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Movie Outlook: 2008

by Kathryn Durfee
01/17/2008

Though many big-budget productions have been pushed back or tabeled for later release dates due to the writer's strike, 2008 still promises to be an entertaining year at the theater! Here are my picks, culled from those still slated for release this year.

Synecdoche, New York
Estimated Release Date: March 21
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson
Plot Outline: Hoffman plays a theatre director in a personal and professional rut (see the list of female actresses portraying the various women in his life). For his next play, he attempts to build his own version of New York in which he directs his cast in a piece of brutal realism and honesty. The title is a play on the city name "Schenectady." Synecdoche refers to a literary device in which a piece is used to describe the whole or vice versa.

Horton Hears a Who!
Estimated Release Date: March 14
Director: Jimmy Hayward, Steve Martino
Featuring the voice talent of: Jim Carrey, Steve Carrell, Dane Cook
Plot Outline: Based on Dr. Seuss's classic book by the same name, Horton is the latest project from the folks at Blue Sky Studio (Ice Age, Robots). The titular character is an elephant struggling to save Whoville, a colony of microscopic beings. His agreement to help the Whos brings him nothing but torment from his neighbors, but Horton maintains that the Whos exist and deserve to live. Blue Sky's previous projects have been nothing less than stellar, featuring photo-realistic rendering and endearing characters.

The Other Boleyn Girl
Estimated Release Date: February 29
Director: Justin Chadwick
Starring: Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana, Kristin Scott Thomas
Plot Outline: Based on the book by Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl tells the tale of two beautiful sisters, Anne and Mary Boleyn. They are driven by their family's ambition to compete for the love of the handsome King Henry VII. This looks to be a lavish story of intrigue, love, and deception during a defining period in European history. Chadwick has done only television work before this, but a great cast and a big budget will hopefully deliver a work of art that mirrors the success of Gregory's book.

Wanted
Estimated Release Date: June 27
Director: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Angelina Jolie
Plot Outline: McAvoy plays a young slacker who finds out his long lost father was an assassin. He is recruited into the organization, the Fraternity, when is father is murdered and is trained by a man named Sloan (Freeman) to take his father's place. Of course, there is more to this organization than meets the eye. Will he be a hero or an avenger? Wanted is based on Mark Millar's graphic novel series.

Iron Man
Estimate Release Date: May 2
Director: Jon Favreau
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges
Plot Outline: Iron Man is based on the Marvel Comic series of the same name. Robert Downey Jr. portrays Tony Stark, a billionaire playboy industrialist that makes weapons for the U.S. government. While testing one of his inventions in the field, Stark is captured and forced to make weapons for the enemy. But, why do this when you posses the ability to make a super crime-fighting suit? After he frees himself from his captors, Stark uses his suit back at home as the Armored Avenger Iron Man.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Expected Release: May 22
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf
Plot Outline: Indy's back! According to producer Frank Marshall, the fourth installment of the Jones series is set in 1957, placing it nineteen years since The Last Crusade and acknowledging the actual time between films. We find Indy teaching and living a quiet life. He is thrust back into adventure as he races against Soviet Union agents for the crystal skull. Spielberg I have faith in; hopefully George Lucas kept his hands to himself on this one.

The Happening
Estimated Release: June 13 (a Friday, of course)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo
Plot Outline: Supposedly Shyamalan's best script since The Sixth Sense (let's be honest, his past few have been a little dull), The Happening is a paranoid thriller surrounding a family on the run from a global environmental crisis. Apparently, our planet's plants unleash an airborne virus that causes people to commit suicide violently. As long as Adrien Brody doesn't show up in a yellow poncho with porcupine spikes.

WALL-E
Estimated Release: June 27
Director: Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo
Featuring the voices of: Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin
Plot Outline: The newest release from Pixar, WALL-E tells the story of a little robot in the year 2700. He's the last robot on earth, and his job is to clean up all the trash we've left behind. According to John Lasseter (the head honcho of Pixar), we humans trashed the planet to such an extent that all humans had to leave earth so that millions of these robots could clean it up. The project failed, but WALL-E survived and is cleaning the planet one brick of trash at a time. He falls in love with EVE, a robot sent to check on earth. It must be noted that WALL-E's best friend is a cockroach. If the folks at Pixar can make a cockroach cute, there's no limit to their talent.

The Dark Knight
Estimated Release: July 18
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman
Plot Outline: The only movie about Batman to not have Batman in the title, The Dark Knight marks the second in the series directed by Christopher Nolan. After the disappearance of the Scarecrow, Batman returns to fighting crime in Gotham. This film's bad guy? The Joker. What more needs to be said? Oh, how about some good news: Katie Holmes has been replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes.

James Bond 22
Estimated Release: November 7
Director: Marc Forster
Starring: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright
Plot Outline: Not much is known about the new Bond film; Bond 22 is merely a working title. This will be the first film in the series to be a direct sequel to the film that came before it (Casino Royale). When filming began, Variety claimed that the plot would be loosely based on a story by Ian Fleming that has Bond dispatching a drug ring flooding Britain with heroin, but it was later reported in The Hollywood Reporter that producer Michael G. Wilson had come up with an original idea for the film.

The Changeling
Estimated Release: November 7
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Michael Kelly, Jeffrey Donovan, Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich
Plot Outline: Clint Eastwood has been hitting them out of the park; his last two films Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby each brought home fistfuls of awards. Though not much has been released about his latest project, The Changeling is about the mother of a kidnapped son who prays for her son to come home, but when he does, the woman begins to suspect that he is not hers.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Estimated Release: November 21
Director: David Yates
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith
Plot Outline: Everyone who is going to see the next installment in the Harry Potter series already knows what happens in the story. It's Harry's 6th year at Hogwarts, and he uncovers an old book with an inscription reading "This book is the property of the Half-Blood Prince," leading to the discovery of more information about the past of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Estimated Release: November 26
Director: David Fincher (Zodiac)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton
Plot Outline: Based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Button is the bizarre story of Benjamin Button, a man who is born old and ages backwards. When he falls in love with 30-year-old Daisy, his unique situation puts a whole new spin on relationship issues. Fitzgerald claimed that the story was inspired by a Mark Twain's remark that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end.

Australia
Estimated Release: September 5
Directed by: Bax Luhrmann
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown
Plot Outline: A far cry from Moulin Rouge, Australia is set in, surprise, Australia, just before WWII. The film focuses on an English aristocrat (Kidman) who inherits a very large cattle station. Discovering a plot for the English to take her land, she and a stock-man (Jackman) decide to drive 2,000 head of cattle across the Outback only to face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had recently attacked Pearl Harbor.

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