Corked: Hollywood makes wine’s first Spinal Tap
All the glorious sniffing and snobbing that is at the heart of the wine industry gets focused squarely in the lens of filmmakers Ross Clendenen and Paul Hawley. What we get is Corked, a mockumentary on the wine industry that goes right for the pretentious jugular. After the creepy failure of Bottle Shock, Hollywood finally serves up a wine movie that we can wrap our palate around.
Because Hawley was not a wine industry outsider, he was able to get right to the point of exactly what to lampoon. He grew up on his family’s vineyard in Northern California, real wine country. Say no to images of Land Rovers, hilltop villas and trophy wives. You’re thinking Napa. He grew up in a small town in Sonoma and the version of progress there was when the gun shop closed down and reopened as a day spa. The point is, I guess, that the guys knew their subject matter.
What we take away from watching Corked is our first real treat at seeing the wine industry goofed on and always with a keen eye for the obvious. All the stereotypical players are brought to light. I especially got into the two wine-marketers played by Ben Tolpin and Rob Reinis and loved the name of their agency, ScoGar. How spot on was it that one of them was in AA and the other a Bud man? Yeah, let’s bring wine to market.
We get the pretentious wine-ambassador, Donald Smythe, the whack job vineyard manager, played by Todd Norris, who comes up with some psycho ways to protect the sacred grapes. Throw in a rich kid taking over the family wine business, a paranoid cop, a dead body in a wine vat, a corrupt wine awards show and you have a fairly good sense for the mechanisms of the wine industry. Alright, it’s possible that the dead body in the wine vat was a satirical stretch.
Corked received some pretty strong reviews at Cannes last May. Critics seemed to feel that it put wine’s sniffing and snobbing in the perfect context. It’s entirely possible that wine lovers will see the humor and appeal of the film. Cable outlets like the Food Channel would be a perfect venue for it.
Let’s show you the trailer.
We want to thank the filmmakers for sending us an advanced copy of the DVD version of their film, now set for a January 2010 release date. Clendenen and Hawley worked with producer Brian Hoffman for 28 Entertainment and got distribution from TriCoast Worldwide.
