This is gonna be one of those get-it-the-hell-done-already posts, since I won't let myself watch another movie 'til I'm caught up and I'm not sure I can add a whole lot to the discourse on this here movie. Um, lessee: 1) great work from Giamatti, Church, Madsen and Oh (who would be deserving of an Oscar nom if her character had a little more to do; she makes a helluva an impression); 2) Good script that gets off to a bumpy start; the exposition isn't poorly handled so much as it feels a bit obvious. Not such a crime since other details, like Miles' alcoholism, are handled with some subtlety. 4) However, I'm going to be a bit contrarian and say that I ultimately prefer Payne's About Schmidt. It's true that here, Payne is definitely more "humanistic"; he's less judgmental, less detached, cares about the characters more. But I think that, in this case, it results in a blander movie, visually and emotionally. Odd that I would feel that; by the end, Schmidt is trapped, but Miles has the hope for a way out. But Schmidt's world is always defined by spaces that are both cavernous and claustrophobic (offices, the motor home, the wedding reception room), and that and Payne's distance from his characters gave the movie an, oh I don't know, an "edge". Sideways, by contrast, with its Kodak moments and funny-cute montages, feels like soggy bread. 5) Yet one of the more maligned sections of Sideways appears to be the retrieval of the wallet, or, as its known on Cinemarati, the "flapping wanger" scene. I guess some people object to the outrageousness of it, after ninety minutes of restrained realism, and I think some see misanthropy in the depiction of the lower-class married couple. I can't really speak to the first -- either you welcome the low comedy at that point or reject it -- but there's something interesting going on in the second. No one's seem to noticed that, after confronting his wife's infidelity, the man, who could potentially do a lot of things (yell, storm out, get physically abusive), turns it into a bedroom fantasy (with the wife on board, of course). They certainly seem to have a better handle on their relationship than Miles ever had on any of his. Maybe that's a patronizing, doing-Irish-jigs-on-the-lower-deck-of-the-Titanic kind of attitude, but it isn't misanthropic. 6) I may very well cry if Giamatti wins an Oscar for this; he really is a kind of hero to me, a normal-looking character actor with talent to burn who would've been in hundreds of movies had he worked in the 30s or 40s, but only seems to get loser-schlub roles in our still image-conscious era. If he wins, maybe, maybe he'll be able to drop the schlubs and get to play a winner for once.
3) I have no idea how this supposed "get-it-the-hell-done-already post" is any different from my usual posts.
Where we saw it: film | We deign to rate it: outta 100