HO, HO, HO LOOKING FOR GREAT HOLIDAY FILMS? WELL, THE JOKE MAY BE ON YOU.

Byline: Bob Strauss and Glenn Whipp Film Writers

Thanksgiving will soon be upon us, but whether moviegoers will actually be able to mark the occasion with gratitude remains to be seen.

This is supposed to be the time of year when studios hustle out their Oscar contenders, the kind of serious, intelligent movies that adults embrace after an endless summer of brainless fare. Instead, we have a new Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick (``The 6th Day'') that regurgitates ``Total Recall'' and a marijuana movie, ``Dude, Where's My Car,'' that, like, totally recalls the glory days of Cheech and Chong.

Even the would-be prestige films come with their share of problems. The Cuban missile movie ``13 Days'' must overcome Kevin Costner's stab at a Boston accent. The Billy Bob Thornton western ``All the Pretty Horses'' has bounced around two studios (Miramax and Columbia) and countless release dates. The Coen brothers' movie is a musical, the Mel Gibson film is a comedy, and Tom Hanks' acting in ``Castaway'' may be lost in the thicket of his ZZ Top-like beard.

Still, there is hope, namely in the form of outstanding independent efforts like ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' ``Shadow of the Vampire'' and ``Before Night Falls.'' But you'll have to look hard to find them this year; with a little luck, they'll be playing at a theater near you sometime in 2001.

With regard to this year's schedule, remember that even at this late date, nothing is locked in. Some movies will fall out, and a couple might even drop in. That's what happened with ``Dude, Where's My Car?'' and, gee, if that movie's sexy alien jumpsuit-clad women don't just scream Christmas, then, to quote Garry Shandling, ``what planet are you from?''

Happy holidays!

Nov. 17

Boesma and Lena: Danny Glover and Angela Bassett star in the film version of Athol Fugard's play about a rootless couple haunted by apartheid. (Kino)

Bounce: Ben Affleck is a carefree ad agency exec who gives up his seat on a plane that subsequently crashes. Introduced to guilt, he seeks out his dead substitute's widow - and since she's Gwyneth Paltrow, salving his conscience is going to be a lot more complicated than he expected. Written and directed by ``The Opposite of Sex's'' Don Roos. (Miramax)

Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas: Ron Howard brings Whoville to the big screen with Jim Carrey stepping into the Grinch's pointy shoes. (Universal)

Rugrats in Paris - The Movie: Chuckie, Angelica, Tommy and the rest of the gang go to the City of Lights. And you wonder why the French hate Americans. (Paramount)

The 6th Day: Arnold Schwarzenegger gets cloned. He'll be back, and back, and back ... (Columbia)

Sound and Fury: Family members debate whether a 6-year-old deaf girl should get a hearing aid. (Artistic License)

Taboo: Samurai recruits discover gay attraction. (New Yorker)

What's Cooking?: It's multicultural Thanksgiving time as African-American, Latino, Vietnamese and Jewish families get together to cook up a big feast. Stars Joan Chen, Julianna Margulies, Mercedes Ruehl, Kyra Sedgwick and Alfre Woodard. (Lions Gate)

Nov. 22

Calle 54: Fernando Trueba pays tribute to Latin jazz in a documentary that has received rave reviews. (Miramax)

102 Dalmatians: They're back, they've brought one more, and, like the Rugrats, they're romping through Paris. Glenn Close reprises Cruella De Vil and Gerard Depardieu joins la chien chase. (Walt Disney Pictures)

Quills: Adapted from the award-winning play and directed by the iconoclastic Philip Kaufman (``The Right Stuff,'' ``Henry and June''), ``Quills'' stars Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade and Joaquin Phoenix, Kate Winslet and Michael Caine as asylum staff members who keep the prince of perversity imprisoned - or is it really the other way around? (Fox Searchlight)

Unbreakable: Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's follow-up to his box-office phenom ``The Sixth Sense'' also stars Bruce Willis, this time as the sole survivor of a horrendous train wreck. Samuel L. Jackson is the mysterious stranger who then enters his life. (Touchstone)

The Weekend: Friends gather at country house on the anniversary of the death of man who was related to them all by either blood or love. With Deborah Kara Unger, Jared Harris and Gena Rowlands. (Strand)

Nov. 24

George Washington: Kids in rural Southern town struggle to balance their own ambitions and relationships against a tragic lie. (Cowboy)

Dec. 1

Boy's Life 3: The third film in the series about the trials and tribulations of being gay. (Strand)

A Hard Day's Night: The long-promised reissue of the Beatles' first feature film. We'll believe it when we see it. (Miramax)

Kippur: Filmmaker Amos Gitai (``Kadosh'') remembers his experiences in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (Kino)

Yi Yi (A One and Two): Taiwan's Edward Yang directs this story of love among several generations. Yang won the director's prize at Cannes for the film. (Winstar)

Dec. 8

Dungeons and Dragons: Fantasy-adventure inspired by the geek board game. (New Line)

Lies: South Korean soft porn about an 18-year-old virgin and a 38-year- old married man who like their sex rough. (Cowboy)

Proof of Life: Russell Crowe is a hostage negotiator who falls in love with the wife (Meg Ryan) of a kidnap victim he's trying to get released. Stop making snide, funnny-how-life-follows-art comments right now! (Warner Bros.)

Vertical Limit: Mountain climber Chris O'Donnell has to rescue his sister's trapped expedition on the craggy Himalayan peak K-2. Martin Campbell (``Mask of Zorro,'' ``GoldenEye'') directs. (Columbia)

Dec. 15

Chocolat: Another one of those food-and-desire lip-smackers, this time with Juliette Binoche doing the confecting in an uptight '50s French town. Judi Dench, Johnny Depp, Alfred Molina, Robert Carlyle and Lena Olin also dig in. The director is Lasse Hallstrom, who helmed the similarly edible ``Cider House Rules'' last time out. (Miramax)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A martial arts movie with a ``Sense and Sensibility'' sensibility, this Ang Lee film follows a battle-weary master (Chow Yun-Fat) who gets back into the game when a young woman (the amazing Zhang Ziyi) steals a renowned sword that once belonged to him. With choreography by the ``Matrix's'' Yuen Wo Ping. (Sony Pictures Classics)

Diary of a Chambermaid: Surrealist social critic Luis Bunuel's 1964 French version of the venerable sex farce turns it into a critique of prewar fascism. Jeanne Moreau looked great at the time. (Rialto Pictures)

Dude, Where's My Car: Two stoners (not Cheech and Chong) wake up after a heavy night of partying and ask the titular question. (20th Century Fox)

The Emperor's New Groove: Disney's latest animated epic is a knockabout comedy set in a mythical, Inca-like mountain kingdom. David Spade provides the voice of the spoiled emperor-turned-llama (yes, llama). John Goodman speaks for his reluctant peasant helper. Songs by Sting. (Walt Disney Pictures)

From the Edge of the City: Greek film about a young Russian male prostitute trying to make a go of it in Greece. (Picture This!)

What Women Want: A fluke accident gives a shallow man (Mel Gibson) the ability to read women's minds. Let's just say he learns a lesson or two. Helen Hunt, Marisa Tomei and Lauren Holly are among his test studies. (Paramount)

Dec. 19

Finding Forrester: Sean Connery is a reclusive novelist who inexplicably takes on a young athlete as a writing protege. Uplifting, life-of-the-mind lessons no doubt are learned in this drama directed by ``Good Will Hunting's'' Gus Van Sant. (Columbia)

Dec. 20

Malena: ``Cinema Paradiso'' director Giuseppe Tornatore tells the story of a young Sicilian boy and the lessons he learns from a beautiful young war widow during World War II. (Miramax)

13 Days: The 1962 Cuban missile crisis from a White House insider's perspective. Kevin Costner plays the JFK aide who was apparently instrumental in preventing nuclear Armageddon. Costner reteams with ``No Way Out'' director Roger Donaldson. (New Line)

Dec. 22

Before Night Falls: Filmmaker Julian Schnabel (``Basquiat'') essays the life of exiled Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. (Fine Line)

Cast Away: It was Tom Hanks' idea to film this ``Survivor''ish story - in which the superstar appears to slowly waste away on an uninhabited desert isle - in two sections over 16 months. He didn't know at the time that some chubby naked guy would become as big a celebrity as he is in the interim. The film includes Helen Hunt and reteams Hanks with his ``Forrest Gump'' director, Robert Zemeckis. (20th Century Fox)

The Family Man: Materialistic Wall Street trader (Nicolas Cage) wakes up one day to the wife he never married and the two kids he never had. And guess what? He likes it; he really, really likes it. Brett Ratner (``Rush Hour'') directs. (Universal)

The Gift: Sam Raimi (``For Love of the Game'') directs this Southern gothic thriller about a widowed mother (Cate Blanchett) who can psychically see her neighbors' secrets. And boy, are there a lot of them! With Keanu Reeves, Katie Holmes, Greg Kinnear and Hilary Swank in her first post-Oscar role. (Paramount Classics)

The House of Mirth: Socialite (Gillian Anderson) gets shunned when others resent her beauty and intelligence in this adaptation of the Edith Wharton classic. (Sony Pictures Classics)

Miss Congeniality: Aggressive FBI agent Sandra Bullock goes undercover in a bathing suit to thwart a terrorist threat against a big beauty pageant. Benjamin Bratt, Michael Caine, William Shatner and Candice Bergen co-star in the comedy. (Warner Bros.)

Nowhere to Hide: Souped-up South Korean actioner about an eccentric detective's search for an elusive murderer. (Lions Gate)

O Brother, Where Art Thou?: The Coen brothers' latest is a musical remake of Depression-era chain gang movies, with a title borrowed from a Preston Sturges joke and based on Homer's ``The Odyssey.'' Geez, don't these guys ever do anything different? Featuring George Clooney and Coen mainstays John Turturro, John Goodman and Holly Hunter. (Touchstone)

State and Main: David Mamet writes and directs this caustic tale of a New England town that welcomes a Hollywood movie crew only to find that things don't turn out quite as expected. With Alec Baldwin, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sarah Jessica Parker. (Fine Line)

Wes Craven's Dracula 2000: Like it says. Except, much like that Tim Burton Nightmare thing, ``Scream''-meister Craven isn't directing. We presume Dracula, or Buffy, or some vampire-related thing is still involved. (Dimension Films)

Dec. 25

All the Pretty Horses: Bily Bob Thornton's long-on-the-trail adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's best-selling western novel is reportedly so lengthy that neither of the studios that produced know quite how to handle it. For the umpteenth time, Matt Damon and Henry Thomas are the young Texans who encounter life lessons and trouble on a trip to Mexico. Penelope Cruz also stars. (Miramax)

An Everlasting Piece: Two barbers - a Catholic and a Protestant - try to corner the toupee market in Northern Ireland. Barry Levinson directs the hair-raising tale. (DreamWorks)

Vatel: A debt-ridden French nobleman tries to reverse his fortunes with one last, desperate bash in honor of Louis XIV. The lavish do is overseen by supersteward Vatel (Gerard Depardieu), who distractingly falls in love with the Sun King's favorite mistress (Uma Thurman). Roland Joffe, whose movies (``The Killing Fields,'' ``The Mission'') aren't exactly known for their party spirit, directed. ``Shakespeare in Love'' writer Tom Stoppard, however, did do a script polish. (Miramax)

Dec. 27

Traffic: Director Steven Soderbergh (``Erin Brockovich'') looks at the international world of drug trafficking through a series of inter-related stories. Newlyweds Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones head the cast. (USA)

Dec. 29

The Claim: Gold Rush prospector trades wife and child for significant claim. Wes Bentley, Milla Jovovich and Nastassja Kinski try to mine some pathos from this loose adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel ``The Mayor of Casterbridge.'' (United Artists)

Shadow of the Vampire: Creepy, funny, audacious tale that looks at the making of F.W. Murnau's vampire classic, ``Nosferatu,'' and wonders: What if Max Schreck, the unknown Murnau hired to play the blood-sucking count, really was a vampire? Talk about Method acting! With John Malkovich as Murnau and a brilliant Willem Dafoe as Schreck. (Lions Gate)

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Geoffrey Rush is the Marquis de Sade in ``Quills,'' an adaptation of the award-winning play. (Nov. 22)

(2 -- color) Tom Hanks inhabits a deserted isle in ``Cast Away'' (Dec. 22)

(3 -- color) Tim Blake Nelson, left, George Clooney and John Turturro co-star in the Coen brothers' ``O Brother, Where Art Thou?'' (Dec. 22)

(4) The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is relived in ``13 Days'' (Dec. 20)