For a movie from the director of About Schmidt and Election, and with the awards, nominations and critical acclaim it got, I expected a lot more of Sideways than I saw on the screen. If memory serves, some of those who agreed with me pointed to the Paul Giammatti character as someone with whom the critics would seriously self-identify and therefore rate more highly than, say, you or I would. TS1 agreed with me on this.

Very basic plot: Miles (Giammatti) is a failed novelist with a failed marriage but somehow still best friends with college roommate and modestly successful actor Jack (Thomas Haden Church) and the two head to Santa Barbara County wine country for a weeklong bachelors’ jaunt before Jack–who wants one last fling–marries a young hottie. Miles does know his wines, though, and Jack, well, Jack knows how to liven up a party. They meet and hookup with hot chicks (Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh) but Miles has trouble getting past his despression and Jack’s sleaze.

The four main characters all do reasonably good jobs though other than (perhaps?) Oh none seem to reach too far from their natural personality. The scenery is stunning but not surprising; compare it to Kenneth Brannaugh’s 1993 version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and I think you’ll understand how a director can make more from the same general type of setting.

My core complaint is with director/co-writer Alexander Payne. All through the film I was waiting for the sly humor of Schmidt and Election and for some serious escalation of the dramatic tension but the best he managed was a faked car crash and a confrontation between Miles and his ex-wife after Jack’s wedding ceremony. Apparently the latter was intended as the last straw in Miles’ character journey but it just didn’t work for me.

barely recommended and definitely see the other two Payne movies first.

File this one under nice, literate and honest. Not great, not a revelation. Zack Braff, more widely known as the star of NBC’s Scrubs sitcom, wrote and directed Garden State and got some festival awards and critical plaudits. To some degree this seems to have been a reaction to the idea of a network sitcom star writing and directing a low budget indie film since the movie is, like I said, nice but not great.

Braff plays Andrew Largeman, an actor successful enough to be semi-recognizable enough in his hometown but not to avoid waiting tables while between roles. His medicine cabinet is filled with vials of prescription pills and his bedroom is completely white, down to the pillowcases. At the open, Largeman gets a call, which he screens, that turns out to be his father (Ian Holm looking distinctly un-Bilboish) notifying him that his paraplegic mother drowned in the bathtub and died. He gets on a plane to New Jersey, giving us the title.

In the course of four days he meets up with high school pals and acquaintances–they’re all 26 years old now–who give him comps for how life is working out. A reasonably typical assortment and everyone calls him Large; from watching I didn’t realize this was his name, I figured since his character is Jewish it was something more like Larchman or Lachman. Large complains of odd headaches and so his father, also his psychiatrist and the prescriber of all those pills, sends him to a neurologist (Ron Rifkin) where he meets Natalie Portman. Portman is not coiffed with strange braid patterns.

The remainder/bulk of the film covers the next few days during which Large bonds with Portman, comes to terms with Holm and realizes, and this is why I made the comment about not being a great revelation, that life is to be lived. Not wasted on pot (his best friend from back in the day), pills (as his dad would have it) or fighting a constant battle to understand “Why?” (his mom). Interesting, decent acting from the key players, but all in all more of a promise of Braff’s potential.

Braff did a blog though after he finished all the post-premiere and DVD publicity chores he stopped posting; which is okay, the film’s essentially done and the blog is still out on the web for reading. The posts attracted fairly heavy quantity of comments, I must say.

recommended

PBS series American Masters broadcast the Bob Dylan documentary last week but I finally got to watch the second part last night. Zimmy is a musician who’s always been in the background for most people my age and younger, making new music occasionally, sending out some strange messages at times, but this film goes back to his origins and the days when he was very much in the spotlight’s glare.

Covering his life only until a horrific motorcycle accident in 1966, No Direction Home is a deeply flawed production though it offers a view of Dylan that’s informative and enlightening. PBS included after the second half a brief interview with Martin Scorsese (by the nearly useless Charlie Rose) during which the acclaimed director explained that all the interview segments we’d seen of Dylan were conducted not by Scorsese or a journalist but by one of Dylan’s associates. This explained the complete lack of any really probing questions.

In fact, if I understood correctly, all of the material in the movie was assembled prior to Scorsese’s involvement and his major contribution was to “find the narrative” and oversee an editor piecing together the footage. For just this part, I’d say he did a good job and overall I feel, other than a few slow spots in the second hour, the documentary is worth watching for any fan of American culture. I know that the man has never been interested in answering those questions, not seeing them as interesting or perhaps even possible, but I feel the lack of real insight from Dylan himself was a missed opportunity.

One of the strong points is that though interviews with contemporaries (Liam Clancy and Pete Seeger particularly), performance footage and some surviving radio interviews and press conferences we get a very good understanding of Dylan’s early development and his effect on the folk music scene. Most of the film, after all, takes place before he became a pop star; that really didn’t happen until about 1965, after his “shocking” electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival. 40 years on, there’s still controversy about the crowd’s reaction but the footage used shows that they did boo. In fact footage from the subsequent tour of Britain shows that audiences there were also quite upset with the change.

To some extent, after watching, I can understand it. Up until these concerts the show was Bob Dylan onstage with his guitar, harmoica and voice. Period. Hearing, for example, his original versions of “Blowing in the Wind” and “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” are revelations. No band behind him, I can see the simple power of his poetry; a lot of things about Bruce Springsteen are more understandable now.

No Direction Home is a very good film. I don’t think you need to be a big fan of his music to enjoy it. Scorsese could’ve used his scalpel a little better and reduced the run time by 20-30 minutes, and certainly the circumstances of the Dylan interviews should have been made clear. Nonetheless, worth watching.

recommended

Fox (the TV network) has a habit of putting on very cool shows and cancelling them just as I get hooked; Firefly, John Doe, Greg the Bunny are three examples that come to mind. Just who the heck was John Doe going to turn out to be anyway?! I try and resist but it’s like any other addiction. So when I first read that Universal had picked up the rights to Firefly and was giving Joss Whedon pretty free reign to make a big screen version, well, you know what happened.

Fortunately for me, Serenity delivers. With one significant exception, which I prefer not to detail so as to not spoil things for you, the movie is packed with the smarts and humor of the television show and adds the visual impact only possible on the much larger canvas. Box Office Mojo and IMDB list the production budget at a mere $40 million and if that’s accurate then the crew stretched every penny of it. The imagery is stylish, taking cues from the series but not being limited by it, though there’s much less of the Old West flavor.

One of the challenges Whedon had was to make a movie that didn’t expect familiarity with the series but still rewarded it. One of the trickier aspects of this was conveying the basics of the ‘Verse, the fictional future’s backstory, and the problem with River Tamme (that forms the core of the movie) without getting bogged down in them and the device used was brilliant because the opening scene took care of both while opening the plot at the same time.

I was also glad to find out that Whedon didn’t feel trapped by the need to keep absolute continuity with the series, something that absolutely became a heavy stone for the Star Trek franchise. Two quick examples where Serenity breaks it: Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) is not a crewmember but rather a good friend and provider of refuge for the ship after deals are done and, well, the movie starts with River and Simon’s rescue of her with help (presumably) from the Serenity crew while in the series the two come aboard as passengers, already escaped from and wanted by the Alliance.

Nathan Fillion really does well playing the leader of our little band, definitely a post-modern future Robin Hood. His Captain Reynolds is good with a gun but not much more than a club boxer with his fists and he’s kept in character by not doing any wire-assisted martial arts. Adam Baldwin’s Jayne gets a smattering more smarts but remains most concerned with himself and his pocketbook. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who I’ve enjoyed in quite a few movies and one or two British import TV shows, rides his accent and an unwordly serene temperament (which I wonder if Whedon had him do intentionally) to provide an antagonist, a front for The Man since no time’s wasted on showing him getting instructions. Summer Glaus is called on as River for a much wider range than any other character, from the disconnected, nearly mad gibberish to world-class, wire-heavy ninja sword and battle ballet and does stuning work.

As mentioned, there’s one event right before the final confrontation that I truly question. When you see the movie you’ll recognize it and I hope you’ll agree that it does nothing for plot development–included to provide a final motivational push (I suppose), it just seem unnecessary and pointlessly deprives Whedon of tools for the sequels that are sure to come. Not a huge big bad, just the least good aspect of the movie.

definitely recommended

Correction: I received an email a few hours after posting this review from Stephanie (the only name she left) explaining that I misunderstood a few parts of Serenity. To set the record straight I’ll quote her mail in its entirety:

“A little off there. You must have missed the three comics that were recently released as official continuity for the series. Shepherd Book left the boat, so in the film it isn’t that he was never crew, but that he no longer was at that point. This isn’t a break or adjustment for the movie. Same with Inara, she’d also left. The Operative is also introduced in the comics. Simon’s River retrieval didn’t happen with help from the Serenity crew in the movie either. Nothing changed from the series. I’m not sure why you perceived that it was otherwise? Could you clarify that for me? That retrieval at the beginning was a flashback, that was not in time with the film. While we as the audience were able to watch parts of their escape for our own benefit, it’s clear that is but a flashback. In fact, a record of it, shown clearly when the Operative pauses the sequence. We were just watching what he was watching. -S”

Fair enough. As I pointed out to her, though, we watched every episode as SciFi recently rebroadcast the Firefly episodes and I can’t recall a single mention of the comic books. That the opening was a flashback was apparently understood by my wife and does make sense in retrospective. Doesn’t change my opinion about the movie, I don’t give all that many definitely recommendeds.