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 anything quite like it. A-
MIA LIPMAN

CD
ALISON HARRIS: SMOKE RINGS IN THE SKY
(Omega)
These days, female singer-songwriters tend to be either super-slick Americana idols like the Dixie Chicks or indie-folk weirdos like Joanna New­som. There’s no middle ground, nobody to take up the mantle of a Lucinda Williams or Beth Orton. But maybe that’s where Sebastopol native Alison Harris fits in. On her debut album, she croons about loneliness and longing with a grace that listeners across the musical spectrum should connect with. Much like Randy Newman, whose “Guilty” she has covered in concert, Harris has the right voice for her songs; her smooth, arid tone provides the perfect distance between her heartbreaking details and her band’s tasteful playing. The twangy “Mockingbird,” in which she tries to coax a loud-singing lothario out of her sycamore tree, and the bluesy waltz “Trainhopper,” during which she spies on a rail-riding tweaker, are plenty feisty. But Harris is at her best when she spins sad yarns, such as the from-the-grave love song “Angelina.” If she keeps this up, she could emulate another Harris—Emmylou—by earning the love of underground and mainstream music fans alike. A-
DAN STRACHOTA

BOOK
Jennifer Traig: Well Enough Alone
(Riverhead)
Local essayist and humor writer Jennifer Traig, who mined her personal neuroses in Devil in the Details, a well-received and often hysterically funny memoir of her struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, now shares her sister ailment, hypochondria. The daughter of two doctors, Traig had a childhood obsession with health and sickness (mostly the latter) that only got worse with access to the Internet. Search engines made it possible to indulge in endless cycles of self-diagnosis, develop miraculous symptoms through the power of suggestion, and find herself all too frequently in real hospitals with real outbreaks and palpitations to go with her imaginary diseases. Traig is wonderful at describing her bouts with a truly painful illness without indulging in self-pity—though she can be far too detailed, depending on your tolerance for graphic depictions of, say, skin rashes and group vomiting. Indeed, she is so good at hiding her pain behind self-mockery that you might wish her editor had held her to a quip limit. I counted 36 wisecracks in one episode about a collective bout of food poisoning at her Zionist sleepaway camp, when 15 would have been fine. Still, Traig, who also edited The Autobiographer’s Handbook, a new memoir-writing guide, earns our sympathy by not asking for too much of it. This book will certainly comfort anyone who has ever wondered, “If I think I’m a hypochondriac, how will I know if I really am?” B
SHEERLY AVNI

CD
SONY HOLLAND: SWING, BOSSAS, BALLADS & BLUES
(Van Ness)
Jazz vocalists usually go down one of three roads: singing original tunes, covering well-traveled standards, or venturing outside the Great American Songbook. On her third album, San Francisco resident Sony Holland attempts all three, with mixed results. Holland, who grew up in Minnesota and lived in Nashville and Paris before hitting the Bay Area in 2003, sings in a clean, urbane tone that’s equal parts Barbra Streisand and Sex and the City. Such smoothness is both a blessing and a curse. When a performer like honey-toned Madeleine Peyroux tackles Jerome Kern, she makes his songs her own; but when Holland covers “My Funny Valentine,” she sounds like a million other crooners. She fares far better when either abandoning the GAS (love her jaunty reworking of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”) or applying her strong pipes to the handful of upbeat tunes supplied by her songwriting husband, Jerry. On the ribald “I Was No Angel Myself,” Holland shows some welcome spunk, while on “Saving My Life Everyday,” she swings as hard as Ella. Some audiences may be content with a pretty oldie like “The Shadow of Your Smile,” but Holland is most energized and engaging when she sings original work. C+
DAN STRACHOTA