flying out for thanksgiving and family and rest and all that in a few hours, which should be pretty great. can’t wait to see the family and eat dangerous amounts of pie.

before then though i have to offer up a contrarian movie review really quick just to get a little bit of opposition out there in the face of all the puzzlingly high praise for this one…

sideways – 1 star

why in the world does everyone love this movie? honestly, i am baffled. my only concession is that it may require i age 20 more years and experience failures and depression i cannot imagine at only a healthy 23 before i am able to relate to and therefore enjoy this movie, but even of that i am skeptical, and i will tell you why. the comedy didn’t make me laugh much. the drama didn’t make me care much. the characters didn’t make me route for them much. and the insight didn’t make me think much. let me ask you this: what reason do we have to believe that any woman would want paul giamatti’s character in this movie? he’s unattractive, bitter, and sad, and even at his best moments in the film he didn’t show any signs of being anything better than tolerable. so why should we care about this movie? and it’s no better for his friend, the pathologically womanizing friend, who seems like a bastard who is sad he’s a bastard only when he gets caught being a bastard and it threatens his future potential to be a bastard unscathed. again, why do i care? both characters could have failed or succeeded in the end and it still would have just been a sad and only marginally funny trip through a week with two somewhat pathetic aging men.

i will say this: i felt the exact same way about alexander payne’s last film, about schmidt — another case of just a bunch of sad characters i almost wanted to see end up miserable because i didn’t like them enough to want otherwise. so if in painting these character sketches the writer/director is looking to make films that are the most ‘real’ (i.e. as depressing and futile as life can seem), and has succeeded equally in both cases, i guess he deserves credit for accomplishing his goal and rubbing our faces in it. i read in one review complimenting his “illustrating the dilemma of modern mediocrity”, and i can’t disagree that sure, he did do that. but i’m sorry payne, it just makes a fucking terrible movie.

[side note: this film was boring and sad (not in a crying way, more in a ‘god that guy’s life sucks’ way) but giamatti is a great actor. can’t we ever see him in a role as a likeable character? i know i would get sick of being the really talented actor at making people believe how pathetic i was.]