Movie Reviews: Bottle Shock, Man on Wire, The Order of Myths

GO  BOTTLE SHOCK It’s amazing that it took 32 years for someone to make a movie about the “Paris Tastings,” the 1976 oenophilic Waterloo in which a panel of Gallic wine experts blindly compared their homegrown whites and reds against some upstart offerings from Northern California and — oh mon dieu! — gave the edge to the Yanks. And it’s unfortunate that the someone who has finally filmed this wine-world David and Goliath story turns out to be writer-director Randall Miller, a conspicuous veteran of TV sitcoms and sitcom-like Hollywood movies (Houseguest, The Sixth Man) who, when in doubt, always cuts to a magic-hour helicopter shot of rolling Sonoma Valley hillsides and who pours cheap accordion music all over the Paris scenes just in case the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance wasn’t enough to cue us that we’re in the City of Lights. (All that’s missing, really, is a cameo by Pepé Le Pew.) For the interminable first hour or so, Miller’s Bottle Shock is to Alexander Payne’s Sideways what that watered-down box wine they sell in gas-station mini marts is to a fine pinot noir. But then, just around the halfway point, something unexpected happens — the movie actually gets good. You can chalk that up to the delightful Alan Rickman, who plays the British ex-pat wine merchant Steven Spurrier with the inimitable haughtiness of an Englishman trying to become French, and to Bill Pullman’s performance as the real-life Calistoga vintner Jim Barrett, whose Chateau Montelena winery was teetering on the verge of foreclosure when the Paris Tastings suddenly gave him a new lease on life. Pullman, who’s almost always worth watching, plays against the movie’s feel-good impulses at almost every turn; especially in the final stretch, as his character gives in to despair and considers returning to his former career in law, Pullman almost single-handedly transforms Bottle Shock into a stirring fanfare for the common American entrepreneur. Consider this a test case for a great actor: Miller gives Pullman schmaltz, and he turns it into Steinbeck. (ArcLight Sherman Oaks; Landmark; Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7) (Scott Foundas)

Man on Wire

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

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More About

• Randall Miller
• Bill Pullman
• Mobile (Alabama)
• Paul Weiland
• Ella Taylor

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Man on Wire

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The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

 CANARY Canary begins on the false promise of momentum: Twelve-year-old Koichi (Hoshi Ishida) is on the lam from child-welfare agents, who nabbed him in their crackdown on the Nirvana cult compound, recently linked to headline-news terrorism (and a stand-in for Aum Shinrikyo and their Tokyo-subway sarin-gas attacks). He’s en route to a family reunion, when Yuki, another preteen castaway, starts tagging along. (As Yuki, actress Mitsuki Tanimura is lively and unaffected; her fleeting scenes with nonagenarian Yukiko Inoue give the movie its few indelible moments.) Pimping herself to kill time, she’ll take any excuse to split the provinces. The allure of the cult doesn’t need to be overstated: Any hope of an afterlife beats this sunless concrete world of wretched pederasts. On the road, the brief emergence of some bickering lesbian goths threatens to turn this into another movie entirely but actually marks the last incursion of the unexpected. Writer-director Akihiko Shiota’s dramatic strategies are limited to a workmanlike vocabulary of glum location atmospherics and hand-held hustling for when the yelling starts. Any narrative drive is interrupted by flashbacks and tangential scenes, and I was counting off the minutes long before a silly “saved from the blessings of civilization” non-ending. (ImaginAsian Center) (Nick Pinkerton) 

 ELEGY It’s May-December time again, and for an aging dude who scores one of the ripest young lovelies in cinema (Penélope Cruz), Ben Kingsley looks mighty down in the mouth. Or something — it’s hard to tell because Kingsley is pulling one of his wooden-faced sphinx routines as David Kepesh, a skirt-chasing professor who gets his comeuppance from Cruz’s Consuela, the luscious Cuban-American graduate student with whom he falls in love. Or something. Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s hushed and understated Elegy is a flat, joyless affair, not just because of the total absence of carnal spark between Kingsley and Cruz — absurdly infantilized in bangs and a headband — but because it’s adapted (faithfully, up to a crucial point, by Nicholas Meyer) from The Dying Animal, one of Philip Roth’s least successful efforts to come to grips with male helplessness before what he calls “the tyranny of beauty.” Funereally lit, the movie sags beneath fatally tasteful shots of Kingsley’s profile in half-shadow, remorseful after his departed lover returns with a request he fears will unman him. Their dreary love story is enlivened only by excellent supporting performances from Peter Sarsgaard as the whiny son only a narcissist like Kepesh could produce, Dennis Hopper as Kepesh’s loyal best friend and Patricia Clarkson as his sometime sex partner. The softened ending is a travesty of Roth, even at his flawed second best. (ArcLight Hollywood; Monica 4-Plex) (Ella Taylor)