RANDOM MUSINGS - Tying up some loose ends before closing out the Movie Club on 'Solaris'... * First, reader Lisa Hannon wrote in to ask, "While you're doing lists [referring to our discussion about filmmakers whose movies we will always go see], who are your favorite female directors, if any?" So I thought about it...and I thought...and I thought...and I'll be damned if I could come up with a single one. There are a number of great female editors out there, the most notable of all being Scorsese's longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker, but men still dominate the directorial landscape. In fact, as this Salon article from April tells us, 96 percent of films are directed by men. In Hollywood who do we have -- Amy Heckerling? Nora 'You've Got Mail' Ephron? Penny Marshall? Thanks, but no thanks. There are quite a few Kathryn Bigelow fans out there ('Point Break', 'Strange Days'), despite the disastrous 'K-19: The Widowmaker', but I'm not really one of them and I can safely say her name alone wouldn't entice me to see a movie. On the foreign/arthouse/independent front there's Agnes Varda, Mary Harron ('American Psycho'), Jane Campion, and younger filmmakers like the Sprecher sisters, whose recent 'Thirteen Conversations About One Thing' I enjoyed while Sam and joeycotton in the Feedback Forum found it mostly annoying. But I'm either not familiar enough with the work of these filmmakers or they haven't made enough movies to warrant instant credibility. Who am I forgetting? Sam, Eric...do you have any favorite female directors? If a reader out there would like to enlighten me on the merits of a particular female director, please send me an email at: cinemascoped@attbi.com. * On Greg's Previews over at Yahoo, his poll question is: "Which of these December releases do you think has the best chance of being this year's big Oscar winner?" I point this out not because I care to even hazard a guess at the answer, but because seeing all of the choices in a row made me realize just how great December is going to be for movies. Spike Lee's '25th Hour', Alexander Payne's 'About Schmidt', Spike Jonze's 'Adaptation', Denzel Washington's directing debut 'Antwone Fisher', Spielberg's 'Catch Me If You Can', 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind', Scorsese's long-awaited 'Gangs Of New York', 'The Hours' with an unrecognizable Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, and a little movie called 'The Two Towers.' The only movie on the list I'm not excited to see is 'Chicago', the movie version of the famous Bob Fosse musical starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellwegger. I can't really explain why; I just know I probably won't see it until it's been out for many weeks, if at all. * Speaking of the '25th Hour', CS reader and former 'Burn Hollywood Burn' co-host Joe Horaney sent in this link to the trailer for Spike Lee's latest about the last twenty four hours a guy (Edward Norton) spends before he goes to prison for seven years for pushing heroin. David Benioff wrote the screenplay based on his own novel of the same name...well, almost. Lee dropped the "The" to make it just '25th Hour'. Joe read the book and had this reaction to the trailer: "Looks great. Definitely captured the tone of the novel and the cast is awesome. Edward Norton wouldn't have been my choice for the main character because of how he is described in the book, but he can pull it off. Will be one of Spike's better movies I'm betting." Joe went on to say that there character in the books is supposed to be "'black Irish,' dark and really good looking, the kind of guy that walks into a room and everyone notices. Ed Norton played a good sleaze in 'Rounders' for a reason; you could buy him as that. The guy described in the book sounded more like a Billy Crudup."

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