Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

There's a good chance the film will make you laugh out loud, but if it doesn't, there's an even better chance it will make you openly sob.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I've heard people compare this movie to Sideways. How this comparison was made, I'll never guess because this movie was in no way comparable to Sideways.These 2 films were as different as Star Wars and the Thornbirds. The only thing they had in common at all was they both had wine as a subject.Though the interviews in this documentary were semi-interesting, they were ruined by the absolute worst camera work ever...attempted. I've never seen worse camera work in my life and I'm comparing it to home videos accidentally taken by 5 year olds.I give this two stars, ONLY for the interesting interviews with French wine types and for showing how pushy and corrupt the American wine companies are (Aren't all companies pushy and corrupt?) I'd give it -10 stars (Yes, that's NEGATIVE 10) for the deplorable, terrible, horrible, awful, VERTIGO-INDUCING, 5-year-old-could-do-better camera mess.

First, I loved the documentary. It represents a new school history/theory where a subject can reflect a wide range of social and historical issues.I'll get the camera and dogs out of the way first. I hate the Blair Witch quality of the camera, but also understand the advantage of such a casual approach. In fact, I agree with the other reviewer that it gives us unprecedented access.Dogs: Warning, I have a doctoral degree in literature which I do NOT use as a profession, so some of my training may seep in: The dogs are a beautiful metaphor for the complex relationship of human's great endeavors and our need to find the labor to achieve them. The dogs might reflect their owners, as one reviewer suggested. But they also serve as a stand-in for the workers we see in the film. While this might hint at the Marxist problem raised by one reviewer, I think it also shows how difficult it is to globalize labor issues. No Mondovi's in Italy may not translate as well elsewhere. (Yikes! I am a Marxist at heart and hate to hear my cynical resignation hold sway!) It is a remarkable bait and switch. The dogs are family, the workers are family. But, in the end, the dogs are the workers (the last scene with the poor farmer). While you may disagree with the politics, the artistry of the analogy, coupled with the more overt politics of the film, are wonderful.Had only Faulkner (I am from Alabama) had the power of film beyond the Hollywood market, what interesting tales would have been told.

i was looking forward to this, and to be honest there were some bright spots, but it would have worked better if it had concentrated on one story rather than shooting all over the world. The many dogs were a lot of fun but i got bored of the wine fascists pompously whining (;-)) on about their achievements.I felt it would have worked better as an hour long TV documentary, concentrating on one of the many different issues it explored. The most interesting being the french town near montpelier fighting off a an American wine company's campaign to get rid of the historic forests. A socialist mayor agreed to a deal, a nicely timed election arrived, and a communist mayor was elected, who turned it down, much to the exasperation of the American wine execs...hopefully the director's cut will be shorter than the original..

Mondovino is an extraordinary documentary. It's self-indulgent, quirky, opinionated and overlong, but it's likely to be indespensible, because it's a devastating anatomy of the growing conflict between authentic local production (the French key word is "terroir") and the globalization of wine by which family origins are forgotten and the emphasis is on quick satisfaction, forward flavor, and standardized tastes.The maker of this film is Jonathan Nossiter, polyglot, sommelier, happy tippler, photographer, director, and star interviewer in his documentary film – which began as a quickie, but wound up taking four years to make. Nossiter appears as fluent in Italian as he is in French, and perhaps in Spanish and Portuguese too. He's often on screen, addressing everyone in their native language, but it's his camera that's obsessed with sometimes annoying details, above all dogs.Never mind, though; he manages to get everybody to open up to him, including many of the leading "players" of the international wine market, including those who come off the worst in Nossiter's documentary. And even those dogs turn out to have meaning. Isn't one's dog the clearest metaphor for a person's true nature? It's obvious Nossiter likes Battista Columbu in Sardinia and Hubert de Montille in Volnay best – and it's obvious why. They're different sorts of men: Columbu is radiant and serene, de Montille querulous and acerbic. But they stand equally for what may be a vanishing world -- one where wine-making is authentic, personal, local, humane, where it's identified with place of origin not brand, done for pride of craft not profit, or – what the Michel Rollands and Mondavis want – for worldwide, nay, universe-wide market domination. Both dream openly on camera of making wine on other planets and of selling it to everyone.De Montille comes across as mattering more than the Mondavis or any of the other aristos and plutocrats. He has only a few hectares. He makes wine that's severe, edgy, not for everyone – like himself -- and long-lasting. He's true to himself. A big focus of Mondovino is how the California Mondavis – who've already collaborated with overblown first growth bordeaux Mouton Rothchild to produce a pricey California hybrid, Opus One, since the Eighties -- recently tried to get hold of a big slice of burgundy. But a communist mayor took over the town from a socialist one and the sweetheart deal was off. The Wine Spectator becomes, as Nossiter shows, one of the manipulators, and manipulation is an essential aspect of globalization. So too is Robert Parker, of Monkton, Maryland (who gets interviewed and his flatulent bulldogs thoroughly photographed). Parker has always been independent, but his wine ratings (and his taste) have come to wield too much power over the world wine market. French wine-makers are terrified of him, and that situation has undermined their independence. Parker, it turns out, has long been very friendly with Michel Rolland, a super-star French wine consultant (whose Mercedes limo we get to ride around in), and it turns out that the kind of heady, forward, fast-developing wine Parker likes is also what Rolland encourages wine-makers to produce – and globalization means not only eliminating small producers but homogenizing wine styles. Hence Rolland's ebullient charm is suspect, but so are Parker's so-called authenticity and independence. The richness of Nossiter's picture comes out in the way he delineates wine families and their different, sometimes squabbling, members – most of all the de Montilles, the stubborn, feisty and wise old Hubert; his energetic son Etienne, who works for the powerful negociant, Boisset; and his daughter, Alix, in personality closer to Hubert, who decided to leave Boisset because they want her to lie -- to put her seal on wines she hasn't supervised the making of. Nossiter's eye and ear can be devastating. The rich Staglin family in Napa Valley emerges as self-congratulatory and self-deceiving nouveaux bores. Their and other ruling wine families' condescension, outright racism, and covert or past links with the fascists and even the Nazis is another of the persistent filmmaker's gradual revelations. As one Nossiter interviewer has said, "don't get him on the subject of Berlusconi and Bush"; but Berlusconi is just fine with the wealthy Italian wine-making families.Another sympathetic dissenter to the globalizing bandwagon is New York wine importer Neal Rosenthal, who knows the importance of terroir and the inroads against it. Rosenthal was present as a speaker after two of Film Forum's afternoon showings of Mondovino -- a local hero, of sorts, for the documentary's US premiere. It's hard to do justice to the film or even list its full roster of figures. Michael Broadbent, longtime Wine Director at Christie's, a dry, aristocratic Englishman, once a leading authority and wine tastemaker, now eclipsed, as all are, by Parker, appears on screen to fill in the central role the English played in the growth of France's finest wines. Bernard Magrez, head of a huge Bordeaux dealership; the Antinoris of Florence (aristocrats with fascist lineage). . .the list goes on and on. One doesn't want to stop, and one sees why Nossiter's film is too long. Because it's all there in the details: this is what the controversy is about. Little things matter. Mondovino is annoying (the jumpy camera, the dog farts), but also riveting and important – a film not to be missed. And for the truly interested, there is a ten-part TV series from this material on the way.