At this time of year, I always feel strangely compelled to see at least a couple of the movies that will likely be Academy Award nominees. This is a slight problem, as there are only two cinemas in town. The one at the mall run movies that make you feel stupid just by looking at the poster. The one downtown has a better mix and was showing Sideways, so off we went.
And I have to say I just don’t get what the big deal is about this movie. I can see why the industry likes it. “It looks like it cost a dollar to make, and it features emotionally stunted creative types! Swoon!” I’ve admitted my bias against most entertainments with unsympathetic protagonists, and this one fell squarely into that category.
What I really couldn’t get past was the notion that the characters played by Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh — bright, charming, sexy women with a lot on the ball — would be so hungry for companionship that they’d hitch themselves to such obvious losers. That’s not to say that Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church weren’t good in the movie. But they were good at playing totally self-involved, arrested adolescents. The resolution for Oh’s character was particularly unsettling for me.
It’s disappointing, as I’ve liked some of director Alexander Payne’s other work. Election, while dealing with similarly unsavory characters, had a different kind of self-awareness that made it a lot more palatable. There was a level of distance that let viewers decide how they responded to the characters and their actions. In Sideways, I didn’t feel like I was allowed to laugh at Giamatti, that his middle-aged malaise was in some way noble or tragic instead of just pathetic. And since I never found it anything but pathetic (and recognized it from too many other movies where hot women squander their charms on shlubs to give them a new lease on life), I could never get engaged.
And while I’m on the subject of movie-going, can I just say how much I hate the act of watching a movie with strangers? The level of rudeness has become so predictable that I don’t know why I even try any more.
We were sitting near a couple who pulled off a trifecta of bad manners. They showed up late and made a big deal of picking where they sat, in spite of the fact that the theater was practically empty. They brought their own snacks and spent most of the early portion of the film crackling wrappers and offering each other bottled water. (You can do that bottled water thing silently, you know. You just wave it in the direction of your companion and look to see whether he or she takes it or non-verbally declines. It’s not something that requires dialogue.) And the woman of the couple was a narrator. She would make obvious pronouncements like “She’s pregnant,” or “Oh, the 1961” that anyone with a functioning brain cell would keep to themselves because they’re so damned obvious.