July 28-August 3, 2005

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

The Bike in Film II
(Fri.-Sat., July 29-30, 8 p.m., $8, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6575)
After Critical Mass takes over the streets, the Bike in Film II takes to the screen with two nights of two-wheeled entertainment. Friday's program cycles through shorts evenly split between documentaries and fanciful narratives; you can check out Cuba's plan to combat gas shortages with bicycle power, or choke back tears at the story of unrequited love between bikes. Saturday's highlight is a screening of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, perhaps the most daring chronicle of man-bike love ever to grace the silver screen. Neighborhood Bike Works will valet-park your ride, and the White Dog Cafe will host the closing night party. But please: Don't drink and pedal.

Mondovino
($29.99 DVD)
If William Blake could hold the world in a grain of sand, Jonathan Nossiter does the same with a glass of wine. The work of a fiction filmmaker and an ex-sommelier to boot, Nossiter's hand-held, digitally shot doc is visually eccentric and unabashedly partisan (not the same thing as biased). From the ancient vineyards of Bordeaux and Tuscany to the mega-wineries of Napa, with stops in Baltimore (home of omnipotent critic Robert Parker) and Brazil (where tree-climbing farmers make wine for themselves and their guests), Nossiter literally traverses the globe in search of old-fashioned ways and new-fangled techniques. Wine, Nossiter told me at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, is as varied as people, and reflects the people who make it, a philosophy that has much to do with his preference for crusty farmers over slick entrepreneurs. Of wines like Mondavi's big-ticket Opus One, infused with grapes from all over the world, Nossiter says, "Would you want every woman to look like Pamela Anderson?" (One French farmer succinctly calls the conglomerates "terroiristes.") Above all, Mondovino venerates the notion of terroir, the part-real, part-mystical sense of place that is necessarily absent from big-brand bottles. Nossiter's predilection for the handmade extends even to his cinematography, his loose, jagged camerawork frequently departing from his ostensible subject to highlight some subversive (or, sometimes, merely distracting) detail. (He seems downright obsessed with shots of winery dogs, so much so that the longtime cat lover now has his own.)

It's hard to escape the feeling that Mondovino's alleged populism is balanced by a covert snobbery: Nossiter may justly bemoan Parker's highly influential preference for big American reds over musty European vintages, but Parker's claim to have "democratized the wine experience" still holds water. But it's a measure of Mondovino's openness that even the ostensibly bad guys get their say, although some, like high-priced "wine consultant" Michel Rolland, have attacked the film for recording their own incautious statements. To be fair, Nossiter does make Rolland look unduly glib by declining to explain his oft-touted method of "micro-oxygenation," which involves bubbling air through the vats to give new wine the roundness of old. Nossiter did a little micro-oxygenation of his own, digitally tweaking in post-production so his colors burst off the screen; his skies have the ripeness of just-picked fruit. But it's only fair that Nossiter, like his subjects, picks up a few blemishes along the way; his old-world vintners cultivate prejudices as well as wine, some longing for Mussolini and applauding Berlusconi, others dismissing Jewish neighbors who vanished during the Holocaust. Inevitably, Mondovino demands to be savored, swallowed slowly and mulled over after the fact (an opportunity that Nossiter's planned 10-hour version would offer in buckets). Perhaps a two-hour-plus documentary on the globalization of wine is a hard sell, but it's a shame that Jonathan Nossiter's eye-opening film never rated a Philadelphia screening. At least this way, you can drink while you watch.

Misc. Picks Fans of classic comedy and al fresco movies, rejoice: Secret Cinema shows Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert at 40th St. Field (Thu., 9 p.m.) and the Lawn-Chair Drive-In hosts an evening of silent shorts at Liberty Lands Park — now home of the Giant Hole! (Wed., dusk). If you prefer laughing indoors, take note of the County/Bryn Mawr/Ambler syndicate's Born Yesterday (Mon./Wed./Thu., respectively, all at 7 p.m.), and mark your calendars for the week of Aug. 8, when the Stan and Ollie fest continues with Way Out West and The Music Box.