Bill Condon's smart, stirring life of the renowned mid-century sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, has a lot to say on the subject of sex, which it treats with sobriety, sensitivity and a welcome measure of humor. Condon, who parsed the riddles of erotic desire in his earlier film Gods and Monsters, regards the humid matters of the flesh with a dry, sympathetic intelligence. What really turns him on, though -- or at any rate what makes his new movie's heart beat faster -- is science.
The director addresses sexuality with candor and wit, but it is the act of research as much as its object that imparts to Kinsey its flush of passion and its rush of romance. I can't think of another movie that has dealt with sex so knowledgeably and, at the same time, made the pursuit of knowledge seem so sexy. There are some explicit images and provocative scenes, but it is your intellect that is most likely to be aroused.
Which is, of course, its own form of pleasure, one all too rarely granted by film biographies of the famous and the great. Unlike written lives, which thrive on endless expansion and documentation, biopics must compress and shape the messy narrative of actual life into three acts and two hours, and the conventions of the genre have the effect of eroding the very individuality they mean to celebrate, constructing smooth, nearly interchangeable stories of trauma and triumph out of the knotty partic-ulars of public life and personal history. Kinsey does not entirely escape from these conventions, and includes a few scenes in which its protagonist's character is explained rather than embodied.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
There is, for example, a dinner table scene midway through in which Kinsey (Liam Neeson) is clearly treating his son with the same imperious lack of sympathy that his own father (John Lithgow) inflicted on him. We get the point, but just in case we missed it, Kinsey's wife (Laura Linney) steps in to berate her husband. "Have you learned nothing?'' she demands. "Nothing?''
In spite of a few heavy-handed moments like that one, Kinsey is remarkably adept in showing us just how much Kinsey did learn, and how much we can and did learn from him. Depending on your view of current mores, he was either a Promethean figure, liberating Americans from ignorance, superstition and hypocrisy, or a Pandora opening up a box of permissiveness and perversion. Condon clearly takes the first view, and he argues the case for Kinsey's contribution to sexual knowledge and social health without ignoring the more troubling aspects of his life and legacy.
But his Kinsey -- whose hobbies include gardening and classical music, and who is rarely without his trademark bow tie -- is also, charmingly, a nerd. "You're a lot more square than I thought you'd be,'' says one of his research subjects, and the future Mrs. Kinsey finds him a little "churchy." Kinsey, a zoologist specializing in the taxonomy of gall wasps, came late to sex, as both an intellectual and a physical pursuit. As the movie tells it, his fieldwork, collecting hundreds of thousands of wasp specimens, offered an escape from a sickly, unhappy childhood and from his bullying, puritanical father, a professor at the Stevens Institute in Rochester and a Methodist lay preacher first shown inveighing against such sinful modern inventions as the combustion engine, the electric light and the zipper. "Lust has a thousand avenues,'' he rails.
The greatest risk the movie takes is in attempting to deal frankly with its hero's own sex life without succumbing to prurience or easy moralism. Sometimes his scientific zeal shaded into obsession, and his methods went from the empirical to the experimental in ways that remain ethically troubling. "Is there a Mrs. Kinsey?'' wondered a scanda-lized matron in a famous magazine cartoon published in the wake of the best-selling Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Kinsey.
In undertaking his sex research, Kinsey set out to document what was normal, and discovered a universe of variation. In publishing his findings, he horrified some readers and titillated others, but the implications of his work, as presented in this humane and serious film, go far beyond mamma-lian physiology or human behavior. Each of us is different, and none of us is alone.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS