Double takes

The treacly heart-warmer

Thomas Kinkade’s Home for Christmas (Nov 30)
The premise Young Thomas Kinkade (Jared Padalecki) finds inspiration for his famous painting The Christmas Cottage, and turns his “cottage industry” into an art empire.
The talent Padalecki, of Gilmore Girls and Supernatural, tries to prove his leading-man chops. Marcia Gay Harden and Peter O’Toole bring the project a little cred.
Strengths “Painter of light” Kinkade gives this film built-in name recognition.
Reasons to worry Well, great galloping kee-rist, it’s a film based on a (bad) painting.

The Perfect Holiday (Dec 12)
The premise A little girl asks a department-store Santa to bring her mom a new man for Christmas.
The talent Morris Chestnut (Breakin’ All the Rules, Ladder 49) has demonstrated an easy charm in a number of films, and Gabrielle Union (Daddy’s Little Girls) has been eminently watchable in bad films.
Strengths Hooray for  a holiday film that doesn’t feature a pale, white Christmas.
Reasons to worry The premise sounds like yet another riff on Miracle on 34th Street, which has been done to death. Director Lance Rivera’s only other credit is the unfunny The Cookout (2004).

The Perfect Holiday

Winner The Perfect Holiday. Despite our fondness for Padalecki, Home for Christmas has sappy written all over it. The Perfect Holiday has all the signs of a little irreverence mixed in with the Christmas sentiment.

The musician biopic

I’m Not There (Wed 21)
The premise Todd Haynes offers a meditation on the life of Bob Dylan with six actors playing different aspects and eras of Dylan’s persona.
The talent Haynes (Far from Heaven, Safe) has assembled an awesome cast to play Dylan, including Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett, who’s been getting raves for her turn as mid-’60s Bob.
Strengths Haynes knows how to mess around with genres to make great art, and Dylan is an ideal prism through which to look at the idea of celebrity in the 20th century.
Reasons to worry Haynes’s collage approach could be great art, but it could also be a rambling, unstructured mess. The concept may overshadow the art; audiences may get distracted by the pointless question of who did the best Dylan.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Dec 21)
The premise Jake Kasdan (The TV Set) and Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) send up the musical biopic genre with the story of a fictional music star who adjusts his persona to the changing times.
The talent John C. Reilly takes the lead, and gets support from Paul Rudd as John Lennon and Jason Schwartzman as Ringo Starr. Rocker Jack White plays Elvis Presley.
Strengths Apatow’s scripts are uniformly terrific, and Reilly is a seriously great comic actor.
Reasons to worry The re-creation of the various eras and musical genres Cox moves through could become an exercise in the obvious: a send-up of folk-rock, a ’60s psychedelic phase complete with LSD trip, ’70s = mood rings, etc.

Walk Hard

Winner Walk Hard. After a season of serious Oscar bait, we’re ready for some silliness.