Movies
Excellent: Movies this great are rare, so don't miss it.
Good: At least worth the price of admission.
Okay: See it if you have nothing better to do.
Bad: If you absolutely have to see it, wait for the DVD.
No stars: Frickin' terrible; give us our two hours back,
you director from hell.
Sideways
(★★★)
R,123 minutes
Starts tomorrow at Liberty Hall
Paul Giamatti plays to type. This usually spells unoriginality and boredom but with Giamatti it means something different. As we watch Giamatti in Sideways, playing yet another middle age sad sack, we feel as though we are watching him anew. All thought of American Splendor or the farther removed Man on the Moon is washed away. A new, not improved, and more emotive and gentler man emerges.
A week before his best friend Jack's (Thomas Hayden Church) wedding, Miles (Gaimatti) and Jack set out to California's wine country to celebrate. Miles tries relentlessly to share his love of wine with
Jack, who is really more of a beer and pizza kind of guy. Jack's main goal on the trip is to sow his wild oats and try to do the same for Miles, and when they come across a good-natured waitress named Maya (Virginia Madsen) and a wild vineyard worker named Stephanie (Sandra Oh). Jack gets exactly what he wants while Miles ends up with more then he bargained for.
Directed by About Schmidt and Election helmer Alexander Payne, Sideways is no average buddy road-trip movie. Sure, they set out on a trip, tell some lies to meet some girls, secrets are revealed, etc., but it's handled so maturely that it feels like these guys are teaching us some valuable lessons. I will admit I felt a tad unimpressed by all the "wine-as-people" metaphors (wine gets better with age, so do people, etc.) that are beat into our
heads with an unrelenting force, but overall I felt for Giamatti. Giamatti and Madsen are an unlikely match who work best when discussing their favorite wine and life (damn those metaphors!), and work way better than vulgar Jack and his few night stands with Stephanie.
Lindsey Ramsey
Sideways works because of Payne's care for these characters, and as a result they seem to care for each other. Jack and Miles' friendship or Miles and Maya's flirtation - all the relationships are smart and introspective. And although I felt perhaps I was missing something being a college-aged girl and not a middle-aged man, I still felt satisfied with the flavor the film delivered.
Alexander
(☆)
R 173 minutes
There is something movie critic Roger Ebert said once on his TV show: No good movie is too long and no bad movie is too short. The second part definitely applies to Oliver Stone's three-hour epic Alexander. It's surprising that a film saturated with such talent as director and writer Stone and a cast of actors such as Anthony Hopkins, Val Kilmer, Angelina Jolie and Colin Farrell, playing Alexander the Great, can be so uninteresting.
Stone has been behind some of the most memorable films of the past 20 years, such as Platoon and Born on the $4^{\text{th}}$ of July, and packs his films full of symbolism and moral lessons. Alexander is no different. Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) tells the story of the life and death of
Alexander, the man who conquered the known world when he was 25. While the film does a good job of recreating the steps Alexander took in his world conquest, its biggest struggle is trying to explain who Alexander as a person really was and how his life shaped his actions. It is easy to see why Farrell was cast in the role of Alexander. Most of the acting is done by his eyes and the intensity they bring to the character.
Alexander suggests a lot of things — he was just a scared little boy afraid of his father, he was a closet homosexual, he had sexual relations with his mother — but these issues are never taken beyond a level of innuendo and feel like a waste of the audience's time. Even at three hours, it feels like there is a lot of this movie that is left out, jumping at the chance to appear on a special edition DVD.
— Jon Ralston
14
Jayplay 12.2.04
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