Fall Movie Preview

I love fall. Growing up in Idaho, autumn generally just meant snow, but here in Michigan it’s a whole other thing that I’ve come to love. Leaf watching drives and cider mills are something I look forward to all year round along with supplies for back to school, bright-eyed and ambitious students in my classes, and a new crop of new movies going into the wintertime awards season. The end of summer is sometimes a garbage dump of movies studios don’t care about, but once the Labor Day weekend rolls around, it’s a parade of big-name, high-budget prestige pictures that get me excited to get back to the theater. 

I’d like to preview a few of the more interesting and provocative films that are coming our way.

Opening September 21 is a new documentary by raconteur and fellow Michigander, Michael Moore. Riffing on the title of his 2004 film about the September 11^th attacks, his new project is called Fahrenheit 11/9, election day for Donald Trump. In the film, Moore criss-crosses the country, interviewing people about the effects the current presidential administration has had on them. I’m not sure how it relates exactly, but the trailer features Moore pulling a tanker truck up to the gates of Governor Rick Snyder’s mansion and using a hose to spray the Flint water onto his yard. Agree or disagree with Moore’s politics and tactics, Fahrenheit 11/9 will surely have people talking this fall.

On September 28^th, we’ll have what is apparently our final opportunity to see Hollywood icon Robert Redford on the big screen. In The Old Man and the Gun, Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a real-life career criminal and prison escape artist who, according to his own words, escaped prison “18 times successfully and 12 times unsuccessfully.” In the film, Tucker escapes San Quentin and goes on one last bank robbing spree. An old man who is retiring playing an old man who is retiring strikes me as really interesting and makes me think of John Wayne’s final film, 1976’s The Shootist in which Wayne, who was dying of cancer, played a legendary cowboy who was dying of cancer.

October 19^th brings Melissa McCarthy in a rare dramatic role as Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me. Israel was a real-life literary biographer who fell on hard times and began a career as a forger and thief. De-glammed in a story based on actual events and switching from comedy to drama is one of the combinations the Oscars and Golden Globes love to reward, so we’ll see how this turns out for McCarthy.

While it will only appear on Netflix and not in theaters, the November 9^th release of The Other Side of the Wind bears mention. It is the final film of Orson Welles, the idiosyncratic writer, director, and actor who changed film forever with Citizen Kane and then could never quite seem to catch a break after that. Filmed between other projects throughout the 70s as money became available, The Other Side of the Wind stars the legendary John Huston as an Ernest Hemingway type fictionalized as a movie director. Apparently the film is a Hollywood satire in which Welles laments the passing of the lions of classic Hollywood and fears the modernity of the upcoming film school generation. Between never having enough money and a ridiculous amount of legal trouble involving the rights to the film, Welles never finished it before his death in 1985. As much as I begrudge Netflix for pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into lame movie and tv projects in a throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy, I do appreciate that it’s is a platform for projects like The Other Side of the Wind that would otherwise never been seen.

So there are plenty of interesting films coming out this fall along with new mainstream tent pole and superhero movies, of course. Make some time between your foliage drives and cider mill trips to see some of them.