Hollywood, Show Us Your Chops

And, wasn’t that a dreary summer?

“Me, Myself & Irene” was funny, if you think making light of schizophrenics and shooting injured cows is funny. And, what was the point of “Hollow Man”--that being invisible is great because you can sexually harass women undetected? And, didn’t Academy Award winners Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie stretch their talents in “Gone in 60 Seconds”?

If it wasn’t for the spectacle of ancient Rome re-created by computer in “Gladiator,” or those cackling hens plotting escape in “Chicken Run,” or wondering how the heck Tom Cruise did his own stunts spinning on motorcycles and dangling from a cliff in “M:I-2,” would the summer of 2000 have been memorable at all?

But take heart, movie aficionados. In Hollywood, autumn has arrived.

Just as the leaves are weaving a vivid tapestry in reds, yellows and golds across this fair land, so too are movies about to change their tone with the season--well, some of them anyway.

Sandwiched between summer and the Thanksgiving-Christmas holidays, the fall is a quirky, tantalizing period for Hollywood, when filmmakers embark on personal projects, stars take on riskier roles and character drives the story.

Stories like “Girlfight,” a “Rocky”-like profile of a female prizefighter raised in the Brooklyn projects. Think studios would release that in the summer?

Or “Billy Elliot,” the story of a British boy with a passion for ballet growing up in a gritty coal-mining town.

Or “You Can Count on Me,” a film about a single mother in an upstate New York town who receives an unexpected visit from her rebellious lost soul of a brother.

Or “Dancer in the Dark,” the story of a Czech immigrant single mother working in a factory in rural America who is losing her eyesight but not her passion for music. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

“In the summer, there is so much pressure to be a blockbuster, while at the holidays, there is so much pressure to win Academy Awards,” observed director Bruce Paltrow. “But pictures in the fall tend to be more personal in nature. They’re not cookie-cutter films.”

Adds writer-director Nora Ephron, autumn is a time when movies “get a little bit more adult and a little bit more risky.”

Paltrow and Ephron have reason to savor this autumn season. Both have films coming out this fall.

Paltrow directed his daughter, Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow, in “Duets.” The road-trip movie, made on a shoestring $12.5-million budget, revolves around six people whose lives converge in the raucous world of--are you ready for this?--Middle America’s karaoke bars.

“It’s a world absent of cynicism,” Paltrow says of karaoke. People “are not waiting to jeer at you or call you stupid--they are ready to applaud those with the courage to stand up and sing.”

And, yes, that’s Gwyneth herself singing tunes like “Bette Davis Eyes.”

“If this movie doesn’t fall on its ass,” the director says, “then it’s going to be great.”

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Ephron, meanwhile, has just directed a “twisted comedy” called “Lucky Numbers.” The film stars John Travolta as a local TV weatherman in Harrisburg, Pa., who schemes with a sociopathic lottery ball girl (Lisa Kudrow) to rig the state lottery. Or, as Ephron puts it: “It’s something between ‘Fargo’ and ‘Ruthless People.’

“The character Lisa plays draws pingpong balls out of a machine and dreams of being Vanna White, but Vanna White is so far beyond any level of success you could ever imagine for her,” Ephron adds. “Travolta is a guy with a very clear notion of how important he is to the people of Harrisburg, even though no one outside the 75-mile radius of that television signal has ever heard of him. He has his own table at Denny’s.”

See what we mean about the fall? Even the hype dispensed by directors is better.

This fall, attendance could be further affected by the Olympic Games in Australia and the election race as it heats up.

With that in mind, here are some other movies that should make the fall an intriguing season:

September

One of the more thought-provoking movies will be “Remember the Titans,” which stars Denzel Washington as football coach Herman Boone, who in 1971 took over a newly integrated football team in what was then the racially divided city of Alexandria, Va.

The movie was written by an African American screenwriter, Gregory Allen Howard, who left Los Angeles four years ago because he wanted to get away from the racial strife that he felt was eating away at the city’s fabric. Moving to Alexandria, Howard began asking how that city managed to peacefully integrate.

“Believe it or not,” Howard recalled, “they told me a high school football team peacefully integrated this city. The city was torn asunder because of race riots and fears of integration--then their football team started winning.”

Another film inspired by real-life events is Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous,” a personal coming-of-age odyssey set in the early 1970s about a 15-year-old boy who lands an assignment to write about a rock band and its free-spirited groupies traveling by bus across America. Oscar-winner Frances McDormand (“Fargo”) is a treat as the worried mother, and baby boomers will groove on the period music.

Then there’s “Best in Show,” a howling satire from Christopher Guest on the coiffed world of canine contestants and their obsessed owners.

Also on tap is “Beautiful,” Sally Field’s feature debut as a director, the story of a determined beauty pageant contestant played by Minnie Driver. But if it’s action you want, not memories, check out “Bait,” starring Jamie Foxx as an ex-con hooked up with a tracking device that Treasury agents hope will lead them to a cache of stolen gold.

See what we mean about the fall? It’s so eclectic.

October

This month presents some questions, like:

* Why is Robert De Niro making so many comedies? One day, he’s a Mafia boss with psychiatric problems in “Analyze This.” The next, he’s Fearless Leader in “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.” Now, he’s the intimidating father in “Meet the Parents,” in which Ben Stiller plays a groom-to-be who finds one disaster follows another when he tries to win permission to marry his girlfriend. (Trust us, seeing the backyard catch fire is worth the ticket price.)

* Can Sylvester Stallone still hack it at the box office? He returns to the screen in “Get Carter”--a remake of the British cult film--about a Vegas mobster who comes home to Seattle to bury his brother and begins to believe that his brother’s death in a car crash may not have been an accident.

* Is Spike Lee ready for prime time? The director takes a satirical look at race and ratings in the early days of television in his new film “Bamboozled.”

And, now that Paltrow has stopped singing “Bette Davis Eyes,” moviegoers can catch her and on-again, off-again squeeze Ben Affleck in “Bounce.” Affleck plays a slick ad salesman who escapes death when he gives a man his plane ticket, then falls in love with the widow when he goes to check up on her.

Winona Ryder, who always looks a little scared anyway, plays a young woman who becomes aware of a satanic conspiracy in the thriller “Lost Souls.” An interesting footnote is that one of its producers is Meg Ryan.

Speaking of the supernatural, Haley Joel Osment, who received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor as the boy who saw ghosts in last year’s blockbuster “The Sixth Sense,” is back this fall with Oscar winners Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt in a very different kind of film, “Pay It Forward.”

The same weekend also brings Harold Ramis’ “Bedazzled,” a Faustian comedy--based on the 1967 British film--about a man (Brendan Fraser) dealing with a drop-dead gorgeous devil (Elizabeth Hurley).

As the presidential race heats up, a film about presidential politics called “The Contender” seems aptly timed. In it, a sitting vice president dies and the president (Jeff Bridges) taps a senator (Joan Allen) to be the first woman to hold that office. In the ensuing controversy over her confirmation, secrets from her past are revealed that threaten her personal life and her political future.

Then around Halloween, the sequel to last year’s hit “The Blair Witch Project” arrives. In “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” we follow five young people who set up camp in the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Md., near the foundation of a house that belonged to an old hermit who was hanged for murdering seven children. When the campers awake, they have no memory of having gone to sleep and five hours stolen from their lives.

And it’s always a treat to see what Robert Altman has cooked up. This time, Richard Gere stars in “Dr. T & the Women,” about a Dallas gynecologist with an overload of women in his professional and personal lives. The film features Laura Dern, Farrah Fawcett, Tara Reid, Kate Hudson and Helen Hunt.

Early November

Circle Nov. 3 on your calendar. That’s the weekend when three big-budget, star-driven films go head to head to head at the local megaplex: “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Legend of Bagger Vance” and “Red Planet.”

Sony Pictures Entertainment is counting on music video director McG to turn high-kicking Angels Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu into female action stars, but whether this takeoff on the 1970s TV show can light up the box office remains to be seen.

“The Legend of Bagger Vance” pairs two of Hollywood’s hot young stars--Matt Damon and Will Smith--under the direction of Robert Redford. Damon plays a World War I hero who returns to Savannah, Ga., and tries to get his stroke back with the help of a mysterious caddie played by Smith. (See what Tiger Woods has wrought?)

And will moviegoers flock to see Val Kilmer in the sci-fi adventure “Red Planet,” given the fact that they already saw a Martian adventure earlier this year in “Mission to Mars”?

Fittingly, the fall season ends with an Adam Sandler comedy called “Little Nicky.”

The studio releasing this picture describes the film this way: “Adam Sandler is Little Nicky, a shy and awkward guy with a penchant for heavy-metal music and two bullies for older brothers. And another thing . . . Little Nicky is the son of the devil and lives in hell. When Dad (Harvey Keitel) decides not to make his brothers the heir to his evil throne, they go to New York, hell-bent on creating their own hell on Earth.”

We can’t wait for Christmas.