HEFT: Sean Penn is the Huey Long–like Southern demagogue in Steven Zaillian’s remake of All the King’s Men. |
That’s back when war was a noble profession, kind of like football as portrayed in FACING THE GIANTS (September 29). A high-school coach has God on his side, and he uses the sport to redeem souls. This is the religious film that caused a big stink with the MPAA when it got rated PG-13. James Blackwell, Bailey Cave, Shannen Fields, and Alex Kendrick star; Kendrick also directs.Medicine can also be a noble profession, but maybe not when your patient is an insane dictator who’s butchered a million people. Kevin Macdonald’s adaptation of the Giles Foden novel THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (September 29) tells the fictitious story of a Scottish doctor taken in by Idi Amin during his reign of terror in the ’70s. If it’s true to the novel, it should be a seductive tour of the void between innocence and responsibility, charisma and madness. Forest Whitaker, James MacAvoy, and Gillian Anderson star.
Also taking place in the ’70s but closer to home are the events in the documentary THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON (September 29). David Leaf and John Scheinfeld (Who Is Harry Nilsson?) examine the FBI file on the former Beatle, who seems to have been investigated for his political views. All I can say is, thank goodness they don’t do things like that anymore.
October
Martin Scorsese, they say, has returned to familiar ground in THE DEPARTED (October 6), which though set in Boston and based on the hit Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs was shot mostly in New York, and its brutally funny sensibility sounds like a throwback to Mean Streets as a Boston cop infiltrates the Southie mob while a Southie mobster infiltrates the police. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson playing a character who seems a lot like Whitey Bulger.
You might feel you’re returning to familiar territory yourself with INFAMOUS (October 13), another film about Truman Capote and In Cold Blood. Those who have seen it insist that the experience is just as good the second time around and that the little known Toby Jones might make you forget Philip Seymour Hoffman in last year’s Capote. The rest of the cast is well known indeed: Sandra Bullock, Peter Bogdanovich, Jeff Daniels, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Isabella Rossellini. Douglas McGrath (Nicholas Nickleby) directs.
A jolt of up-to-the-minute reality intrudes with John Bonito’s THE MARINE (October 13), in which the title warrior, sent back from Iraq against his will, finds the war isn’t over yet when his wife is kidnapped. I suspect this may be more a rehash of Rambo and Death Wish than a sensitive look at the needs of returning veterans and the toll of post-traumatic-stress disorder. John Cena, Kelly Carlson, and Robert Patrick star.
Meanwhile, as the death toll grows in the Middle East, the party continues here in America. John Cameron Mitchell of Hedwig and the Angry Inch gives us every inch and more in SHORTBUS (October 13), his controversial NC-17 film about the sex lives of various New Yorkers. Raphael Barker, Lindsay Beamish, and Justin Bond star.
