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Cinemania is our religion here

By Ed Goldman

With Labor Day come and gone, it’s time to think about Autumn, even though it won’t even come (much less be gone) for three more weeks. But you know the script: After Labor Day is when the white shoes get put back in the closet, stores start dusting off the Halloween garbage they didn’t move last year and Hollywood wants you back. 

Here’s a Fall preview of the film roster (all suggested by actual scheduled releases). 

LORD OF THE ONION RINGS. Frodo, Bilbao and Sam suffer a snack attack after successfully fighting off the Ents—those talking trees who were considerably more menacing than the ones in the film version of “The Wizard of Oz.” (I think their most ominous line was, “Are you hinting my apples aren’t what they ought to be?”). 

Anyway, in this latest installment, one of the J.R.R. Tolkien trio—which sounds like a jazz combo you’d hire to play at your daughter’s or granddaughter’s Confirmation—is seeking a particular gold ring. It’s the wedding band that slipped off the finger of a woman after she played an especially vigorous set of pickleball. Her finger shrunk from perspiration and the band fell into the batter she was using to make onion rings in her stint as a celebrity chef (at a fundraiser to benefit owners of McDonald’s franchises who’ve been stung by California’s new minimum-wage law).

But before Frodo, Bilbao or Sam can find it, the woman’s husband is arrested for having a battered wife. Rated PG for zany misunderstandings.

TRANSFORMERS: WHAT, AGAIN? The charmless robots who can turn themselves into railroad trestles, flight-control towers or espresso makers at will are back in a new adventure as incomprehensible as their previous outings. 

Advance tickets—which can also morph into tarot cards, wedding invitations and Handi Wipes—went on sale at the start of this paragraph and have already sold out. A new block of standby tickets is scheduled to be printed before the film concludes its theatrical run in a few minutes. Rated R for scenes of mechanical cruelty.

BLACK WIDOW VS. THE CEMETERY DIRECTOR. Scarlett Johansson finally plays a woman who speaks in her actual Manhattan accent, has zero superpowers and is mourning a deceased husband whose name was Harold Black (which makes her the Black Wi—oh, you’re way ahead of me). Watch her go mano-a-mano with the upselling head of an upscale graveyard in upstate New York who tries to convince her that Harold will sleep for eternity so much better in a coffin made entirely of Reynolds Aluminum. 

“I can assure you that as the centuries roll by Mr. Black will not experience any signs of spoilage,” the cemetery director assures her. Then, adding the personal twist favored by auto dealers and insurance salespeople, he adds, “Why, this is what my very wife is wrapped up in!” Scarlett seems impressed but when she asks when the director’s wife passed away, all is lost. “‘Passed on?’” he says. “Who said anything about her passing on? Eeew, that is like, so gross.” Rated R for the possibility that zombies will suddenly appear and use rough language.