Month: December 2004

The Grapes of Wretchedness.

Lost in a wine-dark sea, Miles (Paul Giamatti) is withering on the vine. His wife left him two years ago and he’s still in the drunk-dialing throes of despair. His novelist aspirations are dying an ugly death in ever-smaller publishing houses. Both oenophile and alcoholic, he drinks too much, eats too much, surveys the world in furtive glances, and cringes with self-loathing every time he looks in the mirror. He’s lugubrious, pedantic, bristling with negativity to the core. In sum, Miles is almost completely beaten down by life…so of course he attracts the attention of a smart, beautiful woman (Virginia Madsen) who shares all his important interests and remains fond of him, even and despite his awful behavior.

If you can get past this one critical and wholly improbable plot point (and I did, eventually), Alexander Payne’s Sideways is a trip to California wine country well worth taking. The movie basically plays like an approaching-middle-age version of About Schmidt (right down to the unfortunate nude scene), but this seemed a more well-rounded and generous film than its predecessor. (I thought Schmidt derived too many laughs from turning Dylan McDermott’s character into a buffoon. That being said, I also think Sideways flinches from reality in the closing moments in a way About Schmidt didn’t.) And, while I’m about as far from a wine connoisseur as you can get (whites with chicken and fish, right?), Sideways also succeeds in making the subculture of oenophilia both accessible and reasonably engaging, a few ham-handed “wine-is-life” soliloquies notwithstanding.

Special nods go to all the actors involved here, and particularly Paul Giamatti for making it so easy to empathize with the easily unlikable Miles…I can’t think of many other folks who could have pulled it off so well (In fact, looking back I’d say Nicholas Cage pulled it off less well in Adaptation.) I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Thomas Haden Church, as Miles’ low-key, horny doofus of a best friend, and Virginia Madsen, as the previously noted underwritten muse of second chances, get some action come award time (which may end up meaning sour grapes for the Closer crowd.)

Samurai Bat.

The holiday trailer season continues today, with the first look at Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and, if you’re fast, this early copy of the spiffy new Batman Begins trailer. (If that doesn’t work, there are a number of screencaps here.)

A Storm is Coming.

“For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base. But we can’t afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers.” While kicking Terry McAuliffe out the DNC door, MoveOn.org lays claim to the Democratic party. “We bought it, we own it, we’re going to take it back.”

Don’t Eat the Chocolate.

Would you let your kids near this man? The all-new, all-creepy trailer for Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory just popped up on the grid, and it seems Johnny Depp is playing it more Ed Wood and Hunter Thompson than he is Gene Wilder. I like it.

Once Bitten, Thrice Shy.


While it was pretty clear going in that the Blade trilogy had already peaked in the first five minutes of the first film, when Wesley Snipes busts up Traci Lords’ vampire rave to New Order’s infectious Pump Panel remix of “Confusion,” I still had high hopes that Blade: Trinity would live up to the “quality popcorn flick” standard of the first two. Alas, the Daywalker’s third installment is a bit of a mess. It’s got a few reasonably numbing wire-fu action sequences, sure, but it’s missing that certain je-ne-sais-quoi that made the first two outings such fun. The result is…well, kinda flat.

Surprisingly, given that this is the third Blade written by first-time director David Goyer (who’s also scribed next summer’s Batman Begins), the biggest problem here is the writing. For one, there’s holes in the plot you could drive a Batmobile through. (If the vampires can capture Blade so easily, what’d they need Dracula for? How did Drake know when the good guys would hit the psychiatrists’ office?) Moreover, entire setpieces are lifted straight out of other, better films. (For example, the aforementioned psychiatrist, stolen right out of The Terminator, or the bloodbank and (ugh) baby scenes, both jacked from the original Blade.) And worst of all is the dialogue. Ryan Reynold’s character, Hannibal King, not only has to spit out a slew of stale-on-arrival wisecracks in every scene, he also appears to have learned English from reading AICN talkbacks.

In fact, that may be the most annoying thing about Blade: Trinity — Like no movie since Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, it appears conceived, written, and marketed to appeal solely to Harry Knowles’ disgruntled army of foul-mouthed, oversexed, ADD-afflicted teenagers, right down to the Patton Oswalt cameo and the gratuitous Jessica Biel shower scene. For what it’s worth, though, Biel and Reynolds are troopers about it all, while Blade himself just seems bored at this point. (By the way, I’m a happy member of iPod Nation, but Biel’s iPodatry here was, frankly, embarrassing.) Casting Parker Posey as evil vamp Danica Talos probably seemed like a good idea (and a nod to the NYC uberyuppie milieu of Stephen “Deacon Frost” Dorff in the first film)…but she’s got nothing to work with, except some terrible repartee with Reynolds. And I don’t know what it is about Vampire Big Bads, but the guy who plays Eurotrash Dracula has got to be the worst actor I’ve seen in a major movie since Shane Brolly in Underworld. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put it (birddogged by my bro), he had “all the dark charisma and burning threat of a baked potato.” In sum, Blades 1 & 2 are both surprisingly enjoyable, but this time they miffed it.

Heaven & Hell.

In today’s trailer bin, Colin Farrell moves from Alexander the Great to John Smith in Terrence Malick’s very Malickian The New World, while Keanu Reeves Neos up Hellblazer in the full trailer for Constantine.

Their lyin’ eyes.

Ooh, Porter Goss must be furious. The CIA station chief in Baghdad “has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon.” According to the classifed cable obtained by the NYT, “the security situation was likely to get worse, including more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there were marked improvements soon on the part of the Iraqi government, in terms of its ability to assert authority and to build the economy.“

Elsewhere, Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) said upon his return from Iraq, “We really need cold, hard facts and honesty. The situation is tough over there…If with 100,000-plus troops over there, we can’t control that 10-mile road [between Baghdad and GWB Airport], it shows what’s happening politically. The people are not as friendly as they were a year ago towards Americans.” Hmm…you’d think a GOP Senator like Chafee, to say nothing of our nation’s intelligence agency, would know better than to aid the terrorists by airing the real facts about what’s going on over there. Can’t they smell the victory?

In Search of M.

“String theory, the Italian physicist Dr. Daniele Amati once said, was a piece of 21st-century physics that had fallen by accident into the 20th century. And, so the joke went, would require 22nd-century mathematics to solve.” The New York Times surveys string theory at 20…fascinating stuff, but I still don’t get it.