Fall Preview

By Richard Schickel; Richard Lacayo; Jeanne McDowell; Joel Stein; Belinda Luscombe; Lev Grossman; Josh Tyrangiel; Richard Corliss; James Poniewozik

TRUE STORIES

CRITIC'S CHOICE EXPLORATIONS OF THE LIVES OF MEN

Entrapped in his obsessions and compulsions, he eventually became the perfect American weirdo--all silences and unclipped toenails. But before that, Howard Hughes, at least as Martin Scorsese sees him, was the perfect American, period. He was rich. He was romantic. He was fearless. And as an inventor and entrepreneur, he was one of the past century's great visionaries. It is this Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who dominates The Aviator--recklessly crashing planes and cars, heedlessly wooing Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), among others.

"[The film] has a lot to do with the nature of wanting to be famous," says Scorsese, "the nature of wanting to be a star." Beyond that, though, he sees his flyer in classic terms: as Croesus or Midas, with a golden curse, or as Icarus, flying too close to the sun on waxy wings. Above all, The Aviator, expensively set in the America of the 1920s, '30s and '40s, promises to be as grandly aspiring as its subject, and this being a Martin Scorsese film, full of grim foreshadowings as well. "The seeds of his own destruction are right inside of him," the director muses, happy to have once again embraced romanticism's darker side.

One way or another, all biopics improve on reality, lending life a coherence and meaning that eludes us as we live it. Since our reality is at present so incomprehensible, maybe we need that kind of narrative logic now. That, anyway, is how Hollywood is betting this fall. From Ray (Charles, that is) to Che (Guevara), we are going to see a lot of real people--all male, natch--battling their way to triumph or martyrdom. Jamie Foxx is perfectly cast as the singer overcoming blindness and addiction on his way to becoming an icon. Colin Farrell too seems freakishly right--with the possible exception of the hair--as the charismatic, ambitious Alexander the Great in Oliver Stone's Alexander. The Motorcycle Diaries features Gael Garcia Bernal as a carefree Guevara vrooming around South America on his hog, looking for fun but discovering the beginnings of his revolutionary destiny. Too political? Try Finding Neverland--Johnny Depp doing a loose interpretation of J.M. Barrie, exploring both the realities and the fantasies that conditioned his creation of Peter Pan. Too twee? How about Liam Neeson in Kinsey as the curiously haunted sexologist who got us talking about our sexual lives and longings? There's a life story for every taste. --By Richard Schickel

SHAKESPEARE: THE MAN BEHIND THE SCENES

Is it because so little is known about Shakespeare's life that so much has been written about it? Shakespeare left behind no diaries or letters. His name appears in some parish records and legal papers and in the commentaries of a few contemporaries. The rest is silence. Or is it? By listening closely to the poems and plays, and by assembling scraps of historical evidence into (mostly) plausible surmises, scholar Stephen Greenblatt has produced Will in the World (Norton; 406 pages), a dazzling and subtle biography, due Sept. 20, that teases out possibilities in the bard's inner and outer life, like the much argued conjecture that in youth, Shakespeare was secretly Catholic in an England where the old faith was being suppressed. You may not always be persuaded by Greenblatt's intuitive leaps, but you'll have great fun watching him jump. --By Richard Lacayo

WHEN THE NEWEST FAMILY MEMBER IS MOM

What happens when a Prada-loving, Pilates-driven wife and mother from Manhattan trades places with a woodchopping, school-bus-driving, working-class mom from rural New Jersey? Not exactly what you'd expect. Welcome to the premiere episode of Wife Swap, ABC's riveting examination of family values (Wednesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.) starting Sept. 29. Unlike Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy, Fox's current version of the same concept, Wife Swap involves no monetary reward. Just a simple premise: two matriarchs from different worlds swap lives for two weeks. One of the most entertaining new entries in reality TV, Wife Swap reminds us that the American living room is as fascinating a laboratory of human emotions as Borneo or the corporate boardroom. --By Jeanne McDowell

RETURN ENGAGEMENTS YOU LOVED THEM ONCE. CAN THEY WOO YOU AGAIN?

You know, of course, that it won't be any good. But at some point, after soaking up the posters and commercials and talk-show appearances, you convince yourself that this sequel might be different. This one--the one with the characters you want so much to hang out with again for two hours--could be good. "A friend of mine said there are only three good sequels," says Matt Damon, who stars in Ocean's Twelve. "The New Testament is better than the Old. Huck Finn is better than Tom Sawyer, and Godfather II is better than The Godfather."

But we are an optimistic people, and movie studios feed on optimism, so this fall we'll be tempted with not only Ocean's Twelve but also Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason; Wesley Snipes' third vampire film, Blade: Trinity; and in what has to be the first case of a throwaway dirty pun being incarnated into main characters, Meet the Fockers. The sequel to Meet the Parents even lured in big names Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman to play Ben Stiller's parents.

Of these, Oceans, with Steven Soderbergh directing the original's all-star cast now augmented by Catherine Zeta-Jones, has the best pedigree. "We were always mindful that we had to be good. None of us just wanted to jump into a cynically made sequel," says Damon. The director never intended to reunite the cast, but while on a press tour in Italy "I could just see in his eyes that he had a great idea," adds the actor, whose own sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, was a summer hit. The movie's retro-glamorous European locations ensured that the shoot was well documented by the paparazzi. And the parties at star George Clooney's house at Italy's Lake Como added to the Rat Pack mystique. "George raised a good point about sequels," Damon says. "He said if how much fun you had making the movie always translated into something good, Cannonball Run 2 would be the best movie ever." We know. And yet we still let Dom DeLuise burn us on that one. --By Joel Stein

THE DIMMEST OF THE FRIENDS MOVES WEST

We live in a divided nation. Thus there are two schools of thought on Joey, the 800-lb. gorilla of new TV shows (NBC, Thursdays, 8 p.m. E.T.), starting Sept. 9. Friends was lame, ergo Joey will be lame. Friends was genius, and ... perhaps we need to give Joey a chance. After the failure of every one of the Seinfeld-alum shows, few think Matt LeBlanc's much-hyped solo sitcom is a guaranteed success. In the first episode the still none-too-bright Joey moves to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. He moves in with his sister (Drea de Matteo, late of The Sopranos) and her extremely bright and nerdy 20year-old son, who is, yes, a rocket scientist. And, oops, there's a cute girl next door. So far, nothing can be accused of breaking the form. But Friends was an O.K. idea that thrived on good writing, actorly charm and a low-key start. Let's hope Joey has two out of three. --By Belinda Luscombe

CRITIC'S CHOICE IF LINDY HAD LANDED IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Not many people remember the shocking presidential election of 1940, when aviation pioneer and confirmed isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Philip Roth imagines it with eery clarity in The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin; 400 pages), out Oct. 5, an all too plausible work of counter-history in which Roth re-creates his New Jersey childhood in Lindbergh's America. On taking office, Lindbergh promptly cozies up to Hitler, making good on his campaign promise to keep the U.S. out of World War II, then goes on to pass the (entirely fictional) Homestead Act of 1942, which systematically relocates Jewish families to remote rural towns. Bit by bit, never shrill, never frothing, Roth shows us how easily the U.S. could become a fascist nation. It's a somber and devastating meditation on the ephemerality of freedom. --By Lev Grossman

CRITIC'S CHOICE DOING WHAT THEY KNOW HOW TO DO BEST

They are now men of a certain age, and it no longer becomes them to aspire to be things they are not. So there's no crunk-style rapping on the new U2 album, no gospel choirs or techno experiments, nothing that could possibly be misinterpreted as a sign of midlife crisis. Instead, this as-yet-untitled album is just full of confident, expansive guitar rock from the masters of the form. All the old tricks--the Edge's echoing guitar notes, Larry Mullen Jr.'s martial snare--still work, although Bono has lost a touch of the high clarity he had in his mullet-sporting days. He still has enormous assuredness, and the occasional cracks in his voice make the bad-relationship songs (and, as always, there are quite a few) darker and more dramatic. Custom would seem to demand that U2 start embarrassing itself one of these days. But not today. --By Josh Tyrangiel

PIONEERING WORKS TELL ME THE OLD, OLD STORIES ... DIFFERENTLY

Cynics will say: there's nothing new under the screen. As the temperatures drop outside, though, the cinematic IQ rises. It's too late for the muscle-bound blockbusters, too early for Christmas piety but just the right time for filmmakers' innovation and impudence. Here are four films that are trespassing on virgin soil.

There is precedent for a puppet movie like Team America: World Police. It's only that none has ever been placed in hands as deviantly deft as those of South Park malefactors Trey Parker and Matt Stone. A crew of superhero marionettes (the old-fashioned kind) faces off against wmd-hoarding, four-letter-wording North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Some have already attacked the film for mocking the war on terrorism. But given the correctly impolitic attitudes of Parker and Stone, count on both left and right wings getting clipped. The trailer ballyhoos star names: "Alec Baldwin! ... Susan Sarandon! ... George W. Bush!" Then: "Are all going to hate this movie." The result should be scabrous and loopy enough to make Michael Moore seem ... reverent.

The weapons bombarding New York City in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow are giant robots. They're also entirely created--as is everything else in this movie except the stars--by computer. And at least one of the stars is too: ace news hen Gwyneth Paltrow and crack pilot Jude Law are real enough, but Laurence Olivier, in his first role since his death in 1989, is a hologram.

Different computer trickery created The Polar Express, which might also be called Gollum: The Movie. The same technology used to create the The Lord of the Rings wretch brings this supertrain adventure to life. That, plus Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis.

Yes, we've seen Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice before--as an MGM classic, a BBC mini-series and, last year, a modern-day Mormon movie. But Bride and Prejudice will mark the first time we've seen it go Bollywood. Director Gurinder Chadha enjoyed a surprise smash with Bend It like Beckham. Can she go from goal to gold? --By Richard Corliss

PIONEERING WORKS

CRITIC'S CHOICE TALE OF A FATEFUL TRIP

J.J. Abrams' spy fantasy Alias is not the smartest show on TV. It is perhaps something better: the smartest dumb show on TV. But writer-creator Abrams has competition this season--himself. Lost (ABC, Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.T., debuts Sept. 22) has an even more ridiculous premise. A transpacific flight crashes on a remote island, leaving a few dozen survivors of a type that suggests that the best protection against a 30,000-ft. drop is good hair and low body fat. The plane was a thousand miles off course and out of radio contact--the survivors are stranded. But not alone: at night the jungle chatters with the sounds of unseen, hungry and possibly supernatural creatures. Gilligan, meet Mulder and Scully.

As in Alias, Abrams sells the ludicrous setup with excellent casting (including Party of Five's Matthew Fox and The Lord of the Rings hobbit Dominic Monaghan), inventive details and sharp comic relief. A desert island is a hermetic setting--not much room for fun Quentin Tarantino cameos there. So Abrams loads up on intriguing characters (a fugitive, an Iraqi Republican Guard veteran and so forth), gives them surprising secrets and continually subverts our ideas of who's good, who's bad and who can be trusted. Above all, Abrams understands that if you make your story a little farfetched, you'll lose the audience--but if you make it a lot farfetched, folks will play along. Lost's plots, like those of Alias, make you suspect that Abrams has no clue where all this is going, but the fun is making your own guess. (Here's mine: at some point in the season, a character will say, "This plane crash was no accident!") As long as the twists keep coming, these castaways should be in for a nice long wait. --By James Poniewozik

A BRITISH TALENT-SHOW WINNER STRUTS HER STUFF

For her under-the-radar 2003 EP, The Soul Sessions, Joss Stone won critical praise and a blues-club-ful of Norah Jones comparisons with her husky, knowing renditions of vintage soul covers. Stone showed she has taste, but the important question--does she have soul?--went unanswered. Her covers were emotive, but the depth of her feeling, at 16, was a tad suspicious. Where Jones, an ancient 25, shrewdly concedes the limitations of her experience by never oversinging her tidy little songs, Stone, a native of Devon, England, who signed a record deal after performing on a BBC talent show, heaved and trilled her way through Sessions as if she were still trying to impress the judges.

Stone's first proper album, Mind, Body & Soul, out Sept. 28, is expected to be the hottest-selling debut this fall. Her voice is pretty enough; at the top of her register, Stone is clear and ripe, and at the bottom, when she's almost out of breath, she does a persuasive version of desperation. But her vocal maturity is undercut by songs--originals this time--that are not objectionable, just forgettable. The melodies quote her old soul faves, but they're nowhere near as hooky, while love, the central theme of her lyrics, is predictably like jet lag, a board game or a car. Mind, Body & Soul proves that Stone can sing, but for now she remains a soul singer mostly by declaration. --By Josh Tyrangiel