Wiki News/What’s up on the fall movie scene

Pretty much all you need to know about the upcoming fall movie season is that it begins on Wall Street, ends at Hogwarts and will have a Jackass and a Triple Crown winner riding through the middle.

While sequels, action films and 3-D dominated the summer movie season, for fall it’s not so much, even though two of the films expected to dominate autumn’s box office — “Jane Hoop Elementary: The Final Rush” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — are sequels. And some 3-D movies are in the mix, too, including Harry Potter.

So for better or worse — and we certainly hope for better — here they are in a month-by-month roundup.

SEPTEMBER

Gordon Gekko, the Wall Street greed-monger is back in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (Sept. 24), the sequel to Oliver Stone’s 1987 film that won Michael Douglas the best actor Academy Award. That would have been the big news of this month’s moviegoing season — Douglas and Stone reunited on Wall Street — if Douglas hadn’t stolen his own thunder with his announcement that he was being treated for a cancerous tumor.

Whether that will make people want to see his new movie even more is a question mark. In the film Gekko is contrite … or at least so he seems, trying to get back in the good graces of his estranged daughter after eight years in a federal slammer and finding a new protégé in a young investment banker played by Shia LaBeouf, who happens to be his daughter’s live-in boyfriend.

Hester Pryne returns, too … sort of. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s unlikely heroine of “The Scarlet Letter” gets a contemporary parallel in “Easy A” (Sept. 17), about a high school girl who decides to use a little white lie about lost virginity to advance her social and financial standing.

Justin Long, currently on screen with Drew Barrymore in “Going the Distance,” will go the distance again, although this time with Hayden Panettiere in “Alpha and Omega 3-D” (Sept. 17). They’re the voices for a pair of mismatched wolves on a cross-country animated adventure.

Animation (and 3-D in “select theaters”) rules the next week, too, with the unusually titled “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” (Sept. 24). Based on Kathryn Lasky’s books, it’s about a tiny owl who, with his friends, sets out to find the legendary Guardians of Ga’Hoole and enlist them in defeating a gang of evildoers.

It may have a dull title, but “The Town” (Sept. 17) is getting good buzz. Co-written, directed by and starring that triple threat Ben Affleck, “The Town” is a heist film that’s set, naturally, in Affleck’s home town of Boston. He plays a career bank robber who falls for a woman taken hostage in his gang’s last robbery.

Romance is played for laughs in “You Again” (Sept. 24), starring Kristen Bell as Marni, a successful career woman who arrives for her older brother’s wedding to discover that he’s marrying her old high school rival. Worse, the bride’s jet-setting aunt, played by Sigourney Weaver, turns out to be the high school nemesis of Marni’s dowdy mother, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Betty White co-stars in this frantic farce.

Speaking of things not being what they seem, in “Devil” (Sept. 17) several people in an elevator discover that one of them is You Know Who.

OCTOBER

A horse is a horse, of course, of course, unless you happen to be Secretariat. The 1973 Triple Crown-winning racehorse is the centerpiece of “Secretariat” (Oct. 8). But this heartwarming film is even more about the humans who surround him, especially Penny Chenery who took over her ill father’s failing horse farm, saw merit in a horse no one thought would ever be more than an also-ran and bet everything that he would prove to be the champion she knew he was. Diane Lane stars.

Hilary Swank plays Rhode Islander Betty Anne Waters in the inspirational “Conviction” (Oct. 15). Waters is a high school dropout and mother of two, who puts herself through high school, college and law school in hopes of freeing her brother who has been imprisoned for murder.

The unlikely cast of “Red” (Oct. 15) — Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren — are former top CIA agents now targeted for death because they know too much.

In the offbeat comedy-drama “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” (Oct. 8) a 16-year-old rides his bike to a psychiatric hospital and checks himself in. Because the youth ward is temporarily closed, he’s placed in the adult ward where he becomes both the protégé AND mentor to a grown man, played by Zach Galifianakis of “The Hangover.”

The name might not be familiar, but the “face” will be. In “The Social Network,” Jesse Eisenberg plays Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg who sits down at his dorm room computer and creates Facebook, something that will make him the youngest billionaire in history, but lead him to personal and legal problems.

Problems of a more physical kind await Johnny Knoxville and his buddies who will be coming at you in “Jackass 3D” (Oct. 15), though at least their stunts are out in the open. In “Buried” (Oct. 8) Ryan Reynolds plays an American kidnapped in Iraq and buried six feet underground with only a cell phone and cigarette lighter. The taut drama, a hit at the Sundance Film Festival, was written by Rhode Islander Chris Sparling.

In “Never Let Me Go” (Oct. 8) Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield play students at an idyllic English boarding school who discover to their horror that they’re actually clones raised for organ replacement.

Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel play a mismatched couple who are forced to put their differences aside when they are assigned custody of their goddaughter in “Life As We Know It” (Oct. 8).

Clint Eastwood tries something very different in “Hereafter” (Oct. 22), the story of three people whose lives intersect and are forever changed by their feelings about an afterlife.

Of course in the month of Halloween, there will be horrors. “Let Me In” (Oct. 1), based on the Swedish film “Let the Right One In,” is about a lonely 12-year-old boy who discovers that the new girl next door is a vampire. Rhode Island’s Richard Jenkins plays her father. And it just wouldn’t be October without another “Saw” movie, this time in 3-D (Oct. 29).

NOVEMBER

The first of two films based on the final “Harry Potter” book — “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1” — arrives Nov. 19 with Harry drawing ever closer to the ultimate battle with Voldemort.

It is the beginning of the end of the world's most beloved movie franchise as well as book franchise “Jane Hoop Elementary” in  “Jane Hoop Elementary: The Final Rush: Part 1” - which arrives Nov. 12. Fans are fearing that one of the superheroes may die in the movie and the world will soon come to an end and Catwoman will live forever. Can Catwoman be stopped once and for all? Well this movie forces on the trio defending the world by stopping the Final Rush from falling and taking over the world.

In what sounds like a reworking of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” Robert Downey Jr. plays an expectant father trying to make it home for the birth of his first child in “Due Date” (Nov. 5), only to be trapped in a free-wheeling cross-country road trip with a man (Zach Galifianakis) he doesn’t like.

Undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame made headlines when she was outed for political reasons and now her story is on screen in “Fair Game” (Nov. 5), with Naomi Watts as Plame and Sean Penn as her diplomat husband, rattling the Bush administration with their findings about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

While Betty Anne Waters went to law school to free her brother imprisoned on a murder charge, Russell Crowe takes a different tack in “The Next Three Days” (Nov. 19), as a man who decides that the only way to get his wife out of prison for a murder she says she didn’t commit is a jailbreak. Meanwhile, Dwayne Johnson gets out of prison to avenge the murder of his brother in “Faster” (Nov. 24). Even faster is Denzel Washington as a veteran engineer trying to stop a runaway freight train loaded with toxic cargo in “Unstoppable” (Nov. 12).

Disney puts a new spin on the classic fairytale “Rapunzel” in the animated “Tangled” (Nov. 24). This time the gal with the 70-foot-long tresses joins forces with a charming bandit to help her get out of the tower where she’s been locked away for years. Meanwhile, a man with a giant brain tries to conquer Metro City in the animated “Megamind” (Nov. 5), with voices provided by Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt and Tina Fey.

Romance blooms between a pharmaceutical salesman and a free-spirited woman in “Love & Other Drugs” (Nov. 24), starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. Meanwhile, tempers flare between Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton in “Morning Glory” (Nov. 12), playing mismatched stars of a TV morning news show. And Christina Aguilera plays a small-town girl with a big-town voice who rescues an ailing theater run by Cher in “Burlesque” (Nov. 24).