Philadelphia Weekly

It's getting to be that time of year again, when vast amounts of magazine space and precious Internet bandwidth are consumed by laughably early Oscar picks and predictions. Each year the holiday season at the movies becomes less about entertaining audiences and more about the big studios jockeying for position, hiring expert overpriced campaign consultants, toying with the press and basically doing whatever it takes to win one of those little gold statues. I guess these sorts of shenanigans are fun if you're into horse races--somewhat less so if you actually care about the movies.

In any case, the L.A. Times' Tom O'Neil has boldly announced that the race is already over, and that next February's ceremony will be swept by Tim Burton's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Dec. 21). (Of course O'Neil hasn't actually seen the film yet. That would be silly.) Johnny Depp stars as the singing serial killer, and Burton's wife Helena Bonham Carter plays the sidekick who helpfully bakes his victims' remains into meat-pies. Sure, this sounds like wild stuff, and is anybody not psyched to watch Sacha Baron Cohen crooning as Depp's nemesis? But let us also take a deep breath for a moment, bow our heads and remember some previous holiday seasons' equally buzzed-about, can't-miss Broadway musical adaptations, like The Phantom of the Opera, The Producers and Rent.

Of course any actor in town will tell you the easiest way to get an Oscar is by playing an easily recognizable historical figure. (Over just the past couple years we've seen trophies handed out to Ray Charles, Truman Capote, Katharine Hepburn, Queen Elizabeth II, June Carter Cash and Idi Amin.) But one wonders if any of the regular rules will apply to Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (Nov. 21), which stars Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin and Cate Blanchett ... all as Bob Dylan. As far as gambits go, this one's gutsy as hell, and maybe has a bit of cracked brilliance to it. Considering how the troubadour has built his career on shedding personas as easily as most folks change their clothes, perhaps there was no way a single performer could've handled the job alone. (Although the freakishly convincing leaked footage of Blanchett suggests she'd be up to the task.) In any case, here's hoping this one works out a bit better than Haynes' similarly audacious, hopelessly botched David Bowie pseudo-biography Velvet Goldmine.

Famous musician biopics have become so ubiquitous this time of year, they've finally earned their own parody. Co-written by this year's comedy savior Judd Apatow, Jake Kasdan's Walk Hard (Dec. 21) stars John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox, a fictional country superstar bearing a resemblance to Johnny Cash that we must only assume was entirely unintentional. Lord knows this genre has grown stale enough to have earned a good old-fashioned ribbing, but one can't help worry just a bit about a film that casts Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Jason Schwartzman and Justin Long as the Beatles. Jack White as Elvis, however, is an inspired call. Thankfully, Patrick Duffy plays himself. Because who else could?

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the press recently when Francis Ford Coppola blasted old pals Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino for being apathetic. Okay, so he's right about De Niro, but such sentiments are still hilarious coming from a guy who's been sitting on his ass making wine for the last 10 years, and whose last picture was a so-so John Grisham adaptation. (Hey, remember those?) We'll finally see where Francis gets such nerve when he unveils Youth Without Youth (Jan. 11). Coppola's allegedly "experimental," digitally shot, independently financed saga stars Tim Roth as an elderly academic magically growing young again, which, come to think of it, sounds disturbingly like the inverse of the filmmaker's nigh- unwatchable 1996 opus Jack, which starred Robin Williams as a little boy rapidly aging into an old man.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Apathetic might be too strong a word, but I do seem to recall Nicholson cracking up reporters recently by pointing out that he's playing a terminal cancer patient in The Bucket List (Dec. 25), yet didn't bother to lose so much as a pound. Directed by Rob Reiner, who hasn't helmed a halfway-decent movie since Bush Sr. was in office, the flick stars Jack and Morgan Freeman as hospital roommates who sneak away from their deathbeds to go ride motorcycles, skydive and engage in all the other extreme sports exercises that often come so easily to elderly folks suffering the end stages of a horrific disease.

Looking infinitely more promising is P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood (Dec. 26), a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, starring Daniel Day-Lewis (who appears to be channeling John Huston) as a ruthless, cut-throat prospector and Paul Dano as the fanatical preacher standing in his way. Personally, I consider the rare occasions that the prickly and reclusive Day-Lewis deigns to appear on-screen cause for celebration; this is only his third performance this century. The fiendishly talented Anderson has been MIA since 2002's Punch-Drunk Love, but it's tough not to guess what might've convinced him the time was right for a tale of bloody oil profits and religious extremism.

But the biggest question mark might be Charlie Wilson's War (Dec. 25). This stranger-than-fiction true story stars Tom Hanks as the cheerfully debauched Texas congressman "Good Time Charlie" who, back in the 1980s, helped covertly arm the Afghan Mujahideen in order to battle the spread of communism. (And it's a good thing that one never came back to bite us in the ass, isn't it?) Strangest thing is the picture's a comedy, with Julia Roberts as a former Houston beauty queen and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a shady CIA agent, under the direction of vet Mike Nichols. This could so go either way, but it's worrisome to note the screenplay's penned by Aaron Sorkin, who recently demonstrated with TV's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip that he has absolutely no sense of humor.