Sergio's Fall Movie Countdown--#10

UNIVERSAL REMOTE

There are about 20+ movies opening between now and the end of the year that I want to see in theaters. This does not includes a handful now playing (A History of Violence, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, North Country, Shopgirl) that I haven't caught yet. So for the next ten days, I'm going to count down of the ten best and/or most interesting movies coming out this fall.

10. (tie) King Kong/Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
directed by Peter Jackson and Mike Newell, respectively
opening 12/14 and 11/18, respectively

Okay, so I've already started off with a bit of a cheat by having a tie. (I can assure you it is the only one.) These two films sort of lump together in my mind. They will undoubtably be the two biggest grossers of the season, if not the year. Both are effect-laden extravaganzas of the type that often produce better trailers than films. (See here and here.) I personally hate CG movies because they look so fake. Give me Yoda as a Muppet or the Alien as a tall guy in a suit any day. But the times are what they are and these are the movies they are making.

I don't mean to sound down on either of these films. (Films? They're not films. They're movies!) I think they will both be a good time and a great excuse to eat popcorn. On paper, King Kong seems like the surer thing. Peter Jackson is coming off the Lord of the Rings trilogy and really knows how to tell these kinds of stories. But I'm very concerned with the big ape being CG. I didn't really get all that excited about Gollum in Rings (because he looked fake! Am I the only one that sees this?), but he was only a supporting character. Kong is the main attraction and he's nothing but ones and zeros created on some hard drive in New Zealand. Eventually someone is going to make the perfect CG movies. Maybe a truly gifted filmmaker like Jackson with a $200+ million dollar budget will be the guy who can pull it off. Bladder warning: this one is said to be three hours long.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is based on everyone's favorite book in the series that features Harry competing in the Tri-Wizard tournament. (You may remember it was the first really long one that had third graders doubling over across the country.) Warner Brothers considered splitting the movie into two parts before director Newell convinced them otherwise. So they had to cut a lot, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. (The reason the first two, directed by hackteur Chris Columbus, were less than stellar partly because they were too faithful to the books.) The last Potter film was terrific, raising my expectations. And this one is rated PG-13, raising them even more. And to top it off, Ralph Fiennes plays the human incarnation of he-who-must-not-be-named. So there you have it, the two biggest bluckbusters of the season just barely cracked my top ten.

TOMORROW: An Oscar-winning director goes low budget and plays with dolls.