Tag Archives: Paul Giamatti

Wino Forever

Today we’re leaving San Francisco to explore wine country. Does it make us sound like lushes to admit this was the whole reason we planned this trip?

Before they were Spiderman villains, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church were wine loving assholes just like us. The pair are not very likeable men in the movie Sideways, but they sure do bond over bottles of fine wine. Sales of Pinot Noir surged after this movie hit theatres and of course sales of Merlot plunged. It was a little film that could, showing that life can be both funny and tragic at the same time. Alexander Payne (along with Jim Taylor) took home the Oscar for its stellar screenplay and it, along with its four leads, had plenty of acclaim. I liked it the minute I first saw it but after “cellaring” it for a bit, I find that it has matured, and I suppose so have I. It’s a thoughtful movie that pairs well with stuffed olives and\or brie. 😉

We three Assholes don’t need wine to get us going and we don’t drink to get happy – we drink to get EVEN MORE happy! And we’ll be sloppily happifying all over California wine country today (don’t worry, we’ve engaged a chauffeur), and steadfastly keeping each other’s hair out of the spit bucket (I never spit anyway, I’m definitely a swallower).

We’ll be sure to be updating our twitter account with drunken trip highlights all week long – join us @assholemovies .

Road Trip Movies

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Wanderer’s timing has been spooky lately. The Assholes fly out to sunny California today and will be taking a road trip of our own on Sunday along the beautiful Pacific Coast Highway. Perfect time to be thinking of our favourite road trip movies.

Thelma and Louise (1991)– A road trip to a friend’s cabin in the mountains quickly goes off the rails for Thelma and Louise when Louise shoots an attempted rapist to death before they’ve even reached their destination. The trip goes from vacation to nightmare to something much more as the two realize they wouldn’t go back to their old lives even if they could. Nothing like the life of a fugitive to make you finally feel free.

Sideways (2004)– I made a deal with myself that I would only pick one Alexander Payne movie this week. As much as I love his last four movies- all road trip movies- Sideways was an easy decision, given that we will be doing a Napa Valley wine tour of our own tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll have more fun than Miles (Paul Giamatti), a depressed alcoholic and failed novelist. Sideways is a hopeful but often painful comedy that to this day still makes me feel a little guilty every time I order Merlot.

Due Date (2010)– Director Todd Phillips and star Zach Galifianakis’s follow-up to 2009’s The Hangover was highly anticipated and very disappointing to many but I have always stood by it. Galifianakis’ Ethan Tremblay and Robert Downey Jr.’s Peter Highman are forced to drive cross-country together after they’re both improbably kicked off an airplane. Both stars play off of each other beautifully and the gags mostly work but what I love is how the story is constructed around what’s going on in the lives of these two men instead of around a bunch of setpieces and jokes. Downey is particularly good as his performance hints at a more real pain than he has been able to manage even in his recent “dramas” like The Judge.

San Andreas – not the Rock’s fault!

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I just liked the title, it’s not a knock on this movie. San Andreas was actually surprisingly enjoyable. I am biased because as you may know I like when things blow up. Well, the sheer amount of destruction on screen here probably tops 2012 (the movie not the year). Which of course was centred around the Mayan apocalypse. This is just two little states getting smashed, but my god, so much smash!

I go into these movies expecting cliches and this movie has all of them. Including one I could have done without, the scuzzy new boyfriend of the ex of the male lead. And he is super scuzzy, Mr. Fantastic he is not. I felt like he was included just so we could get behind some of the disaster, like maybe if he dies it will be easier to forget the thousands more that are swept away with him. You be the judge I guess. For me, I always just assume everyone else died at the end of these movies, even though they tell us in cliched news footage that most were okay. In San Andreas, it did not seem like anyone except the Rock and his family were walking away at the end. The other CG rag dolls just added to the triumph.

I liked it. Every ludicrous minute. Critics drive me nuts when they give a movie like this a one star review. You know what? This is not Oscar material. We came here to see some shit get torn up. And San Andreas delivers to a fault!!!!

I give it a score of 31,250 atom bombs out of 40,000.

The Truman Show

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The Truman Show came out before the reality TV craze really set in, so its prescience is commendable and chilling.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carey) is a man who’s been filmed since birth, and for 30 years, the world has watched him round the clock. The only person who doesn’t know that Truman’s a big, big star is Truman himself, who believes himself to be living a normal life. An entire town has been hired and created to convince him of this, but everyone’s in on it, everyone’s an actor with their own motives and agendas. When Truman does begin to catch on to the ruse, no one is more keen to stop his leaving than his director of 30 years, Christoff (Ed Harris).

When Sisken and Ebert reviewed The Truman Show, they gave it an enthusiastic two-thumbs-up, but also gave an unprecedented on-air apology to Jim Carrey for having said that he would never have a career when they hate-reviewed Ace Ventura: Pet Detective just a few years earlier.

The Truman Show wasn’t just a hit at the box office, it became a cultural phenomenon. In 2008, Popular Mechanics declared it one of the 10 most prophetic science fiction films ever. Big Brother debuted just a year after The Truman Show hit theatres, and the popularity of other shows like it probably predict the downfall of humanity, but the fact that so many people flocked to the movies to see that same thing satirized has to be a good sign, right?

The Truman Show is studied in lots of Media Ethics courses. Of course they look at Truman’s creator, Christoff, the director who stalked unwanted pregnancies and eventually trapped an unwitting human in a very big but very fake bubble. But they also look at Marlon, Truman’s best friend, and Meryl, his wife. These of course are simply actors playing a part – Meryl (Laura Linney) basically prostitutes herself for the role and is willing to bear Truman’s child, who will be a star of a spin-off.

Even more interestingly, psychologists are reporting real people experiencing the “Truman Syndrome” or the “Truman Show Delusion”, basically people believing they are the unwilling stars of their own reality TV shows. Some people may be happy about this fake fame, others tormented. But they believe cameras are secretly following and filming them around the clock. One such person traveled to NYC after 9\11 to check that the towers had indeed fallen; this person believed that it was perhaps just an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another such person climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty believing his long-lost high school girlfriend would meet him there, and he’d finally be released from the show.

I’m betting\hoping The Truman Show was a little less life-altering for you than it was for some of these poor people, but doesn’t that just go to show the effect the media can have on our lives?