FILM
Bottle Shock
(Opens August 6)
Here’s the glossed-up backstory to 1976’s so-called Judgment of Paris. At this historic blind tasting in Europe, two Napa Valley wines, including Château Montelena’s chardonnay, toppled French hegemony and put new-world winemaking on the map (and fees in the tasting room). Mainly, Bottle Shock looks at how Montelena’s implacable former-lawyer proprietor, Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), and his slacker son, Bo (Chris Pine), crossed paths with the event’s organizer, Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), a snooty British wine merchant doing reluctant recon in California. (Winemaker Mike Grgich, who went on to create his own successful winery, is strangely absent from the story.) Though bolstered by affable performances, the Rocky-meets-Sideways script, cowritten by director Randall Miller and his wife, Jody Savin, is weakened by hokey dramatization and overextended with pat, clunky subplots. It flatters the California wine country ethos of good living, which would be fine if the movie itself weren’t so Hollywood: Abundant helicopter shots of rolling, sun-dappled vineyards signify a fablelike land of repose and rustic delectation, in which even the grizzled old barflies have occasion to shout, “Any asshole can tell a merlot from a zinfandel!” Verdict: Chewy, ripe, and rounded almost to the point of flabbiness, it finishes rather cleanly; less satisfying is the fragrant bouquet, which contains notes of corn and all-wet underdog. B-
JONATHAN KIEFER

BOOK
Andrew Foster Altschul: Lady Lazarus
(Harcourt)
This engrossing first novel by San Francisco’s Andrew Foster Altschul dwells at the crossroads of Rolling Stone’s insider fanaticism, David Foster Wallace’s academic posturing, and the confessional hijinks of real­ity TV. The story tracks the obsessive research of a wannabe biographer, also named Andrew, into the chaotic life of Calliope Bird Morath. The daughter of an iconic punk rocker who commits suicide in front of her, Calliope becomes a poet whose talent, beauty, and mental instability inspire her own cult following. Part music-magazine profile, part faux memoir, Lady Lazarus is almost too rich with pop­ular culture for its own good: Calliope is compared to Ché Guevara and Sylvia Plath, while fictional Andrew references countless writers, musicians, and media. At one point, Calliope—whose first-person narrative is impressively surreal—even changes her name to an unpro­nounceable symbol, à la Prince. Alongside the poet’s inevitable public breakdown, Altschul shows us Andrew’s private unraveling—in his stalkerlike attraction to his subject, his anta­gonistic attempts at ther­apy, and his clumsy parenting. The cacophony of characters can be hard to follow, and the psychedelic final chapters too closely resemble the most self-indulgent music journalism, but Altschul’s attention to detail is astounding. If you like the novel’s conceit and tongue-in-cheek style, you’ll be instantly immersed. If you don’t, good luck getting past the first few footnotes. Either way, you’ve never read