Films featuring
Paul Giamatti

Saving Private Ryan

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Saving Private Ryan is almost two movies in one. The first is a short but intense 30-minute piece about the Omaha Beach landings while the second is a more traditional “unit” picture running about two-and-a-half hours. Only the presence of the same actors in both ties the two parts together. Each could probably stand separately but folded into the same film, the first part helps give the second, longer narrative layers of meaning and emotional weight that it wouldn’t otherwise carry.

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Cinderella Man

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Ron Howard has a reputation for excessive sentimentality in his films. I’ll reserve judgment on whether this is deserved for another time, but if it is true, Howard was the perfect director for Cinderella Man. This mostly accurate story of real life boxer James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe) needs a filmmaker willing to yank on the heartstrings like a team of Clydesdales. This film is so consciously old fashioned that it really ought to have been filmed in black and white in the old 4:3 Academy aspect ratio.

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Sideways

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It’s a rare film that actually has a measurable impact on a completely unrelated industry. And for it to be such a sweet, low-key comedy like Sideways is, I think, almost unheard of. But after this film was a hit with audiences, sales of Pinot Noir skyrocketed while those of Merlot dipped slightly.

I sincerely doubt that the filmmakers went into this project aiming to reshape the wine industry. They were just trying to make a quiet, very human story about two friends on a road trip to celebrate an impending marriage and, in that effort, they very much succeeded.

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