibly 7, of them off in the next two weeks and at least two of them are limited releases that probably won’t make it to wider release until the end of the season, if not later. So really, I’m looking to squeeze in another 5 movies after our big festival blitz, sometime by the end of October. That’s doable.