Hollywood's offbeat treasures

MARQUEE

It's no secret that for at least 10 months in the year, movie-hall audiences in India don't get to see the most innovative American films "" the relatively low-key treasures (made mostly by independent producers rather than the big studios) that play at festivals like Sundance and Telluride.

What we do get are assembly-line thrillers, comedies and dramas that are usually just as formulaic as mainstream Bollywood used to be until a few years ago.

But this tryst with lack of imagination halts, briefly, around January-February when Oscar-nomination publicity makes even low-profile Hollywood movies seem lucrative to Mr Bijli and the other multiplex tsars. Here are some promising films we can look forward to in the next couple of months:

No Country for Old Men: For over 20 years now, the Coen Brothers "" Joel and Ethan ""have been among the most original filmmakers in the US.

Their best movies (Fargo and Barton Fink among them) are triumphs of intelligent, offbeat (and often hilarious) screenwriting, and even their rare failures make for more stimulating viewing than most big-studio successes.

The Coens' latest, No Country for Old Men, a cat-and-mouse drama involving a professional hitman and a sheriff, can be expected to contain all their trademarks: black comedy, whimsical characters and an unflinching, unsentimental look at the dark corners of human nature.

I'm Not There: Indian audiences know Cate Blanchett best as Shekhar Kapur's Queen Elizabeth, but Blanchett's most rewarding performances of late have been as 20th-century icons: she won the best supporting actress Oscar for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, and she's one of the favourites in that category again this year.

Unless the Academy decides to nominate her as best supporting actor ""because this time around she plays Bob Dylan! Director Todd Haynes' audacious conceit of having six different actors portraying various phases in Dylan's life is a comment on the futility of pigeonholing a great artist's life and career.

After all, the real Dylan was famous for not allowing himself to be pinned down by other people's expectations: he disappointed his huge fan base in folk music by going electric in 1965, and later turned to Gospel music in the face of howling protests.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: We're looking forward to Johnny Depp as the eponymous lead in Mira Nair's Shantaram (which has now been indefinitely shelved), but this versatile actor has other aces up his sleeve.

In his fifth film with the brilliantly eccentric director Tim Burton (their previous collaborations include Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow), Depp plays "" hold on to your hairpieces ""a homicidal barber.

This macabre musical, based on a 19th-century British urban legend, also stars Helena Bonham Carter as Todd's partner-in-crime, who bakes his victims' corpses into pies. Not your standard holiday fare, but then Burton is the man who has given us films like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Redacted: It has to be seen whether the normally conservative Motion Picture Academy gives Brian DePalma's controversial Redacted the miss at Oscar-nomination time.

DePalma, a true visual artist with an incomparable sense of shot composition, is one of the best American directors of the past three decades, but his work has always had a cult rather than mainstream following.

He began his career as a political filmmaker in the 1960s, and he returns to those roots with Redacted, a film based on the murder of an Iraqi family by US soldiers in 2006. There's plenty of graphic content here, so even if it does make it to our multiplexes, this is one film you're better off watching on pirated DVD; the big-screen censors won't be kind to it.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)