Kinsey (2004)
Directed by Bill Condon
Kinsey is a portrait of researcher Alfred Kinsey, driven to uncover the most private secrets of a nation. What begins for Kinsey as a scientific endeavor soon takes on an intensely personal relevance, ultimately becoming an unexpected journey into the mystery of human behavior.
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The worst offender being John Lithgow whose portrayal of Kinsey's fundamentalist preacher father sticks out as a caricature (perhaps the casting was a nod to his righteous reverend in "Footloose") until a quiet moment towards the end of the film which nearly redeems his whole performance.
Kinsey’s father (played by John Lithgow, reliving his “Footloose” sanctimony), a small-town moral tyrant, preaches that “the modern inventions of science have been used to cultivate immorality” — the same argument that very sensible people today make about Internet pornography and such, except that HE’S talking about inventions like electricity and the telephone.
Condon depicts Kinsey as the spitting mirror image of his hellfire-preaching Sunday schoolmaster daddy (John Lithgow, far more moving than he was in his superficially similar bluenose-pop role in Footloose).
Writer-director Bill Condon won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with his previous film, Gods and Monsters, a biopic of Frankenstein director James Whale.
The writer-director of Gods and Monsters, a fantastical account of the latter days of Frankenstein director James Whale, plays it fairly straight in biographing famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.
Kinsey makes no apologies for its subject's often infuriating behavior -- in that manner, it has much in common with writer-director Bill Condon's previous feature Gods and Monsters, which presented Frankenstein director James Whale as tragically flawed yet allowed us a look at those personal demons that all too often defined his very being.
Six years ago writer/director Bill Condon fashioned a highly speculative account of the waning days of iconographic filmmaker James Whale, the man who made "Frankenstein."
It's subject was the late James Whale, who directed the original Frankenstein and it's first sequel in the 1930s, and went on to win an Academy Award for his work on Show Boat.
It's subject was the late James Whale, who directed the original Frankenstein and it's first sequel in the 1930s, and went on to win an Academy Award for his work on Show Boat.
I was reminded of Russell Crowe's work in " A Beautiful Mind " (2001), also the story of a man whose brilliance was contained within narrow channels.
Like other recent biopics of influential but troubled men such as Ray and A Beautiful Mind, Kinsey is willing to allow its subject to be a flawed human being — up to a point.
(Kinsey is remarkable for making scientific concepts clear and comprehensible without resorting to the gimmickry of A Beautiful Mind.)
Laura Linney has a thankless role, that of the supportive woman who stands by her obsessed, brilliant man (see also Jennifer Connelly in “A Beautiful Mind,” Marcia Gay Harden in “Pollock” ), but she does it stoically and with grace.
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In "Gods and Monsters," (starring Ian McKellan), he created a sensitive portrait of gay filmmaker James Whale.
Writer-director Bill Condon won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with his previous film, Gods and Monsters, a biopic of Frankenstein director James Whale.
Writer-director Bill Condon ("Gods and Monsters") shoots a mostly conventional biopic of the pioneering but square sex researcher.
Condon, the talented writer/director of "Gods and Monsters" (which also chronicled a real person — director James Whale — of whom our memory is now faded), frames his story with a number of one-on-one interviews, intended to convey the strange mixture of clinical distance and intimacy that Kinsey and his team employed.
Writer/director Bill Condon ("Gods and Monsters") follows up his wildly imaginative debut with a thought provoking examination of the life of the well know sex researcher in an ironically more buttoned-down style.
In focusing on Kinsey's rise to prominence, the film, written and directed by Bill Condon ("Gods and Monsters"), tends to take more of a cheerleader position, dismissing and glossing over Kinsey's faults as a scientist and celebrating his crusading spirit.
Isn't Kinsey, in a way, the father of the man-on-woman, woman-on-monster, monster-on-man pansexual utopia of The Rocky Horror Picture Show?
(Back in the '30s before unflinching naturalism was possible the romance approach to biography in American movies like The Story of Louis Pasteur made more sense.)
He's more than respectable as Charles but finally his hilarious performance in Booty Call (1997) is more fully achieved.
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What's extremely cool about Vera Drake is that director Mike Leigh ( Topsy-Turvy ) kept it a secret from the rest of the cast -- the actors playing Vera's husband and grown children -- just exactly what Vera has been up to all these years, so that when she finally and inevitably gets caught, they're really actually stunned.
When an affair between Clyde's new bride Alice (Julianne Nicholson, "Tully") and a married coworker (Timothy Hutton, "Secret Window") causes a fight to break out between the two men, Kinsey only appears to see the practical solution, not the emotional fallout.