Sideways (2004)
A friend of mine is aghast at the critical acclaim for Sideways, the latest film from Alexander Payne. She's upset because the movie is populated by characters who are self-absorbed, promiscuous, and willing to support each other in severe misbehavior.
I understand her objections, but I don't think Sideways is condoning misbehavior. I believe we're supposed to wince, and sometimes laugh, in dismay — and even in affection — as these characters, who do have their strengths, blunder their way into all kinds of trouble. And beneath all of the tomfoolery and trouble, these characters have beating hearts and redemptive qualities as well.
The story of Sideways follows two friends, Jack (Thomas Haden Church) and Miles (Paul Giamatti), on a road trip during the week before Jack's wedding. Miles wants to enjoy this last "guys' week out" by touring wineries and savoring life, even as he groans over his failure as a writer and his disillusionment with love. Jack, on the other hand, wants to spend the week getting laid with any woman who will give him the time of day.
These are not characters we admire for their morality. They're fools for whom patient viewers will develop some affection. We hope to see the Connoisseur and the Neanderthal learn something before it's too late. By the end of their reckless and problem-prone journey, one of them clearly hasn't learned a thing. The other, well . . . let's just say there's a glimmer of hope, but not much.
Coming after Election and About Schmidt, Sideways is the first of Payne's films in which we have the chance to really care for the characters, because he reins in his strident satire better than before. We laugh in dismay and sympathy more often than we're asked to laugh in contempt.
Still, it is true that Payne continues to express contempt for certain varieties of people, while showing an extravagant measure of patience and grace toward his snobbish, self-absorbed "heroes." (There is a scene late in the film that is its most outrageous, but also its most cruel.) As in About Schmidt, the characters that he sympathizes with get special treatment, while those who are more simple-minded are also portrayed as despicable beasts. This is a disappointing weakness in a film of surprisingly warm, human, and insightful moments.
One of the two remarkable strengths of the film is Paul Giamatti's performance. Giamatti just gets better and better with each role he plays. I loved him in last year's American Splendor, but he's even better here as Miles, who, like some fine wines, may reach his life's "peak" later than most others do.
And he's working with a fantastic supporting cast, including Virginia Madsen in her most radiant performance, playing the one woman in the world who speaks Miles' language.
Thomas Haden Church is also strong as the thick-headed Jack. Jack is as dangerous and destructive in his reckless ignorance as Jude Law's Closer character is in his malevolent selfishness. He's a despicable character portrayed in far too forgiving a light here. But while he's insanely promiscuous and heartless toward women (especially a winery worker memorably played by Sandra Oh), he does at least try to muster some understanding for his despondent friend.
The other virtue of the film is Payne's delicate use of wine as a metaphor throughout the script... a wonderful way of phrasing what he wants to say about human beings.
This is a film that offers some quiet insight. But you may find that, despite moments of sweetness and wisdom, the characters' misbehavior leaves a bitter aftertaste.
Sideways Should Earn Paul Giamatti Another Nomination
I finally caught up with Alexander Payne's latest film, Sideways, tonight and liked it much, much better than his last film, About Schmidt.Read more
House of Flying Daggers: Don't Miss It
Film critics are beginning to groan about this being an interesting but less-than-satisfying year for movies. I've got to agree. Usually, the Oscar season reveals a handful of movies that are worth revisiting time and time again. This year, there's been one disappointment after another, with only a scattered few titles worthy of multiple viewings. And most of those are still significantly flawed.
Usually, there's at least one film that has me shouting from the rooftops at the end of the year. This year, there are a handful I'm recommending again and again, but they're not the kind of films that make me revisit my all-time-favorites lists.
One of those "keepers" is Hero, which is definitely the most enthralling film of the year visually. Its politics are controversial and its characters are more symbolic than specific, and thus while it remains thrilling in repeated viewings, those thrills are primarily aesthetic and intellectual, not at all emotional.
So it was with great hope and anticipation that I approached House of Flying Daggers for a special advance screening at the Seattle Art Museum, hosted by Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News, and marking the release of the new volume of film reviews by the folks at the world-famous Scarecrow Video.
My review will appear at Christianity Today Movies soon. For now, all I can say is that the film delivers on the promise of Hero's spellbinding visuals, strikes a much more comical tone (for an hour, anyway), brings the martial arts scenes even deeper into the realm of dance, and features the strongest performance of Zhang Ziyi's career. (This time, she's not a whining, adolescent ninny like she was in Crouching Tiger and Hero.)
Like Hero, the film is also full of unexpected plot twists, some of which are thrilling, and others that ... well ... you'll see my review soon.
Suffice it to say that I prefer Hero, but despite its last-act flaws, House of Flying Daggers is still well worth seeing for its performances, the controlled chaos of its battles, and its phenomenal visual spectacle.
The best thing to know before you see it: Its Japanese title is The Lovers, which is a much, much better title. The title House of Flying Daggers misleads the audience about where their focus should be.
Which has more make-believe: Kinsey or Finding Neverland?
Here's this week's edition of Film Forum, with more than you need to know about this week's new releases.
Tom Hanks will star in The DaVinci Code
Looks like this decent piece of commercial fiction, full of historical innaccuracies and gross misrepresentations of Christ and Christian history, is going to be in the news for a long time to come.Read more
U2 in The New York Times
U2 wins raves in The New York Times today, and look great in the photo that accompanies the article. (That photo's sure a lot more interesting than the album cover, which is the most unremarkable in the band's history.)Read more
Pullman: American Christians are "mirror image" of Islamic extremists
I consistently get emails from readers of Phillip Pullman's The Golden Compass, angry that I would dare criticize such a fine author. They argue that I'm exaggerating the anti-Christianity theme of the books. They seem to think Pullman is a man of staggering intellectual powers.
Well, he does have an impressive imagination. And The Golden Compass showed he has a way with words.
But it also led to sequels that exposed a blatant agenda of ridiculing and slandering Christianity as lunacy and evil. (And then there is his insistence, in interviews, that C.S. Lewis was evil and The Chronicles of Narnia was racist, chauvenist propaganda.)
This week, I've found even more perspective from the man, this time related to the election...Read more
Mojo on U2's Atomic Bomb
from Mojo:
In defiance of the burdensome weight of their own history and the lifespan of the average rock band, U2 in 2004 are rock’s only remaining superpower.
Other long-lived bands continue to impress, but none come even close to matching U2’s astonishing global commercial dominance in the rock field.
Of the 12 tracks here (the UK and Japanese releases have an additional track, Fast Cars) over half are instant U2 classics and the remainder are never less than very good. ‘...Atomic Bomb’ is almost certain to go down as a landmark rock record for the noughties.
‘Miracle Drug’ will go down as another U2 classic: obliquely referencing what is known as the ‘Lazarus effect’ when apparently dying HIV-positive people are rescued with the use of new medication, the beautiful melody soars heavenwards without ever sounding trite.
When the music turns rather more personal, the rawness of Bono’s recent bereavment on the epic ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’ makes for a genuine Kleenex moment.
The lifeblood of ‘...Atomic Bomb’ is Bono’s unstinting belief that pop stars can make a difference and that they should use their power for something above and beyond mere personal reward.
From now on it’s hard to see what’s left for U2 other than to continue trying to compete with themselves in a rock world devoid of meaningful competition. No other group can command the enormous cross-gender, cross-generational and cross-ethnic support that U2 do. The last great rock band of the 20th century and the only truly great rock band of the 21st ? You bet.
Finding Neverland and Kinsey - Guest Review by J. Robert Parks
This guest review was contributed by J. Robert Parks.
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It would be hard to find two more culturally distinct figures than J.M. Barrie and Alfred Kinsey. One was a Victorian, English dandy, the other was a 20th-century, Midwestern pragmatist. One was a playwright, the other a scientist and professor. One lived in the realm of the magical, the other in the laboratory of cold, somewhat hard facts. And while both were writers, Barrie is most famous for the enduringly popular Peter Pan tale, while Kinsey is best known for the popular-in-its-time Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Though the two men might be entirely different, their respective bio-pics provide an illuminating comparison on what makes a good film.
Finding Neverland is set in London 1903. Another of Barrie's plays has opened disastrously, and his patron and impresario (played by Dustin Hoffman) is encouraging him (good naturedly) to find a hit. Barrie (Johnny Depp) is more interested in playing in the park, where he entertains children with his pantomime and by dancing with his dog. There, he meets the four Davies boys: George, Jack, Michael, and Peter. Peter is the most serious of them, not having gotten over the death of his father, but all of them, including their mother (played by the always enchanting Kate Winslet) are entranced by Barrie's evocation of a fantastic place.
One of the great things about Finding Neverland is how it moves from the realistic to the magical. One moment, everyone's playing Cowboys and Indians in the back yard, and the next moment director Marc Forster (Monster's Ball) seamlessly places us in a gorgeous, artificial set. Forster does the same thing as we see Barrie writing Peter Pan from his experiences with the Davies boys. In a spectacularly gorgeous scene, a bedtime moment where the boys are jumping on their beds turns into the genesis of Peter Pan flying through the air. The movie relies on the old chestnut that writers find all their material from their own lives, but Forster and writers Allan Knee and David Magee use the device so naturally that it rings true.
The writing in Finding Neverland is sharp and witty, as you'd expect from a movie based on a play. In one scene, as Peter Davies has finally come out of his shell and written his own work, he remarks, "It's a little bit of silliness," and Barrie quickly responds, "I should hope so." It helps enormously that Johnny Depp is the essence of charm. Imagine combining his Buster Keaton impersonation from Benny & Joon with his sashaying performance in Pirates of the Caribbean. And his tender scenes with Kate Winslet, who's always fine as an alluring free spirit, are marvelous. The boys are perfectly played, and Julie Christie has a small role as the mean, old mother. Only an unnecessary coda breaks the spell. It's as if Forster wanted to bring us back from Neverland, lest we never leave the theater.
I was anxious to leave the theater where Kinsey was playing. Not that the bio-pic is entirely wretched. Liam Neeson is strong as the famous sex researcher, and Laura Linney gives her usual fine performance as his long-suffering wife. And the supporting cast of Peter Sarsgaard, Chris O'Donnell, and Oliver Platt is up to the task. But Kinsey fails where Finding Neverland succeeds. It makes the mistake of trying to cover all of Kinsey's life, from his childhood where he (of course) had issues with his domineering father (played as a straw man by John Lithgow) to his romance and marriage to his wife Clara to his discovery that there was (gasp) more to sex than he first realized to his fame and acclaim to his persecution by the powers that be (including the pompous, racist, homophobic Tim Curry) to his final and teary-eyed vindication. That's a lot to cover in a two-hour movie, and so we glide along, hitting the high points and admiring Kinsey's cavalier approach but never getting at the essence of the man.
Kinsey does not shy away from the controversial aspects of the man's life--his testy relationship with his son, his researchers' uncomfortable experiences with his own theories, and his apparent coddling of a pedophile-but it presents them in ways (briefly and out of context) that manipulate us into ignoring those facts. Yes, he didn't get along with his son, but look at all these amazing things he did. True, his own "open" ideas on sexuality proved disastrous for his assistants, but look at the great things he did. Well, it does appear he used gross child sexual abuse as a research tool, but look at the marvelous things he did. It's like when Fox News brings out the token liberal and then claims to be fair and balanced. This is not a fair and balanced portrayal.
"So what?" you might ask. Finding Neverland certainly isn't revealing any of Barrie's warts. But Finding Neverland isn't trying to be a biographical portrait. It's much more interested in the Peter Pan myth and how the fantastic in art can inspire us to dreams in our own lives. Kinsey, on the other hand, is an historical document, one that's attempting to shape our understanding of a pivotal figure of the 20th-century. But director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) has an even broader agenda: to fire off a huge salvo in the culture wars by declaring Kinsey's work "life saving." Near the end of the film, after Neeson has enjoyed a Schindler's List moment by crying over the people he couldn't help, he meets an old lesbian, who declares (as if to the audience), "Things have gotten so much better since the publication of your book....You've saved my life, sir." Now we do like our propaganda to be subtle, don't we? As my friend Garth put it as we came out of the theater, "I feel like we should go watch Ang Lee's The Ice Storm," a movie that provides a more realistic assessment of Kinsey's work.
On the other hand, as I came out of Finding Neverland, I wanted to write my own play or take a walk by the lake or have a long conversation with a friend. It's a film that inspires you in the best ways. I heartily recommend it.
Finding Neverland, four stars; Kinsey, two stars
What the Wold Needs Now From Michael Moore and the Rest of Us
Hooray for David Poland for saying what so desperately needs to be said, over there at The Hot Button. I resonate with his words about divisive behavior on both sides of the political fence, about Michael Moore, and about a need for more respect from each side for the other.
I'm really sorry I missed this episode of the Bill Maher show now that I hear about THIS happening...
I have been in a bit of a death match with Michael Moore in this column, on the site and on the blog over the last five months. It has cost me dearly. I have been accused of being a right winger, a fascist and an obsessive. I see my role as that of a tennis pro, hitting volleys back over the net relentlessly - but make no mistake, I have heard the rage of many of my (and our, at MCN) valued readers.
I would argue that Moore lost perspective in his journey.
I would argue that his anger got the best of him in the rush to get Fahrenheit 9/11 completed and into theaters in time to make an impact. And I would argue that the embrace of his film, which still stands as a political finger wagging instead of a film of thought and insight as his other films have been, emboldened him to go further and further down the road of excess.
And I played my very best Ginger Rogers to that extremist positioning.
But even in trying to defend the middle, the dance made me a bit of an extremist too.
My favorite moment of post-election media was watching Alan Simpson, a very moderate and earthy Republican congressman who is now a civilian, tear Bill Maher a new a------ on Maher's HBO show last Friday night. Simpson unleashed the rage of the "red staters" in a flow of real and powerful ideas. When Maher made a passing joke about there only being two gays in Simpson's Wyoming, Simpson called him on his bullshit, in that word. He reminded Maher that the people of Wyoming, left, right and center, were disgusted by the murder of Matthew Sheppard. He reminded us all that Sheppard was a real person who suffered a real death and that people on every side of the political spectrum are still human, even if they lose perspective on the humanity of others far too often.
Andrew Sullivan continued that theme, taking a centrist position on a liberal-ly stacked panel (as usual), taking on the mythology of the "people voted on morality" myth that was created by an exit poll (are we trusting those again?) that had morality on top with 22% to 21% for Iraq and 20% for the economy as motives for voting. After a couple of days of bashing the "red states" on this, even the NY Times backed away, running three of five Op-Ed pieces last Saturday on why the poll was inaccurate and should not be used for political capital.
The tone on Maher's show changed radically. And it wasn't the rise of the right. It was a demand from some very smart and caring people for true civility. It was a call to remember that raging at and belittling others for seeing things differently than you and making wide-raging assumptions about who they are based on one slice of their actions is divisive and destructive.
Thing is, I believe in Michael Moore. In some ways, this very column emulates Michael Moore's work. It is the effort of the creative mind, struggling to find a way to communicate ideas in a way that is accessible, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. But the effort must be celebrated.
An image of Moore came to me from a different angle recently in a chat with someone in the industry (who will remain nameless since this person probably did not mean to put Moore on the spot or to become the center of a controversy by saying this to me), who told me that Moore had expressed some disappointment in himself for his Oscar acceptance speech, realizing in retrospect that he hit the wrong note with the aggression of that speech. The remark came so casually that I don't doubt it for a second. And how can Moore, always under fire, ever take a step back and publicly admit in the heat of battle that he had mis-stepped? Like Harvey Weinstein, who he teamed up with for Fahrenheit, Moore is the tank that must keep rolling along lest anyone see the points of vulnerability.
But it is time to get out of the tank… to take a good look at the world around us… and to reassess our targets. Michael. And me.
If Moore's new documentary about HMO malfeasance makes just $10 million, it will be a success by comparison to any other docs. And given the space and time he will, I expect, take on this one, it will probably match the quality of his other films, piss some off, be beloved by many, and be a lot less personal.
The public right wing of America went after Moore in much the same way that Moore went after Bush. We can do an autopsy someday, but it is time to move along. When I see Susan Sarandon still questioning the validity of this election (also on the Maher show), claiming voter fraud might have stolen the election for the Republicans, I am saddened. Would she have been questioning Kerry's victory had it been by one small state's electoral votes and a popular vote of less than 100,000? I doubt it. But the idea that questionable ethics are purely a Republican or Democratic thing is simply a denial of reality.