It's beginning to look a lot like... Veteran's Day?!?

Pardon the Nixon-esque gaps between posts, but I have been working tirelessly to discover what exactly happened to the fall movie season that The Times and the Daily News so breathlessly previewed two months ago. Yesterday, both papers seemed to be extinguishing their hard-ons for autumn as a whole and instead plunking 2005's remaining releases into even more proscribed, hype-drunken perspectives.

As you most certainly remember, The Times won The Reeler's Fall Preview Sweepstakes with its exhaustive-yet-balanced look at the season's hotly anticipated films of all shapes and sizes. Profiles included everybody from Reese Witherspoon to King Kong--both highlights of films still yet to be released when the paper ran yesterday's Holiday Movies package. I mean, what day is this? Nov. 7? I cannot even buy egg nog yet, and Caryn James is hovering in her jammies at the top of stairs to see if Terrence Malick slides down the chimney with The New World?

And if you thought that was bad, do not even look at Jack Mathews' early-November Oscar gauge. Granted, this is nowhere near as egregious as the Los Angeles Times' blogger Tom O'Neil last week predicting an Oscar-night victory for King Kong, but he is from Los Angeles--he is obligated to say retarded shit. And while you might think that same caveat applies to a Daily News film writer, the paper's head is not as wedged in its ass as you might automatically presume; Mathews is a capable enough critic to come up with something a little more imaginative than ranking the Oscar potential of 10 films that, with a couple of exceptions, he has not even seen.

For fucking example:

1. Munich Steven Spielberg is racing to get his drama - about the hunt for the masterminds of the PLO raid on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Games - ready for release by the end of the year. If he succeeds and it's in the quality range of Schindler's List, it will be the front-runner.

2. Brokeback Mountain Ang Lee's adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story about a closeted love affair between two gay ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming may be too much for red-state audiences, but it gives the liberal-leaning Academy a great chance to stick its thumb in conservatives' eyes. ...

8. King Kong The odds are against fantasies, but director Peter Jackson has already beaten those odds with his Lord of the Rings films. If this remake of the 1933 classic turns out as well as those, count it in.

9. Syriana Normally, you wouldn't expect a political thriller to catch Oscar's eye. But if Stephen Gaghan's adaptation of disillusioned ex-CIA man Robert Baer's book about intrigue and corruption in the oil fields of the Middle East is seen as a referendum on U.S. policy in the region, it might break through.

That does it. Based on conversations I have had with insiders, I am going to go out on a limb and call Just Friends my Oscar favorite. If Ryan Reynolds can wear his fat suit believably, and if he can wow voters with the charm he flashed in Blade: Trinity and Waiting, and if Roger Kumble can capture the same youthful vigor he wielded with the Cruel Intentions films, and if Alanis Morrisette can follow her trenchant portrayal of God in Kevin Smith's last two films, and if Anna Faris can remember her lines, then hey--there is no stopping this winter sleeper from being a spring sweeper!

Ugh. Just kill me.