Fall Movie Preview

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
STARRING George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, Holly Hunter
SCREENPLAY BY Joel and Ethan Coen
DIRECTED BY Joel Coen
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Clooney creates comedy with those kooky Coens.

It must have been an amazing pitch meeting. How else to explain Touchstone and Universal agreeing to hand the Coens, Oscar winners for Fargo but not exactly kings of the box office, more than $30 million for this idiosyncratic retelling of Homer's Odyssey, transplanted to the Depression-era South? The source material is probably only slightly more obscure than the title's in-joke: Taken from Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, it's the drama that a director known for comedies wants to make. And that's not the only Sturges homage scribbled in the margins as three escaped cons (Clooney, Turturro, and Nelson) search for the money that one of them buried before going to jail. Along the way they meet sirens by a river, crash a KKK rally, and record a hit single. ''It shocked me that [the Coens] could have trouble getting a film made,'' says Clooney, who had been up for a part in an earlier Coen film that never materialized. ''When they came to me with this, I immediately said yes.''

GOOD SIGN Clooney generated heat with The Perfect Storm.
THEN AGAIN The Coens' last big screwball homage, The Hudsucker Proxy, laid an egg.

CHOCOLAT
STARRING Johnny Depp, Juliette Binoche, Alfred Molina, Judi Dench
SCREENPLAY BY Robert Nelson Jacobs
DIRECTED BY Lasse Hallstrom
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Oscar loved Hallstrom's Cider House Rules. Will he adapt to this one?

After bringing John Irving's prose to the screen, the Swedish director is delving into the pages of a very different sort of book — a modern-day fairy tale about the healing power of high-caloric confections. Binoche plays a mysterious (and vaguely supernatural) stranger who scandalizes a tiny conservative French village by opening a chocolate shop across the square from the church, leading the locals into temptation with her magically delicious treats. Molina is the resident nobleman who tries to shut her down, while Depp (who starred in Hallstrom's What's Eating Gilbert Grape) plays the handsome out-of-towner who gives Binoche more than a sugar rush. ''It's a totally different tone than Cider House,'' says Hallstrom, who made only one major change from Joanne Harris' 1999 novel, moving the story from the 1990s to the more lyrical 1950s. ''This one is sort of a comedic fable. It's a very enchanting story, with a great eye for character and psychology.''

GOOD SIGN Certainly sounds sweet.
THEN AGAIN Depp doesn't appear until well into the second half. Talk about burying your lead.

THE PLEDGE
STARRING Jack Nicholson, Robin Wright Penn, Aaron Eckhart, Vanessa Redgrave
SCREENPLAY BY Jerzy Kromolowski, Mary Olson-Kromolowski, Sean Penn
DIRECTED BY Sean Penn
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Jack's back and Sean's got him — as a cop hooked on an unsolved case.

If you're seeking relief from the here-today-gone-by-recess teen stars, look no further than the seasoned cast that Penn has assembled for this drama (freely adapted from the novel by Swiss author Friedrich Duerrenmatt) about a retired Reno homicide detective obsessed with the unsolved killing of a little girl. Along with Nicholson (reuniting with Penn after 1995's The Crossing Guard), there's Redgrave, Helen Mirren, Sam Shepard, and Harry Dean Stanton. ''There was no time for rehearsal,'' says Eckhart (Erin Brockovich), who plays Nicholson's ex-partner. ''Sean gets people he wants to be around, who he knows can step up to the plate.'' But even with such a pensive posse, it wasn't all moodiness all the time — surprising considering the Vancouver shoot was plagued with weather problems. ''I thought Sean [was always going to be sitting] with his face in his lap, brooding,'' says Eckhart. ''Never, ever. When you get Sean in the environment that he loves, he's as relaxed as you'll ever see him.... I'm not saying everyone was making balloon animals, but when you got your work done, you could talk and laugh.''

GOOD SIGN Did we mention that cast?
THEN AGAIN If the film's anything like The Crossing Guard, it could be a major bummer.

VERTICAL LIMIT
STARRING Chris O'Donnell, Scott Glenn, Robin Tunney, Bill Paxton
SCREENPLAY BY Robert King, Terry Hayes
DIRECTED BY Martin Campbell
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
The GoldenEye director has a new arsenal: crampons and carabiners.

''I get terrible vertigo. I hate the snow. And I hate helicopters,'' says Campbell, listing his reasons for making this high-altitude action flick in his native New Zealand. ''It was better than filming some cop show in bloody L.A.'' Plus, he loved the plot: After his father's tragic death in a climbing accident, a young man (O'Donnell) gives up mountaineering but is called back to K2 — the world's second-highest mountain, and widely considered more dangerous than Mount Everest — to rescue his sister (Tunney) and her summit team, who are trapped in a crevasse at 26,000 feet. Although the production began at a mere 12,000 feet on Mount Cook, shooting was no picnic. ''We were at the mercy of the weather,'' says Campbell, whose crew faced a blizzard in August and had to transport camera equipment up and down the peak daily by helicopter. Adds O'Donnell, who was bummed at the no-skiing-on-your-day-off rule imposed by the producers, ''What was extreme about it was being dumped on this little ledge for seven hours without a trailer to go hide in.''

GOOD SIGN With nature as the tyrant, this could be The Perfect Snow Storm.
THEN AGAIN It may leave audiences wishing they'd gotten Into Thin Air.

STATE AND MAIN
STARRING William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Philip Seymour Hoffman
SCREENPLAY BY David Mamet
DIRECTED BY David Mamet
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
After the success of Wag the Dog, Mamet sticks it to Hollywood one more time.

First off, it's not State and Maine or State of Maine, as the film has been erroneously called. ''I hope it's not a bad title,'' says Macy, one of many Mamet regulars in the film, ''but it's State and Main, as in [the fictitious] Waterford, Vt., which has State St. and Main St., and the Coffee Corner is right there on the corner.'' That intersection is ground zero for the plot of this farce about a big-studio film, titled The Old Mill, shooting in this quiet Vermont town. Within days of the arrival of the crew — including the director (Macy), screenwriter (Hoffman), producer (David Paymer), and stars (Baldwin and Parker) — all showbiz hell breaks loose: Parker's starlet refuses to complete her contractually obligated topless scene, and Baldwin's leading man hits on a teen townie (Julia Stiles). ''Pretty much everyone is, on some level, despicable,'' says Macy, ''but the despicable aspects of all the characters are so across-the-board that you kind of have affection for everyone.'' Yep, sounds like Hollywood.

GOOD SIGN That cast! That screenwriter! That cast!
THEN AGAIN There's always that danger of being too inside.

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
STARRING Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen
SCREENPLAY BY James Schamus, Wang Hui Ling, Tsai Kuo Jung
DIRECTED BY Ang Lee
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
From the director of The Ice Storm...a Matrix-style martial-arts epic?

After rapturous back-to-back receptions for his dramas Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Ice Storm (1997), Taiwanese director Lee got lukewarm notices for last year's Civil War tale Ride With the Devil. But he wowed Cannes with this $15 million action-romance that pits a battle-weary master (Chow) against a female rebel (Zhang) and builds to a series of kickapalooza fights. As choreographed by The Matrix's Yuen Wo Ping, combatants leap tall buildings in single bounds, run up walls, and hop through tree branches. How'd they do it? Thick wires and harnesses, later digitally erased, allowed grander trajectories than seen in most Hong Kong flicks. While perfectionist Lee wished he could ''do some shots again,'' he wouldn't change his decision not to dub or shoot the actors in English. ''It would be more profitable,'' he concedes. ''And I was given a lot of advice to do that. But to me, there's a personal meaning to the language. Doing a martial-arts movie in English would be like John Wayne speaking Chinese in a Western.''

GOOD SIGN Sony Pictures Classics says it plans a big promotional push aimed at ''the MTV generation.''
THEN AGAIN The Tom Green set doesn't usually flip for subtitled films.

MISS CONGENIALITY
STARRING Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, William Shatner
SCREENPLAY BY Marc Lawrence, Katie Ford, Caryn Lucas
DIRECTED BY Donald Petrie
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Bullock gets physical as she enters wacky Carrey country.

''Male comedians are able to do physical comedy, but I don't think anyone wants to see a woman doing that,'' says producer-star Bullock. ''I'd love to bridge that gap a little bit.'' Exhibit A: Miss Congeniality, in which a tomboy FBI agent (Bullock) poses as a beauty-pageant contestant to thwart a bomb threat. ''Sandy's got a lot of Lucille Ball in her,'' says coexec producer Lawrence. But no one was laughing when director Hugh Wilson (The First Wives Club) dropped out shortly before filming was to begin. ''It's certainly unnerving,'' says Lawrence. ''We were in preproduction — stuff was being built. At a certain point you say, 'Are we talking about the same movie?' If the answer is no, it doesn't benefit anybody to keep riding that train.'' Within a week Petrie (Grumpy Old Men) had come aboard, and now the film's only tension is over what the lead character will do in the pageant's talent competition. ''That's the big thing,'' says Bullock, ''since she has no talent whatsoever.'' We won't spoil it, but let's just say her ''talent'' is as dubious as it is embarrassing. ''That was humiliating,'' she says of filming the scene outdoors in front of the Alamo. ''With everyone who's touring the Alamo that season, I'm in some Bavarian tutu going, 'Okay, I just single-handedly finished off the rest of my career.'''

GOOD SIGN We love Lucy too. And if anyone can resuscitate her brand of humor, it's Bullock.
THEN AGAIN The last wacky comedy she produced and starred in was Gun Shy.

SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE
STARRING John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Udo Kier, Cary Elwes
SCREENPLAY BY Steven Katz
DIRECTED BY E. Elias Merhige
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Dafoe's neck-chewing turn as a vampire Method actor.

What if the guy you hired to play a bloodsucker really was one? That's the fantasy premise of this movie-biz tale, which freely reimagines behind-the-scenes battles on the 1922 silent German thriller Nosferatu. Malkovich, in a voluptuous toupée, plays director F.W. Murnau, a headstrong gay auteur who, in this version of events, thinks nothing of jeopardizing his cast to get results. His attempt to play Svengali to star Max Schreck (Dafoe) soon backfires in ways that spoof contemporary movie-star politics. ''It's not just an homage,'' says director Merhige, hired by producers Nicolas Cage and Jeff Levine on the strength of a film he'd made as a college student. ''I'm using Murnau and Schreck as a metaphor for the cinema itself, for art making. Schreck murdered himself to become someone else.'' That description of acting sounds about right to Dafoe. ''I often seek a mask of some sort,'' he explains. ''It's a filter that frees you up so you aren't so bound to your view of things.''

GOOD SIGN A source at distributor Lions Gate Films (Gods and Monsters) believes ''we'd have to work pretty hard to f--- up an Oscar nomination for Willem.''
THEN AGAIN Indie fare isn't as Oscar chic as it was a few years back.

THIRTEEN DAYS
STARRING Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood, Steven Culp, Dylan Baker
SCREENPLAY BY David Self
DIRECTED BY Roger Donaldson
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Costner takes on Camelot and tries to heat up the Cold War.

Paced over two tense weeks in October 1962, Thirteen Days chronicles how President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and White House aide Kenny O'Donnell bargained and bullied their way out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kenny O'Donnell? A few historical purists have howled that the real O'Donnell was nothing like the crisis counselor in the film. Donaldson admits to taking a few liberties, but denies Costner's man was a bit player. ''He was a powerful guy,'' he says. ''If you've seen newsreel footage of the Kennedys, Kenny O'Donnell is always there, so much so you'd think he was a Secret Service man.''

Greenwood's role was equally tough — to play the King of Camelot, the Canadian actor labored over the Bah-ston accent, coordinating cadences with Culp's RFK. ''We sparred with our dialects, trying to maintain the one that was right for us,'' Greenwood (Double Jeopardy) says. ''With varying degrees of success, I'm sure.'' But the actor had another challenge: digging out from under the JFK mythos. ''I tried to think of him as more of a man and less of an icon,'' he says. ''He becomes larger in our memory, and I thought that was likely to crush me.'' By all accounts, the approach worked — perhaps too well. Rumors and an Inside.com article had test audiences loving Greenwood and snubbing Costner. Donaldson refutes this, saying that Costner, Greenwood, and Culp's ratings were neck-and-neck-and-neck. ''I know Kevin was not picked out for criticism,'' says Donaldson, who directed the star in 1987's No Way Out. ''If anything, it was the opposite; for Kevin, who's been getting a hard time lately, this could be the comeback.''

GOOD SIGN Read the last sentence.
THEN AGAIN Haven't we heard that before?

THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE
STARRING the voices of David Spade, John Goodman, Eartha Kitt, Patrick Warburton
SCREENPLAY BY Credits unavailable at press time
DIRECTED BY Mark Dindal
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Spade and Sting go south in the season's big Disney 'toon.

Producer Randy Fullmer (The Hunchback Of Notre Dame) and his team were two years into Kingdom of the Sun, a Disney animated musical about the Incan empire, with songs by Sting, when the wheels came off. Literally. ''There was one particular meeting [where] we argued whether to have a wheel, because the Incans didn't have wheels,'' says Fullmer. ''We realized at the end of that day we were taking this film way too seriously.'' Worse, after reviewing their work (the entire film had been storyboarded, and a third of it was completely animated), Disney didn't like it either. Given two weeks to revamp it or get shut down, Fullmer and Co. came up with Groove, a buddy-comedy fantasy set in a nameless south-of-the-border country. Though that may sound like DreamWorks' recent Road to El Dorado, the specifics are different: When arrogant young emperor Kuzco (Spade) gets transformed into a llama by a power-hungry subordinate (Kitt), he must team with a good-hearted peasant (Goodman) to reclaim the throne. In the switch from musical to comedy, Sting's five songs were cut, though the producers did ask him to write two new songs for the soundtrack and end credits. ''It hit him really hard,'' says Fullmer, ''but Sting is not a quitter. He just said, 'All right. What's your next story line?''' Fullmer fondly recalls the frantic two weeks of reworking the film as ''magic.'' But don't ask him how much that magic cost. ''They don't tell us,'' says Fullmer, ''and I'm actually happy they don't.''

GOOD SIGN Kitt as a devious diva. Prrrr.
THEN AGAIN This still sounds like The Road to El Dorado.

THE GIFT
STARRING Cate Blanchett, Hilary Swank, Greg Kinnear, Keanu Reeves
SCREENPLAY BY Billy Bob Thornton, Tom Epperson
DIRECTED BY Sam Raimi
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL?
Oscar-winner Swank takes another walk on the dark side.

While the movie version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil failed to capture the wee-hours menace of Savannah, Ga., we've got higher hopes for this small whodunit. The Southern gothic locale is ''like the eighth character in the movie,'' says Kinnear. ''There's a haunted vibe and unusual spirit to the town that we tried to use in the film.'' Fitting, since the premise of the estimated $10 million movie is such a creepy one. Blanchett plays a recently widowed mother whose paranormal gift reveals the secrets of some of her neighbors. One of them is a tormented wife (Swank) whom she advises to leave her bullying husband (Reeves). Another is an elementary school principal (Kinnear) whose young fiancée (Katie Holmes) has vanished. The film marks Swank's first movie since winning the Best Actress Oscar for Boys Don't Cry. ''She certainly copped an immediate attitude,'' jokes Kinnear. ''I think she'd finished shooting by the time she won. Either that, or she just decided not to return to Savannah.''

GOOD SIGN Having made A Simple Plan, director Raimi is certainly comfortable with sophisticated, spooky material.
THEN AGAIN Anyone see his last movie, For Love of the Game? Now that was frightening.

Also in December

SONGCATCHER
Janet McTear stars as a turn-of-the-century musicologist who discovers an Appalachian community blessed with the gift of song.
BOTTOM LINE Sundance embraced it (Dec. 8)

AN EVERLASTING PIECE
''[It's] just like The Perfect Storm,'' says star-writer Barry McEvoy. ''Except instead of George Clooney and Marky Mark, we have bald guys, and instead of a big wave, we have a wake.'' Barry Levinson directed this tale of wig salesmen in Northern Ireland.
BOTTOM LINE Wig salesmen? We're sold! (Dec. 25)

VATEL
A 17th-century French caterer (Gérard Depardieu) romances a courtesan (Uma Thurman) in this costumer from Roland Jofée (The Mission).
BOTTOM LINE A mixed reception at Cannes could mean it's less than appetizing.

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME
Keeneth Lonergan's Sundance winner stars Mark Ruffalo as a loner who visits his sister (Laura Linney) and her son (Rory Culkin) and throws their lives for a loop.
BOTTOM LINE The buzz is deafening.

THE TAILOR OF PANAMA
In this adaptation of John le Carré's novel, Pierce Brosnan is an agent playing cat and mouse with geoffrey Rush's titular couturier. Director John Boormansays the twist is that this spy's ''corrupt, manipulative, and ruthless.''
BOTTOM LINE Brosnan as a spy? Can't picture it.

THE CLAIM
Jude's Michael Winterbottom revisits Thomas Hardy with this take on The Mayor of Casterbridge starring Sarah Polley and Wes Bentley as lovers in a mining town.
BOTTOM LINE His Jude was pretty obscure.

PLUS

BUT FOREVER IN MY MIND
A teen tries to comprehend the politics of romance when his school is occupied by protesters in 1968 Italy.

BUYING THE COW
Jerry O'Connell stars as a commitment-phobe who girlfriend gives him two weeks to pop the question.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT
This moptop mock doc boasts a fresh print and remastered soundtrack.

HILLBROW KIDS
A documentary focusing on Johannesburg's street children.

WES CRAVEN PRESENTS: DRACULA 2000
Ol' Death Breath is back in this update from the Scream merchant — directed by his longtime editor, Patrick Lussier.