Ah, holidays–a time of year to wander around a video store 5,000 miles away from home and realize that Blockbuster, although significantly cheaper than your local video store (whose late fees kick in around 12 seconds after your five-plus euro 24-hour rental is up), has exactly the same range of offerings. (Remember the good old 1980s when, say, ET seemed to arrive in Ireland around 18 months after its American release? We were so grateful when the Hollywood studios got around to remembering us.) As the Arizonan sun has partially incinerated my brain, I can only offer short reviews of the following movies, initially plucked from the shelves more out of desperation than in hope*:Sideways: Of course it’s good. But given the superlatives bestowed upon it, the sneaking thought is “Yeah, enjoyable, some insights, but it isn’t the masterpiece you told me it was.” There’s the issue, raised by others, of whether a superficially charmless and unattractive character such as Miles (Paul Giamatti) could snag a woman such as Maya (Virginia Madsen). But a more profound irritation for me was that Miles acts as though the rejection of his novel means that his life is a complete washout. Yet we see that he actually has a job as an English teacher. Obviously being a teacher means next to nothing for him; perhaps it’s the most expedient way of paying the rent on his fleabag apartment and supporting his quasi-alcoholic lifestyle. Now, I know it would be ridiculous to become angry with Miles’s treatment of his pupils (as if I’m the parent of one of the glimpsed fictional students!), but it does put into perspective Miles’s thwarted ambition. Sure, his adolescent dream remains unfilled (join 99.9% of the rest of humanity) but it’s not as though he’s going to become literally destitute because of it.Closer: Awful. It suffers from a cinematic disease that first appeared, I think, in Woody Allen movies. Let’s call it “Beautiful People Suffering Tastefully in Exquisitely Decorated Interiors Syndrome.” As characters talk about sex and betrayal, you’re really thinking “How much did that bloody loft cost? A mil, two?”I think this picture also explains why Jude Law’s career appears to be stalled. There is something about his sculpted face when it’s trying to telegraph sorrow that makes you want to smack it. Elephant: Very strong. Gus Van Sant’s mediation on the Columbine high-school massacre displays the influences of several moviemakers. In its ultralong takes that lope after walking characters it shows a style reminiscent of Bela Tarr (Check out the Hungarian’s sublime “Werckmeister Harmonies” for a (very) challenging 2+ hours). The high school’s long corridors with their reflective sheen also make you think of the buffed floors from Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”. And when the camera revolves around a basement when one of the soon-to-be-killers plays Beethoven on the piano, I even thought of a sequence in Godard’s “Weekend” when the camera pans around a farmyard as a pianist inexpertly tackles Mozart. It’s a disturbing piece of work that succeeds, I think/hope, in sidestepping an obvious potential pitfall. The Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were interested in becoming famous through their deeds–a picture based on their actions might seem like a realization of their hopes for immortality. But Van Sant’s detached portrayal does not depict them as either snickering monsters or bullied victims who snap. They are not interesting in other words. Rather, they are blanks, with personalities as rounded as the pixilated figures who roam the deserts, shooting complaisant figures, of their video games. And the classical music one of the characters plays does not suggest that he possesses a tortured inner self. Rather it serves to underscore a Romantic ideal of sentiment, perhaps lost, that is quite alien to Van Sant’s duo, Alex and Eric. So, in response to the real murderers’ wishes for eternal notoriety, the filmmaker dismisses them as ciphers, automatons. Not something, I suspect, Harris and Klebold would have wanted. (They probably wouldn’t have been too crazy about being depicted as lovers either).Well, that’s my take anyway.Suspect Zero: This is one of those films that make you suspect that, despite all their chatter about artistry, actors will appear in almost anything if the money is right. How else can you explain, for example, Robert De Niro’s appearance in the “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle”? And how else can you fathom “Sir” Ben Kingsley’s turn, in a faint echo of his “Sexy Beast” persona, as a [Spoiler Alert] a former FBI agent cursed with precognitive powers who tracks down serial killers by going into a trance. High concept only in the sense the writer and screenwriter must have been on something when creating this slice of po-faced schlock.*I sometimes worry about the day when I spend longer in the video store looking for something to watch than actually watching what I finally select.