Sleeping beauties?

More fine film is on the way

American Beauty and Three Kings have stirred hopes of an independent-film revival, and though it might be premature to expect a renaissance the equal of the late '60s and early '70s, upcoming movies should at least make the Oscar race interesting. I haven't seen such potential candidates as Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, David Fincher's Fight Club, Alan Parker's Angela's Ashes, Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil. But here are three I can vouch for (four if you include Steven Soderbergh's The Limey).

The Straight Story. David Lynch's movie might be from Disney and G-rated, but it's still weird and disturbing. Based on a true story, this is the tale of 73-year-old Iowa farmer Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), who heads to Wisconsin to visit his stricken brother, making the 300-mile journey on a John Deere lawnmower. It sounds like a Norman Rockwell freak show; in fact it's a stark and moving fable of mortality and redemption.

Being John Malkovich. So The Straight Story isn't original enough for you? (Believe it or not, a second movie based on the same premise -- Abilene, starring Ernest Borgnine -- is looking for a distributor.) How about John Cusack as a puppeteer married to pet-store worker Cameron Diaz who takes a job in a filing office where a folder falls behind a cabinet uncovering a portal that leads into John Malkovich's mind? MTV director Spike Jonze (he plays the redneck soldier in Three Kings) matches his bizarre flights of fancy with subtlety, pathos, and terrible haircuts in one of cinema's most frightening explorations of identity, gender, and the New Jersey Turnpike.

Snow Falling on Cedars. In films like Three Kings, The Limey, and this Scott Hick adaptation of the David Guterson bestseller, ambitious filmmakers are beginning to transform mainstream material into layered works mimicking the rhythms of time and consciousness. Set in the Pacific Northwest after WW2, this is ostensibly the tale of a Japanese-American on trial for murder and the one-armed vet (Ethan Hawke) who's in love with the accused's wife. But as one of the most amazing Dear John letters in the history of cinema demonstrates, it's also about the fate of the individual in the darkness of history. Slow, challenging -- and vastly rewarding.

-- P.K.

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