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Somehow director P.J. Hogan balances broad comedy, subtle satire and painful melodrama all in the same film. In this story about misfits, everyone, even the popular girls, look like freaks. One could say that the message is that we need to find a fellow misfit that matches or compliments our individual quirks. It also strongly argues that we reap what we sow.

Muriel Heslop (Toni Collette, THE SIXTH SENSE) is a frumpy overweight 20-something who draws a lot of unflattering attention to herself with her tight flashy clothes and high-pitched cackle. She hangs around with a group of bleach-blonde idiots who have decided that she makes them look bad so they will no longer allow her to be around them. She often lives in a fantasy world featuring a soundtrack filled with Abba songs. Her father Bill (Bill Hunter, STRICTLY BALLROOM) is a politician in her small town of Porpoise Spit, Australia. He belittles his slacker children and his nearly comatose wife Betty (Jeanie Drynan) in front of strangers. So, we don’t really mind that much when Muriel takes a blank check from him and heads out on holiday to a tropic island where her former friends have gone. There she meets Rhonda Epinstalk (Rachel Griffiths, TV’s SIX FEET UNDER), a kindred oddball spirit. But Muriel’s compulsive lying and immature desire to show up her snobby enemies threatens her only real friendship.

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Ed Harris steps behind the camera for the first time since his excellent biopic POLLACK for this screen adaptation of Robert B. Parker’s Western novel. This tale of honor and camaraderie is a traditional oater in its tone. While it features some flares of modern frankness, the story never feels like it steps outside of the 1880s era. Fans of Westerns will be reminded of films like MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. Audiences not in love with the genre will find an engaging character piece about two men who have formed a uniquely close bond under life and death situations.

Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons, REVERSAL OF FORTUNE) is a miner who writes his own rules for himself and his men in the New Mexico town of Appaloosa. After murdering the marshal, the town leaders turn to lawman-for-hire Virgil Cole (Harris) and his partner Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE). Cole’s deal is easy, you turn over the town to him and he’ll bring order to it. Before the ink on his contract dries, Cole has gunned down two of Bragg’s men for pissing on the floor of the saloon. The showdown of wills between Bragg and Cole soon begins. Then Allie French (Renee Zellweger, BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY) walks into town and fires buckshot right into Cole’s heart.

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With the arrival of David Gordon Green’s latest drama, SNOW ANGELS, on DVD this Tuesday, this week seemed like a great time to look at two filmmakers who share the same tone. Green has said that he has been influenced by the work of Terrence Malick, a filmmaker who has only made four feature films since his debut production BADLANDS in 1973. Green has made five features since his debut film GEORGE WASHINGTON in 2000. His latest, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, was a great diversion from his typical material. The five films chosen for this profile capture the epic feel of their work, which paint poetic imagery to tell their simple, yet deep, stories.

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The Coen Brothers’ follow-up to their Oscar-winning NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a quirky spy spoof that mixes the genre satire of FARGO with the dark whimsy of their films like O’ BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? Secret CIA documents. Plastic surgery. Alcoholics. Adultery. Sexaholics. Are the elements of the plot random events or building to something bigger? What’s being constructed in the basement? Who is following me in that car? Did the Russians kill my friend? We watch to find out the answers and along the way laugh out loud.

Osborne Cox (John Malkovich, DANGEROUS LIASONS) is a mid-level CIA analyst who is demoted due to his drinking problem. Offended by the implication, he quits to write his tell-all memoir. His wife Katie (Tilda Swinton, MICHAEL CLAYTON) doesn’t like this at all. She’s been finished with Osborne for quite some time, sleeping with Treasury employee Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney, OCEAN’S ELEVEN), who uses dating services to cheat on his wife. One day, Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, SEVEN), a clueless personal trainer, comes across a disk with CIA “stuff” on it. Discovering it was created by Osborne, he and his co-worker Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand, BLOOD SIMPLE) devise a hair-brained plan to blackmail the former agent. Linda wants to use the money on four cosmetic surgeries she believes she needs. Their manager Ted (Richard Jenkins, THE VISITOR) thinks its all a bad idea and believes Linda looks great just they way she is. As the plot boils, the various players will cross paths in various ways. Left to sort it all out is a CIA supervisor (J.K. Simmons, JUNO).

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One of, if not the most, beautiful looking film ever made, Terrence Malick’s poetic masterpiece is a simple, and sometimes, strange film to get your mind around. With little dialogue, the story is told straightforward. The plot plays out much as one might expect, but then ends with a coda that seems out of place. But thinking upon the film more, you discover that there are two films in one. The story of a love triangle and the story of how that love triangle affects the life of a young teenage girl.

Linda (Linda Manz, GUMMO) is that young girl. A girl who hasn’t seen much stability in her life, moving around as a migrant worker in the early 20th century with her brother Bill (Richard Gere, CHICAGO) and his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams, THE DEAD ZONE). Working in a steel mill in Chicago, Bill gets in an argument with a foreman and accidentally kills the man. So the trio hops on a train and heads south to Texas where they get jobs working on a giant wheat farm, owned by a lonely farmer (Sam Shepard, THE RIGHT STUFF). To avoid questioning looks, Bill and Abby claim to be brother and sister, and when a fellow farmhand questions that fact, Bill hits him. One day, Bill overhears that the farmer only has a year to live, so he gets an idea. The farmer, who is the richest man in the state, has taken a liking to Abby and asked them to stay on after the season is over. This could be their ticket to the good life. But the farm foreman (Robert J. Wilke, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN) sees the couple as the con artists they are.

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Mickey Rourke is back!

Okay, the Toronto Film Festival is winding down and the word on many of the fall’s big releases is trickling down to the public. This update to my 30 Most Anticipated Fall Films List has six new films to consider. This is a recap to the 10 most buzzed about fall flicks from this week. The top two have leapfrogged to the top three in my mind.
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Diane English’s 21st century update of the 1930s dramedy THE WOMEN never frees itself from its source material. In so doing the contemporary material seems at odds with the 1930s-style humor. For the most part the film moves along not working, then you get a scene that does work and you wish that the rest of the movie were like that. Then you get more of those scenes and the movie starts developing some weight. But then it tanks it all right at the end with an ending that reminds us of everything that hadn’t been working before.

Mary Haines (Meg Ryan, WHEN HARRY MET SALLY…) is married to Stephen Haines, a rich New York businessman. She works designing uninspiring clothes for her father’s company. Her best friend Sylvia Fowler (Annette Bening, AMERICAN BEAUTY) hears from a nail technician that Stephen is having an affair with the Saks perfume counter girl Crystal Allen (Eva Mendes, HITCH). Sylvia doesn’t want to break her friend’s heart so she tells the secret to her perpetually pregnant friend Edie Cohen (Debra Messing, TV’s WILL & GRACE). But soon enough Mary discovers her husband’s affair from the same source and begins to question her entire life.

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With the remake of George Cukor’s THE WOMEN, arriving in theaters this Friday, I felt building a lineup around the original was a great idea. Like the remake, THE WOMEN put a group of its era’s stars — Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford — on the screen together. So I decided to look at other work from classy Golden Era Hollywood women. Audrey Hepburn goes from rags to riches. Greta Garbo coughs and we cry. Bette Davis goes from frumpy to fetching. And Katharine Hepburn makes us understand why she’s a legend. Come along as we laugh and we cry with legends of the screen.

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Former SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE writer Michael McCullers gets his first chance to direct from his own script and presents us with a bit of a warmed over sitcom. While the surrogate mother twist hasn’t been done before (that I know of), the film still presents many pregnancy movie clichés. Added to the mix is the odd couple relationship between the smart businesswoman who can’t conceive and her white trash surrogate. Lucky for McCullers he was able to convince former SNL alum Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to star.

Fey plays Kate Holbrook, a veep at a health food chain, who has put career before relationships. Now she’s 37 and wants to have a baby. After she is unable to conceive, she decides to go to a surrogate agency, run by the perpetually pregnant 50-something Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver, GALAXY QUEST). Kate gets paired up with Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler), who smokes, eats nothing but junk and finds video game karaoke the height of entertainment. Angie’s common-law husband Carl (Dax Shepard, IDIOCRACY) is all about discovering that one get-rich-quick scheme that will get him rich. When Angie has a falling out with Carl, she ends up on Kate’s couch. In the midst of her personal chaos, Kate is trying to head up the construction of her company’s new flagship store, which is the dream of her boss, the New Age obsessed Barry (Steve Martin, SHOPGIRL). If this weren’t enough, she meets the nice juice storeowner Rob Ackerman (Greg Kinnear, AS GOOD AS IT GETS).

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When I was in college, I once got in a conversation about COOL HAND LUKE that ended in the consensus that it was among all of my friend’s father’s favorite films. We joked that maybe we had to become fathers to understand the grand appeal. Looking back now, it’s kind of funny how we didn’t see the film the exact same way our fathers did, considering we were around the age at which our fathers had been when the film came out. The late 1960s cinema was filled with anti-heroes and Luke is one of the shining icons of that movement. The film is about more than a convict standing up to his oppressive jailers; it’s about a youth culture standing up to a world that wanted to box them in.

Luke (Paul Newman, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID) was imprisoned for knocking the tops off parking meters. He came home from the war a hero. Now in his small town, he had nothing better to do. At first, Luke buts heads with some of the veteran prisoners like Dragline (George Kennedy, TV’s DALLAS), but he soon wins the respect of his fellow inmates through his undying will to never give up. The Captain (Strother Martin, THE WILD BUNCH) runs the prison with an iron fist, laying down dozens and dozens of rules on the prisoners. The bosses want to break the men’s wills and when they push Luke too far, he does everything he can to break free.

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