Today I saw A Face in the Crowd, a 1957 film I had never heard of five days ago, and it blew me away. It was directed by Elia Kazan of A Streetcar Named Desire and Baby Doll (which I loved), and On the Waterfront (which I rather keenly disliked), as well as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and East of Eden (which I should probably see someday). It features the big-screen debuts of Andy Griffith and Lee Remick, as well as Walter Matthau only a few years into his movie career (I believe this was his first non-Western film role).

A Face in the Crowd is about a wandering Arkansas alcoholic with a guitar and a boatload of charisma who rockets to fame as a TV personality, and eventually becomes a potent political force before his mean arrogance brings him crashing back down. The structure is very similar to 1949’s All the King’s Men (and probably many others), but much better here. The cinematography, sets, writing, and most especially the acting are top-notch. This film bombed with audiences when it was first release, and was completely ignored at the Oscars (notables that year include The Bridge on the River Kwai and 12 Angry Men). This is rather too bad, as the film is a masterpiece and a true classic. It doesn’t deserve this obscurity.

You’ve never seen Andy Griffith like this, and after this movie, you never would again. Griffith stuck to much safer roles following A Face in the Crowd. His character, Lonesome Rhodes, is volatile, mean, and sexually charged, but also fascinating and magnetic. I would never have guessed that the man who went on to play the beloved sheriff of Mayberry for many successful television seasons had this sort of persona lurking inside.

I was also amazed by the movie’s continued relevance after 50 years. With television still a growing phenomenon in the late ’50s, this movie was way ahead of its time (a recipe for box-office disaster, I suppose). It put me in mind of such phenomena as (for instance) the influence of Fox News over red state America. Regardless of whether a liberal bias exists in the media, there is no doubt that conservative America gets its opinions from the boob tube, and this movie shows that they have for as long as that medium has existed (remember McCarthy?).

It is a riveting and worthwhile experience for any film buff or student of cultural history, and I’m so pleased it caught my eye when I was checking in the VHS copy at the library earlier this week.

Posted in Reviews

starring Ivana Baquero, Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu and Doug Jones
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro
rated R for graphic violence and some language.
98%
Do you remember the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales? Good people died. Children got eaten. And even when the story ended well, it probably traumatized you somewhere along the way. This is the spirit in which El Laberinto del Fauno, or Pan’s Labyrinth (written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, best known in this country for 2004’s Hellboy), was conceived. It is a marvellous and breathtaking creative effort, introducing conventional fairy tale elements into one of the most important ideological conflicts of the twentieth century to produce an enchanting and terrifying fable for adults.

It is the summer of 1944, and Ofelia, a young girl, is traveling to northern Spain with her very pregnant mother so that they can be near her new stepfather, CapitᮠVidal, when the child is born. Vidal is a brutal military officer in the Spanish army who has been stationed in the area to eradicate a small rebel militia that is hiding out in the woods, stubborn holdouts from the Spanish Civil War. Ofelia is a bookish kid, used to enduring the usual admonishments that she stop filling her head with nonsense.

Her active imagination is in little danger of starvation in her new surroundings, however. The run-down mill where Vidal has set up his base of operations is right next to an ancient and mysterious stone labyrinth. She has been at the mill for less than 24 hours, in fact, before she receives her first midnight visit from a fairy who leads her deep inside the labyrinth for a meeting with a very shifty-looking faun. The faun reveals that Ofelia is, in fact, the long-lost princess of a fairy kingdom, and in order to return there she must prove herself by completing three tasks of increasing difficulty before the next full moon.

As Ofelia begins her quest, Vidal sadistically tightens his grip on the local community to increase the pressure on the rebels, members of his household play their own dangerous game of aiding the enemy, and Ofelia’s mother experiences frightening complications to her health as she prepares to give birth. If ever a child needed a fantasy world to escape to, Ofelia certainly does, but in an interesting twist, the horrors of her tasks parallel the atrocities committed by her new stepfather. Before she can truly escape, she will have to face terror and evil head on.

The film is very dark, both in content and visuals. The people behind the camera seem grimly determined to hold each shot during the film’s most gruesome moments long past the point where most movies (and, indeed, most moviegoers) would have gladly turned away. What some might view as a lack of restraint, and possibly even good taste, on the part of the director is also incredibly effective in communicating the stakes to the audience. The characters are right there in the midst of it, and all but the most desensitized of viewers will be forced to invest heavily in their plight or walk out.

Additionally, of course, there is an element of contrast at work here. Ofelia’s innocence and the virtue of the rebels and their allies are thrown into sharp relief against the background of evil, both human and monstrous, which they struggle against. Nor is Ofelia helpless in this struggle, although she may seem young, weak, and naive. Underscored by the film’s tagline: “Innocence Has A Power Evil Cannot Imagine,” this theme is developed throughout Ofelia’s adventures. The more terrible evil is shown to be, the more potent the force that defeats it will seem.

Pan’s Labyrinth has been nominated for Best Foreign Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Music, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Makeup. While I would not be surprised to see it win any (or all) of the above, it is up against a number of worthy contendors. However, it would be positively wrong for another entry to come out on top in the latter two categories. Del Toro’s fantastical creatures have an amazingly palpable screen presence, rivaling anything from the WETA or Jim Henson creature workshops. Although Del Toro’s vision lacks their menagerie-like variety and enormous cast of hundreds, its high quality more than compensates for the low quantity. The denizens of the labyrinth live, breathe and move flawlessly and believably, every bit as alive and real as the human characters. One of the them in particular is among the most terrifying things I have ever seen.

This film is suffused with a powerful combination of delightful wonder, harrowing thrills and moving human drama. It emerges from a rich heritage of fairy tale literature without seeming bland or derivative, sure to leave its own unique mark on a tradition that, apparently, is far from extinct.

Posted in Reviews

I went to see Children of Men about a week ago. I’d had my eye on it since I first saw the trailer: novel, thought-provoking concept, respectable cast, directed by Alfonso Cuarón helmer of the only truly stand-out Harry Potter movie to date). So, when it opened in Longview, we were so there, and I, for one, was not disappointed.

This film has gotten a lot of criticism for things which I feel have nothing to do with how well it played on the big screen, so I won’t discuss them right away. It gets so much right: locations, technology, atmosphere, attitudes. From the large to the small, Children of Men convincingly transports the audience to a 2027 where no human pregnancy has occurred in over 18 years. Cuarón is very comfortable working with dark, gloomy material, as is his leading man, Clive Owen. Very ably backing him up are Julianne Moore, Michael Caine (always excellent), newcomer Claire-Hope Ashitey, and a growing favorite of mine, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity, Amistad). Seriously, every time this guy pops up in a movie I’m watching, it happens to be a really great movie.

There are also some bold storytelling choices here that shatter the predictability of the plot. No character is sacred, and there is a very real tension throughout most of the movie as the ultimate ending remains very much up in the air right down to the final moments. Every time things seem to be moving comfortably down a particular path, there is a sudden reversal that throws everything into disarray. There is some really great work here in the action sequences as well, including one of the most intense car chases I’ve ever seen, during which the car’s speed never exceeds 20 mph!

Of course, the thing everyone is talking about is that (I believe) 7-minute unbroken shot that takes place in the midst of a chaotic urban battle near the end of the film. It is indeed impressive, although I barely noticed that the camera hadn’t cut once until the scene was probably a little over half over. It is a major undertaking to get everything to work perfectly during a shot that requires so much in the way of explosions, gunfire, and rapid but smooth camera movement, and it is carried off fairly well. However, I’ve seen Russian Ark, a movie which consists of a single 96-minute take involving 2000 actors costumed and scripted to cover 300 years of Russian history, and three live orchestras performing massive ballroom sequences . . . It makes 7 minutes of pitched battle seem a tad less worthy to write home about.

About halfway through the sequence in Children of Men, blood spatters on the camera lens (this was what first drew my attention to the lack of cuts), and as I watched I found this extremely distracting and annoying. A few minutes later, it suddenly disappeared and I assumed that there had been a cut even though I could not in any way detect one. A few days later, I read this about the filming:

Cuarón had access to his location for the shot for just a few weeks, and his crew used up all but the last two days simply preparing for the long sequence. The first take, which took all of the first day, was a disaster from start to finish. The second, which took up most of the second day, was ruined when the cameraman tripped. Each ruined take would require several hours for the crew to set everything back up and try again, so when the third take began, the sun was literally setting on their final day to use the selected location. No pressure.

With the fate of the scene hanging in the balance, filming began, but then one of the fake blood packets on a dying bystander exploded too close to the camera, spattering the lens as I described above. Disgusted, Cuar󮠹elled “Cut,” but fortunately the sound of an explosion drowned him out and no one heard. He sat through the rest of the sequence, and then Owen and the cameraman came over, elated at their success. He quickly pointed out that, certainly everything seemed to have gone well, but the scene was ruined by the blood. Both Owen and the cameraman, incredulous and furious, told Cuarón off, stating that the accident of the blood was an incredible boon to the scene and was precisely the sort of thing he himself was always looking for.

Well, when they put it that way . . . the scene went in the film and the blood stayed. But Cuarón recognized that it grew tiresome after a few minutes, and the production hired a digital artist to painstakingly remove the blood from every single frame of the final minutes of the scene. The job was, by all accounts, quite tortuous, and the digital artist hated them for it. So, when the blood disappears, the scene was not cut as I had assumed it must have been. Quite a story, I thought.

Anyway, about that criticism . . . apparently Cuarón has not at all interested in reading the original book when he worked on the screenplay and on filming. He thought it would distract him from what he wanted to do: namely, use the idea of a future world with no children as social commentary on certain American governmental policies of the present such as immigration and the environment and so forth.

He pretty much sucks at this no matter which way you look at it. A lot of people were disgusted with the movie because they found it jarring and irrelevant that he should try to use this concept as a soapbox for those issues. I greatly enjoyed the movie and completely missed the fact that this is what he was supposedly trying to do. Looking back I remember maybe one or two asides that might be construed as pertaining to those issues, but I don’t really see how they connect to the present, and I certainly don’t think they make any sort of coherent political statement.

One thing that I did notice while watching the movie, however, was the number of seemingly disconnected religious pointers floating around in it. Main character names included “Julian,” “Theo,” “Luke,” “Miriam” and “Kee” (spelled differently from the “circulating life energy” of eastern religion, but certainly pronounced the same). The title itself comes from a Psalm. These and other similar names and ideas appeared at random in the movie, didn’t seem to really go anywhere, yet did not seem to be coincidental.

I have since grabbed the book from the library and I plan on reading it, and I have discovered that the author is a Christian and her book explores many Christian themes and ideas through the premise that the film version took (or tried to take) in an entirely different direction. In the book, for instance, Luke is an Anglican priest, and the organization called “Fish” (a strange name for what is, in the movie, a terrorist organization) is much more closely linked to the ideas represented by the Christian fish after which it is named in the book. The faith upon which the book is based is strangely absent in the film, but the labels remained like cryptic signposts, pointing at nothing in particular. The director (seeking to “go in a different direction”) was too ignorant to realize that he had left in the terminology when he drained the ideology.

My attitude about that is one of sad amusement tinged with disappointment for what might have been. Children of Men is an amazing film experience just as it is, but compared to what it could have been it seems strangely hollow. I loved the movie, but it could have changed my life. Oh, well.

Posted in Reviews

There are two things you need to know about this movie immediately: 1) It is a computer-generated cartoon directed by a man credited as Steve “Spaz” Williams whose previous movie work is confined almost exclusively to visual effects. 2) Its story is a hideous stew of ingredients stolen brazenly from Finding Nemo, Madagascar rounded out with the various tired cliches of its genre. Anything that smacks of originality also stinks of the kind of thing other animated movies wouldn’t stoop to include.

The Wild (as I’ve already kind of told you) is about a ragtag group of zoo animals led by Samson the lion (Kiefer Sutherland) that breaks out of the New York City zoo to rescue Samson’s son Ryan, who has been mistakenly loaded on board a ship headed for the jungle. This well-worn story seems all the more overdone when weighed down with the standard Disney plot accoutrement of the single-parent family. (What’s with that, anyway?) Along the way they mingle with a menagerie of different species representing the full spectrum of offensive racial stereotypes.

The prize goes to the Arab pigeon, a wild-eyed idiot with a gambling habit. However, the icing on the cake has to be the tropical island dung beetles done out in full Swedish yodeling-polka-singer regalia complete with lederhosen and golden braids. The sight brought a single stunned query to my lips, but since this is a review of a kid movie I’ll refrain from repeating it.

The movie’s subplots are a tad disturbing as well, the most prominent of these being the attempts of Benny the squirrel (James Belushi) to win the love of Bridget the giraffe (Janeane Garofalo). If they can’t keep it inter-species, can’t they at least stick to romances between vaguely compatible species? There is also a herd of wildebeests intent on becoming carnivores, but I guess that’s more weird and, I dunno, impossible than truly disturbing. But did I mention that William Shatner voices the fanatical leader of the wildebeests? Yup. And Eddie Izzard is the show-stealing koala bear/comic relief (I say show-stealing because this movie’s few fans seem to be fans because of his character, not because I myself was vastly entertained by him).

So, if the plot and characters fail so spectacularly, how are the visuals? Problematic to say the least. First, the animals are spectacularly realistic. They look so real, in fact, that they just aren’t funny. This is a cartoon that has a hard time feeling like a cartoon because its characters lack stylization, and therefore they lack . . . well, character. Meanwhile, the environments that these hyper-realistic, high-quality cartoon animals stroll around in are just plain lousy. I have never seen such total incongruity in an animated feature. It is literally as if the environments were designed and rendered by a completely different team on Big Idea’s software (the Veggie Tales people, in case you wondered). This effect is so jarring that, more than once, the animals appear to be performing on a sound stage, complete with static, painted backdrop and plastic props. Tacky.

The humor feels the same way. The best animated movies manage to keep people of all ages entertained with a smorgasboard of cartoon action, clever concepts, and wise-apple humor aimed just over the kiddies’ heads. Having run through the first on auto-pilot and skipped the second, The Wild attempts at the third are beyond contrived. The effect produced resembles attending a children’s puppet show where the puppets occasionally go limp and lifeless and the puppeteer’s head emerges from behind the curtain as he breaks character completely to fire off a smart remark at the adults in the audience.

In conclusion, this is an inferior effort on all fronts. Should have been aborted. Should be avoided.

Posted in Reviews

I don’t know whether I’ll publish this. I watched Kinsey the other night, and I’m not yet convinced that I had any business sitting through it without spending some time reflecting and writing on the subject. The movie is a biopic about the life and work of Alfred Kinsey, one of the first scientists to conduct a large-scale, in-depth study of human sexual behavior.

His findings were published in two studies: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). His work was instrumental in such major changes as the American Psychological Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in the 1970s. In short, for good or ill, Kinsey is an important 20th century figure.

Kinsey is, to my limited understanding, a figure very similar to Freud: a controversial pioneer in a socially-disreputable field whose findings are now suspect and possibly even obsolete, but who deserves a certain amount of recognition for the difficult task of beginning the necessary dialogue. Some people (i.e. some Christians) were and continue to be deeply threatened and offended by his ideas. Some embrace him as a champion of enlightenment in a dark time.

The film captured me during its opening hour, alienated me halfway through, and then proceeded to bounce me back and forth on a moment’s notice for the duration. Reading (more-or-less) opposing reviews of it from Ebert and Focus on the Family’s Plugged In didn’t relieve my strong sense of ambiguity at all. This movie, much like the subject of its protagonist’s studies, is not to be trifled with.

Let me try and quantify what I mean just a bit . . . and I think I shall proceed beneath the fold for good measure.

Christianity, of course, gets a pretty bad play throughout. Kinsey’s father is a Methodist minister whose first scene involves a sermon on how electricity (leading to the picture show), cars (“parking” and “the joy ride”), telephones (unmarried men and women speaking to each other from their beds) and the zipper (uhhh . . .) are all modern inventions of Satan designed to lure humankind towards lustful pursuits. It is later revealed that Kinsey’s father was fitted with a humiliating and painful leather strap at the age of 10 to keep him from masturbating.

One of Kinsey’s fellow professors (played by the always-smarmy Tim Curry) insists on abstinence-only sex education taught as a sub-section of the university’s general health course. The man is a pompous idiot and obviously unfit to teach the subject. His views and his stupidity are presumably (and unfairly) linked. There is no sympathetic opposition to Kinseyan ideas. On almost any issue you can find individuals on both sides who aren’t mindless idiots, and only by addressing these can you truly strengthen your own position.

The implication in a few reviews I read was that a close-minded, silent approach to sex-ed is still the dominant Christian position. On the way to work this morning I flipped by a Christian radio program which was discussing the importance of parents being open and honest with their teens regarding sex.

Kinsey is inspired in conducting his study by two things: ignorance and misinformation. He becomes aware that people know next to nothing about sex, and a lot of what they do know is wrong. Both he and his wife are virgins when they are married, and (not to put too fine a point on it) they struggle a great deal at first in “making things work.”

Kinsey eventually discovers that a lot of newly-wed couples have this problem, and he tries to help them with a college course defined by its frank and open dealing with the subject of how sex works (the course is open only to faculty, graduate students, married students, and seniors). With this unprecedented forum for discussion open before them, Kinsey’s students are suddenly full of questions for which he has no answers: Does masturbation really cause blindness and insanity? Does oral sex cause problems during pregnancy?

Some of the issues raised, both here and at other points in the film, are scarcely creditable (but oddly believable). Did, for instance, turn-of-the-century scout handbooks really recommend reading the Sermon on the Mount, sitting with the testicles immersed in ice-cold water, and thinking of your mother’s pure love as antidotes to masturbation? Was it truly taught that only the lower classes, and particularly Negros, had difficulty with abstinence?

Ebert points out in his review that oral sex between married heterosexuals is still nominally illegal in 9 states. Wikipedia notes that all such laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003, but still . . . as recently as that?

The presence of these questions and the fact that no one has any answers to them bothers Kinsey a great deal, and he sets out to answer some of them. His method is simple: grab a few assistants and start compiling complete sexual histories of vast cross-sections of the population in an attempt to ascertain what constitutes “normal” sexual behavior. His shocking conclusion? If “normal” is defined as “something that a large percentage of people do,” then pretty much anything is normal (and therefore, he adds, acceptable) when it comes to sex.

Along the way, he engages in behavior that may be in the interest of science, or may simply be fetishistic self-indulgence. He begins by cheating on his wife with a bi-sexual male assistant. She isn’t shocked or horrified, but she is deeply saddened and hurt, and they have an excellent discussion about the reasons for confining sex to marriage. However, this admirable sequence is rendered as ambiguous as anything else in the film when Mrs. Kinsey (“Mac”) sleeps with the same assistant a few minutes later. This is done with the full fore-knowledge and consent of Kinsey himself. It is vaguely implied that Mac is more interested in showing Kinsey how it feels than anything else, but if he notices anything, he doesn’t let on and the entire line is more-or-less let alone.

In their studies regarding the sex act, Kinsey, his wife, his assistants, and their spouses are all prime test subjects. They are encouraged to essentially mix and match with each other, and often they are filmed and studied later by the group. It’s all part of the job and they are all (in the words of Plugged In) “serial adulterers.” This is not without consequences, however. Soon, a few marriages are on the rocks and Kinsey’s assistants are at each other’s throats. One rages at Kinsey for his casual view of sex (and I paraphrase):

“[Sex] isn’t just something, it’s the whole thing. [Sex] is a risky game, because if you’re not careful, it will cut you wide open.”

You won’t find any mention of the stark portrayal of the consequences of adultery and the impassioned words spoken against it in the Plugged In review. They were far too determined to smear this movie to allow too much of its positive content to creep into their assessment. But I’ll come back to them in a moment.

Kinsey was particularly interested in revising laws concerning sex offenders, and in one particular scene he rather vehemently defends them. I ultimately realized that this must be referring to any adult convicted for engaging in a sexual act with another consenting adult. Still, it disturbed me both with its lack of clarity and its lack of acknowledgement of the seriousness of sexual crime.

In what is certainly the film’s most troubling sequence, Kinsey and his assistant Wardell Pomeroy visit a man whom Kinsey nonjudgmentally regards as a gold mine of information which he will not be able to acquire in any other way. The man, if he actually existed, would have to be among the most sexually active and deviant human beings in history. He is a deeply twisted and disturbed individual whose goal for decades seems to have been to engage in intercourse with as many people and things as possible and make detailed measurements and recordings of the results. He claims to have had sex with 22 different species of animal and over 9500 human beings, including about 800 pre-adolescents of both genders and 17 members of his own family and extended family from 7 different generations. I could go on, but you get the idea.

At some point during the interview, Pomeroy has had enough and storms from the room. Kinsey remains, commenting on the difficulty of remaining impartial. Does he have any personal opinion about this? Do the filmmakers? If so, they are keeping it entirely to themselves. Kinsey ends rather vaguely with Kinsey stating (in response to a question) that love is an important piece of the puzzle, but impossible to quantify scientifically.

I searched rather diligently for some Plugged In equivalent on what Bill O’Reilly would call the “secular-progressive” side. Not surprisingly, non-Christian film critics largely confined themselves to assessing Kinsey‘s success as a film. Novel idea, that. They certainly didn’t engage in the rather vehement, slanted diatribe practiced by Plugged In‘s Tom Neven. The Focus on the Family review also includes a few links to related articles:

Let’s NOT Talk About Sex
If Kinsey didn?t start the conversation about sex, as his movie?s slogan would have us believe, what did he do?

The Truth About Kinsey
The real Alfred Kinsey was not an objective scientist, and certainly not an emotionally well man. The informational links found here are designed to help you learn the truth about Kinsey, his fraud and his crimes, and what you can do combat his influence in your community.

The second link is broken. The first opens with “I?m not going to see Kinsey and I doubt any of my friends will, either. The movie is . . .” which really automatically makes it not worth my time. To petulantly decline viewing a film and in the same breath assess it is beyond dopey. It invites me to stop taking you seriously. The author, Sam Torode, goes on to assume that there is an ideological unity in Hollywood, with a focused agenda to push, and that this film is an attempt to somehow rescue the purportedly floundering sexual revolution . . . bla bla bla.

Torode then proceeds to make the laughable claim that sexual repression has never existed in American society, so Kinsey can hardly be credited for fighting it. For evidence it cites a number of so-called “sex books” written for married couples in the 1920s. In answer I would point out, first that the 1920s were a good sight more “liberated” in many areas of the United States than the 1950s, and second that Kinsey very pointedly acknowledges the existence of these books as sources of a great deal of misinformation; ideology disguised as instruction.

It goes on like that for a good while . . . I’m not so very interested in it, simply because it is belligerently not about the movie. I’m not as interested in the man himself as I am in what the movie about his life has to say. I wish PI were capable of that distinction. And speaking of their review, let me return briefly to it. I have already noted that it is not as complete in its cataloguing as I have known that publication to be in the past. Particularly, it glosses over or ignores many of the extremely positive statements made in Kinsey. If every negative sexual attitude in Kinsey deserves such scrupulous attention, how much more should its affirmations of fidelity be noted? If you can’t play fair, don’t show up for the game.

The “conclusion” section of the review is one of the longest I’ve seen on the site, comprising a good half of the text or more. A large portion of it amounts to bogus character assassination: “Kinsey?s legacy is that he played a role in unleashing epidemic levels of sexually transmitted diseases, rampant divorce, massive numbers of out-of-wedlock births, the breakdown of the family, abortion and the destruction of marriage.”

After reading it over, I was a bit shocked at the difference between the Kinsey presented there and the Kinsey of the movie. Further research revealed that many of Neven’s “facts” about Alfred Kinsey are probably about as credible as the rumored cause of Catherine the Great’s death (and easily as sordid). And, of course, with no citations in the review, it is unclear where Neven got his information. Neven also makes this tangentially funny statement: “writer/director Bill Condon has long been known for his advocacy for homosexual rights.” (Condon is a homosexual, so his history of advocacy is hardly surprising. It’s like calling Tony Blair an Anglophile.)

There is also a rather infuriating cheap shot: “(Simply judging the craft of filmmaking, however, Kinsey is fairly pedestrian.)” It is my impression that, perhaps through no fault of their own, the good folks of Plugged In have long since ceased to have any idea of what constitutes good filmmaking. Kinsey employs a unique and engaging narrative device to drive the story in a way that keeps it interesting throughout. I was quite impressed with it from the beginning. Liam Neeson and Laura Linney are both superb in their roles, and Linney’s Oscar nomination was well-deserved. Chris O?Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, John Lithgow, and Oliver Platt round out a notably stellar cast. After railing on its ideology for several paragraphs, for Neven to finish up with “And besides, it’s not even that great of a movie anyway” is simply childish and obviously unreliable.

Anyway, I’m not sure that I can recommend it either, in the end. Actually, I’m not sure that I have to. If, after reading all of this, you feel that it is something you should or would like to see, then it is likely that you should. If there is any doubt in your mind, steer clear. If you do see it, though, I would be very interested in your thoughts.

Ultimately I am left wondering whether I dislike Kinsey for its refusal to take a moral position (whatever that position might be), or whether I am in awe of its scrupulous adherence to the essential ambiguity surrounding any historical figure or period. There is a certain integrity in the filmmakers’ refusal to inject any sort of conclusive judgment of the man and his methods. I watch Kinsey and I see neither the hero Plugged In claims he has been made into, nor the monster they claim that he actually was, but simply a man. That smells like artistic success to me.

Posted in Reviews