THE FALL MOVIEPALOOZA WHOOPSIEDOODLE FUNFEST POST

I love Fall Movie Season. I love it so much that I love Entertainment Weekly's Fall Movie Preview issue - I buy it every year, just to have an easy paper list with nice printing and color pictures to flip through, marking which films I'm most interested in seeing. I love Fall Movie Season because, despite being a full-bore film snob, I still love Hollywood movies. And not in the ironic "Oh they're so expensive and dumb and unintentionally funny" way. I mean, I love unintentionally funny, too. But I still legitimately believe in the ability of Hollywood to put out awesome movies. And they do it! And when they do it -- barring the odd out-of-season release -- they do it in the fall.

The autumn is when every studio rolls out whatever they figure to be their best bet at some Oscars love. Sure, sure, a lot of these 'A' pictures are, in fact, crap. I have no great hope for, let's say, The Secret Life of Bees, or The Soloist. But there is some great looking stuff coming down the pipe this year. Let me turn to my list and I will extrapolate...

Burn After Reading already kicked the season off right. Best new comedy I've seen since...geez, I dunno, Punchdrunk Love? I liked Burn even more than No Country (HA! Take that, Boisture.) Absolutely set the seasonal mood correctly.

Hmm...looks like I missed Miracle at St. Anna and Choke, but I should still be able to catch Appaloosa and W -- although Renee Zellweger in the former and rumors of boring even-handedness in the latter make me a little wary of each.

Looking ahead...The Road could easily be very good, and Milk looks great. In the realm of summer-film-in-the-fall, there's the new Bond -- and I love me some Bond, so I'll be seeing that, even if Quantum of Solace is a silly name. David Fincher doesn't always hit right with me, but The Curious Case of Benjamin Button looks intriguing. And while Ron Howard is not the director I'd necessarily have picked for Frost/Nixon, I am a sucker for all things involving the previous title-holder for Worse President in Modern History. Eastwood's got two he's directed coming out this fall, and while I'm not so interested in watching him as an aging Korean War Vet tackling his own bigotry in Gran Torino, I do want to see Changeling, written by J. Michael Straczynski. Looking over the film schedule in the magazine, I seem to have written "Ha Ha" next to The Spirit. I will probably see it, though, if only because that image from the trailer of the main character shimmying out of a giant woman's mouth was just too bizarre to pass up.

The film that has me the most excited this fall, however, bar none: Synecdoche, New York -- new Charlie Kaufman! The man has five previous feature film credits, and they're five of my favorite films of the last decade. I don't even know what this new film is about, nor do I want to know. I know that Phillip Seymour Hoffman is in it. Oh, and I know that Rex Reed hated it. I love it when a shitty critic pans a movie I'm excited about. Nothing makes me happier or more excited to actually see the movie. Seriously, studio executives take note: put "Rex Reed wept blood at the critics' screening" on your lobby poster, and you have at least one guaranteed ticket sale right here.

Reed's review is hilarious, not least because he seems to be unaware that synecdoche is a word in the english language, and instead assumes it's merely a mispronunciation of "Schenectady." I mean, sure, I hadn't heard of it before either, but -- you're a writer, Rex. I assume you have a dictionary; look it up. Reed proves his comprehension of the popular taste with such probing questions as "Does anybody even remember Borat?" while attempting to put Sacha Baron Cohen's film in the same grouping as every Adam Sandler movie (and also Apocalypto? That...makes sense...) The review is also filled with lines like this:

"[Kaufman's] directorial feature debut reminds me of the spiteful, neurotic brat kicked out of school for failing recess who gets even by throwing himself in front of a speeding school bus."

...which doesn't really make a lot of sense as a metaphor. Unless Rex Reed is literally being reminded of a bizarre, traumatic childhood experience, in which case: Rex Reed has led a horrifying life, and his reviews make a lot more sense to me. I guess with a background that traumatic, you can be forgiven for claiming that a film is incomprehensible when you didn't even stay to see the end of it. Not that Reed would have probably been able to glean much from it, even if he did stay. He calls Being John Malkovich abominable, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a "jabberwocky" (seriously, what? From the context it's clearly meant as an insult, but -- what does it mean? Rex Reed, you incomprehensible jabberwocky, you!) -- this is clearly not someone operating in any realm of taste or discretion that I'm interested in (except as comedy).