I feel like I’m having a sex week this week, lol – Best Little Whorehouse, Belle De Jour, Closer – and now, what better way to end than the movie about the guy who, arguably, made all these movies possible.

I really didn’t like Bill Condon’s last movie, Gods and Monsters: matter of fact, I fell asleep in the cinema. But Kinsey is my kind of movie. It has interesting subject matter, perfect performances (including a bunch of people, like John Lithgow and Tim Curry, who I just love to see onscreen), a great score by Carter Burwell (seriously, what was going on with the musical Oscar nominations this year??), and interesting visuals (no I’m not talking about Kinsey’s slideshows :-P) and structural ideas.

I’m not quite sure why Laura Linney has been nominated for this movie: she is, as she always is, brilliant, but she’s barely onscreen and she’s given far more interesting performances; I can, however, understand why Liam Neeson was given the cold shoulder. His performance is very awkwardly close to his Oskar Schindler in places: he even has a crying moment, in which he says something very like, “I didn’t do enough, I could’ve saved more,” etc. This is just a nitpick: his performance is otherwise brilliant.

What is most interesting about Kinsey is perhaps the most reasonable explanation why someone would want to make a movie about him all these years later: it’s kind of worrisome how little things have changed since his book. It kind of does seem almost like his work and efforts were in vain, because we still talk about these things behind closed doors – there are still so many avenues of human sexuality that haven’t been properly explored and understood. We still all kind of as repressed, if not moreso, as our parents or grandparents were back then.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 27th, 2005 at 5:47 am in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.