Philadelphia Weekly

Male order: Josh Brolin (above) in W. and Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace are this season's leading men.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do Hollywood release schedules. The abrupt removal of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from Warner's fall slate sent studios scrambling and also left the rank residue of egg on the faces of folks at Entertainment Weekly, who apparently didn't get the memo from their parent company before running a Radcliffe-centric cover story in their fall preview issue. Without such a preordained blockbuster, this autumn is starting to look a heckuva lot more interesting.

First off, let's get to the bottom of Spike Lee's well-publicized, insane anti-Eastwood rant from a couple months ago. If you recall, Lee grabbed headlines by clucking his tongue at Eastwood's dueling Iwo Jima epics for not mentioning the contributions of African-American soldiers, ragging Flags of Our Fathers (which did, in fact, feature black GIs) and Letters From Iwo Jima (which didn't because it was about a Japanese platoon). What an amazing coincidence that Lee has his own WWII movie opening shortly.

Lee's Miracle at St. Anna tackles the efforts of our so-called Buffalo Soldiers in Tuscany. I'm pumped for anything Spike Lee has his name on, particularly after his outstanding 2006 one-two punch of Inside Man and When the Levees Broke. But I also think old Eastwood was onto something when he replied, "A guy like that should shut his face."

The kids told me to make sure to mention High School Musical 3: Senior Year. I have no idea what this is, except I vaguely remember seeing pictures of one of these starlets in her underwear on the Internet, followed by a lot of Disney-scripted apologies. In an age when most second sequels go direct to DVD, I guess there's something to be said for a series that inverts the paradigm. But whatever the case, I'm 33 fucking years old, I smoke too much and usually smell like booze. If I even tried to attend a screening of this thing I'd probably end up on some sort of government watch list.

More interesting is the fall movie most likely to get at least one of its participants assassinated. Larry Charles' Religulous teams the brilliant comedy guru and director of Borat with the insightful but often too-smarmy raconteur Bill Maher for a guided tour through the hypocrisies and absurdities of faith with a capital-F in our troubled modern age. Anyone who's watched more than a few minutes of Maher's indispensible HBO talk show knows exactly where all this is going to end up.

But the question mark here is whether Charles might be able to suppress his star's more unseemly tendencies toward sanctimony and get a productive discussion going. It doesn't look good. My esteemed PW colleague Matt Prigge caught an early peek and is decidedly not a fan, and he's one of the most godless heathens I know.

Since we can't get enough of the culture war, those rascally righties strike back with David Zucker's An American Carol, a Fox News-friendly retelling of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, starring Kevin P. Farley (Chris' little bro) as Michael Malone, a slovenly, morbidly obese, America-hating documentary filmmaker--hmm, I wonder who he's supposed to be?--visited by the ghosts of George Washington, George S. Patton and JFK, who have presumably been enlisted to teach important moral lessons about supply-side economics and government-sanctioned torture. Bill O'Reilly plays himself because who else could? (Larry Linville died in 2000.)

This independently financed production has become something of a cause celebre for victimized Hollywood conservatives, so supporting roles are filled by luminaries like Kelsey Grammer, Jon Voight and Dennis Hopper. The film's trailer plays as desperate and unfunny as any non-ideological Grammer vehicle, but expect the "liberal media" to bear the blame for this impending box office disaster.

If Michael Malone isn't cutting it for you and you want the real deal, Michael Moore also has a flick this fall, except you won't find it in theaters. His Slacker Uprising will be made available for free on the Internet, with the filmmaker magnanimously declaring, "This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans." What he's not telling you is that the film, a chronicle of Moore's 2004 college campus tour, was up until recently called Captain Mike Across America and failed to land a distributor after being critically pasted at last year's Toronto Film Festival.

In one of the kinder reviews, Variety's Joe Leydon claimed "this repetitious and self-indulgent hodgepodge comes across as a nostalgia-drenched vanity project, with far too much footage of various celebs at assorted gatherings intro-ing Moore as the greatest thing since sliced bread." That dang liberal media strikes again.

Of course, the biggest dog in this hunt is Oliver Stone's W., shot on the fly with one of those preposterously brief production schedules that brings back fond memories of Stone's early-1990s heyday, when a steady diet of righteous indignation and (rumored, ahem) suspicious substances sent the fiendish rebel knocking out another broadly unsubtle, epic-length, formally dazzling provocation roughly every nine months or so.

The early, freakishly convincing footage of star Josh Brolin wreaking havoc upon the English language is already enough to stoke hopes for this chronicle of "a life misunderestimated," and we still haven't caught more than stray glimpses of Richard Dreyfuss' Darth Cheney, Scott Glenn's Donald Rumsfeld or Toby Jones' Turd Blossom. In the Greatest Casting Ever Department, former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry plays former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.

And while we're talking about insane schedules, the breathlessly anticipated (at least by me) new James Bond flick benefitted most from that aforementioned Harry Potter move, so the perplexingly titled Quantum of Solace now has the luxury of a full eight weeks to complete postproduction tasks that take some filmmakers (like Martin Scorsese, for instance) more than a year. Good thing director Marc Forster, known for agonizingly literal-minded, Oscar-grubbing dreck like Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland will never be confused with Scorsese.

But the Bond Factory has become such a well-oiled machine over the past 40 years it's hard to imagine Forster mucking things up too much, particularly with Bourne-movie stunt god Dan Bradley now directing the action sequences, which will presumably comprise at least half the picture. The presence of art-house icon and winner of the Roman Polanski-lookalike contest Mathieu Amalric as the villain augers well, but mainly I'm just looking forward to seeing more of Daniel Craig's ruthless, stonecold rottweiler-in-a-tuxedo routine.