Sideways

My wife and I saw the movie Sideways over the weekend. We both HATED it!

The movie is categorized as a comedy but neither of us found anything funny about it. Seriously - some people view this movie as a comedy? I find that bizarre.

The words I think that best describe the film are pathetic and pretentious. The director seems to want the audience to swim in the pathos of his characters where hopefully we will find nuggets of humor and humanity but all we end up with is pathos.

The characters are all literally pathetic.

The main character played by Paul Giamati is pathetic. The guy steals money from his mother and yet feels the moral superiority to sit in judgment of his wonamizing pal? He feels that he is a failure because his novel fails to get published. Being an English teacher is not good enough for him? The only character I felt good for was his ex-wife who remarried a man with none of the baggage carried by the Giamati character.

The Thomas Hayden Church character was a "rake" in the classic sense who you could easily see scheduling sex trips to the Philippines. He starts out with the potential of humor but by the end of the film he's just an amoral pile of goo.

The most obvious manifestation of pretension comes in the discussions about wine. Yes we get it that wine acts as a metaphor for the Giamati character but the wine talk was way over done. Maybe if the Giamati character decided to write about wine he wouldn't be such a loser. That's the thought I kept having listening to him prattle on about wine and grapes.

What really gives the film away as a pretentious exercise of "look at me - I'm so witty and smart" are two things the director wove into the film.

The first bit was when the characters were hanging out in their hotel room enraptured by the movie The Grapes of Wrath starring Henry Fonda. If you ever meet anyone who puts Grapes of Wrath among their top 5 films or books - run. Seriously.

The second bit is when Giamati is teaching his class and he has a student read from John Knowles A Separate Peace. That book is the the single biggest piece of pretentious crap I have ever read in my life. That is a point I will not argue. There is nothing redeeming about having high school kids read that book.

The thing about specifically including A Separate Peace into the movie that serves as the big tip off is the fact that the book is all about self-loathing and that's what the movie Sideways is really all about. All the characters have the common flaw of self-loathing. In fact a better title for this film would have been Self-Loathing Battle Royale because that's what the audience was subjected to for 2 hours.

If you haven't seen the movie yet - save your time and money.