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So, the tipsiest we'll get this season may be from a documentary about wine. From its opening pan of a cellar synced to "I Put A Spell on You," Red Obsession hints that we're about to be possessed by something pretty heady.
The wine trade already has.
Directors Warwick Ross and David Roach begin their beguiling film in the Bordeaux region of western France. As we learn from narrator Russell Crowe, nature and two millennia of experience in fermenting grapes have conferred perfection on its terroirs and passion on its winemakers.
"You need to bring so much love to your vines," coos vigneron Christian Moeuix, who has just helped a lunch party of seven polish off three magnums. With kindred devotion, a competitor from Château Palmer romances his varietals, "I know your soul; I know your character..." Even Francis Ford Coppola rhapsodizes about Bordeaux's "miraculous...works of art," declaring, "Napoleon and Jefferson had tried it, so you're one with history."
As a symbol of heritage, refinement, power and wealth, Bordeaux bottles carry ultimate status in the global wine market. And no place is this more consequential than in brand-conscious China, where buying the world's finest wine is buying "face."
Shot three years after the world financial crisis, Red Obsession charts the shift in global power as the Western economies falter and "the dragon awakes." What begins as a valentine to vin rouge becomes a primer in commerce.
The land of the 60s Cultural Revolution now has more billionaires than the US, and the film handpicks a few for us to meet. One tycoon who made his fortune making sex toys lines his walls with Bordeaux's coveted treasures. He's good for a chuckle, but we fairly swoon as a socialite recalls bidding $1.5 million for a bottle of Lafite at Christie's. We get either thirsty or goosebumps contemplating the implications for anyone else on the planet who may want a nice glass of Bordeaux.
And that's one of the punchlines: the tipple is too pricy to imbibe. Since 1982, we learn, Bordeaux wine has outperformed the Dow, the FTSE -- even gold. It's hard not to hope that the bubble will have burst by the credit roll.
As the film moves deeper into issues of supply and demand, we journey to such outposts as the Silk Road town of Turfan near the Mongolian border. There in the craggy desert, as elsewhere around China, vineyards are springing up overnight. We get a jolt contemplating the projected needs of Chinese consumers in the not-so-distant future, when the entire global production of wine won't suffice to go around.
Another sobering thought is the burgeoning -- and centuries-aged -- local practice of honoring creators with knock-offs of their work. On the lighter side of fakery, there's Château Changyu-AFIP just outside of Beijing. This fairytalish winery may not be as noble as the French estate that inspired it, but it lends the film yet another welcome moment of comedic relief from what might otherwise feel like an economics lecture.
Red Obsession is not only jam-packed with nutrients, it goes down more smoothly than most of the 2013 film crop and leaves us with a hell of a buzz.
Out of the Clear Blue Sky is hardly the first documentary about 9/11, but its chronicle of bond trader Cantor Fitzgerald tells a uniquely epic tale of a corporate family. All of the 658 employees who began that dreadful day at company headquarters on the World Trade Center's top five floors lost their lives, representing nearly a quarter of the attack's total casualties.
Within 48 hours of September 11, Lutnick was promising through widely televised sobs to take care of the Cantor Fitzgerald community: Cantor would now turn over 25 percent of corporate profits to the victims’ families for five years and treat them to 10 years of healthcare. Overnight the man with the "ruthless and cutthroat reputation on Wall Street" became "the face of the tragedy" to a nation in shock who shared in his grief and found solace in his generosity.
Amour
Afternoon Delight, as the title of Jill Soloway's debut feature suggests, has sex on the brain. That's not so much the case for its leading married couple when we first meet them. Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Jeff (Josh Radnor) live in the trendy, upscale Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, where they're raising their son Logan. Since his birth several years earlier, the fizz has gone out of their bedroom.
Also draining libidos are Jeff's job and Rachel's lack thereof. Creating apps connects Jeff to the world -- and bankrolls the Architectural Digest home -- while distancing the conjugal relationship. For her part, Rachel cashiered her dreams of being a war correspondent in favor of motherhood, jogging and attending JCC events.
No amount of wine-and-chat get togethers with other mothers or sessions with a self-absorbed therapist (Jane Lynch) can cure the unfulfilled thirtysomething's ennui. To compound matters, she realizes how good she has it. "How can I complain? "Women in Africa walk 14 miles for water and get raped."
For an erotic recharge, Rachel arranges a couples' visit to a strip club. There she's treated to a lap dance by blond bombshell McKenna (Juno Temple), whom she soon hires as a live-in nanny. Rachel gets her big chance at making the world a better place, but whether it's the young "full-service-sex-worker" or herself that she means to help is arguable. It gives little away to reveal that Rachel appears as surprised as we are when sabbath rites redeem her saga.
Having written and produced TV such series as Six Feet Under, United States of Tara and How to Make It in America, Soloway gravitates to material that's out there yet still fertile for probing resonant themes. Comedy and adult don't always mix easily in Afternoon Delight, yet the tonal clash is offset by precisely Soloway's concern with real challenges of romance, career, family and community.