Saturday, January 22, 2005

"I'M DIFFERENT NOW. I SING." Given that he's hosting "SNL" tonight and is all-but-certain to get a Best Actor Oscar nomination Tuesday morning for "Sideways," it seems like today is a good day to look back at the career of Paul Giamatti. Though he's now one of the more critically acclaimed actors working today, courtesy of the rapturous reviews for "Sideways" and "American Splendor," I want to look at a couple of his earlier films that aren't really all that great, but that he alone makes worth watching.

The first is the Frankie Muniz vehicle "Big Fat Liar," which I saw solely because of Giamatti's involvement. Giamatti plays a weasely Hollywood studio executive who steals a young kid's story and turns it into an overhyped Hollywood blockbuster. The kid (Muniz) and his friend (Amanda Bynes, in her big screen debut) travel to Hollywood to take their revenge. Of course, the jokes are lame and Giamatti winds up spending most of the movie in Blue Man Group-style makeup with a cell phone literally glued into his ear, but he makes the most of it, elevating the juvenile shenanigans to another level. Bizarrely, the other high point of the film is Sandra Oh's (Giamatti's co-star in "Sideways") turn as a high school principal.

The second film is a better film, but a more notorious bomb. "Duets" grossed less than $5 million during its theatrical run, although it spawned a fairly successful soundtrack, particularly the Gwyneth Paltrow/Huey Lewis duet version of Smokey Robinson's soul classic "Cruisin'." The film tells the story of three disparate pairs of people journeying to a "Karaoke Showdown" in Omaha--the daughter of a Vegas showgirl (Paltrow) and her father, a karaoke hustler (Lewis), a cabbie looking for meaning (Scott Speedman) and a waitress (Maria Bello, who sings a mean "I Can't Make You Love Me"), and a man on a bender (Giamatti) and the escaped convict he picks up on the side of the road ("Homicide"s Andre Braugher). Giamatti and Braugher's story is the best of the three, even though Braugher's vocals are dubbed, unlike everyone else in the movie, and Giamatti's performance is an unheralded but great piece of work as a man so frustrated with life that he runs away from it, but who lights up when he discovers that he can sing. And sing he does--cover versions of "Try A Little Tenderness" and "Hello, It's Me." Especially on a snowy afternoon, well worth checking out.

(And speaking of Maria Bello, her presence is just one of the things that makes this weekend's remake of "Assault on Precinct 13" such a pleasant surprise.)

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