Art For Autumn

FALL PREVIEW: MOZART AND MORISSETTE, OPRAH AND TRAVOLTA, STEPHEN KING, ALICE WALKER--EVEN ELTON JOHN'S "AIDA.' HAPPY HARVEST.

THERE'S SOMETHING PRIMAL ABOUT IT. EVERY fall, book publishers, record companies, film studios and entertainment conglomerates start cranking out product like there's no tomorrow. It puts the deskbound critic back in touch with natural cycles--like the pastoral harvest time in Keats's "Autumn Ode," in which a personified Autumn and the sun conspire to "load and bless/ With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run." Our offices are stacked to the thatch-eves with bound galleys, advance CDs and press releases; this time of year, art proliferates as relentlessly as zucchinis. And no sooner does one crop die down than another starts coming on. As leaves begin to turn, you get the big books and more modest films (i.e., the ones that cost under $100 million). Along about November, the blockbuster movies have ripened. By Thanksgiving, you feel like the guy in Robert Frost's "After Apple-Picking"--"overtired/ Of the great harvest I myself desired."

What follows is neither an all-inclusive list nor a "best of" guide--we don't know what a lot of this new work's going to be like, either. It's simply our guesses as to what might interest people this fall--and, in a few cases, what might last for years to come. Here are shopping-mall movies and coterie films, probable best-selling novels and possible cult favorites, music by both multiplatinum pop stars and the merely deserving. Here's stuff we're looking forward to and stuff we're dreading (sorry, Marilyn), work people are going to be talking about and work they would be talking about if they'd ever heard of it. Things people will shell out for--if the market doesn't keep going south--and things they should. So have we covered ourselves enough? Should we quote more poetry? Or just get it on?

September

MOVIES

Rounders. Matt Damon, Edward Norton. Dir. John Dahl. Two poker hustlers on the make and on the run. Norton, who plays the sleazier one, should hit the jackpot.