Deborah Lipp

Sideways (2004) 5/10
Miles (Paul Giamatti) takes his friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on a road trip to wine country the week before Jack’s wedding. There they meet and become involved with two beautiful wine connoisseurs (Sandra Oh and Virginia Madson).

Gods, did I hate this movie.

Okay, that’s kind of strong. There’s certainly a lot to commend. Giamatti’s performance is nuanced and rather brilliant. Madsen and Oh are radiant and sharp. There were some decent laughs, and the movie is intelligently written. For all of that, it pretty much made my skin crawl.

First, can we talk about Thomas Haden Church? He looks like the Claymation version of a handsome man. His face is soft and sort of semi-formed. I was totally on board when he was cast as the Sandman, a character who turns into sand, because he kind of looks like that all the time. It’s very distracting to watch his squishy face, which is consistent with his squishy character. It’s a child’s face, and Jack behaves like a child.

The problem with Sideways is that Miles and Jack are detestable men with barely any character arc. I’m all about dislikable characters, but give me something. Within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, Miles has lied to his friend Jack, dawdled when he was already late, and stolen from his mother. Really, by this point I absolutely despised Miles, and didn’t give a shit what his fucking character journey was. But I stuck with the movie in the hopes that things would shape up.

Silly me.

Giamatti has one absolutely stellar monologue, in which he talks about the wonders of the Pinot grape. How it’s thin-skinned, temperamental, not a survivor, but has the most brilliant and thrilling flavors if it’s grown correctly. It’s very clear that he’s describing himself, but wonderfully, neither he nor Maya (Madsen) spell out the simile; the viewer can know it without having it hammered home. The thing is, though, that Miles is thin-skinned and temperamental, but I never really bought that he was thrilling and brilliant.

A negative protagonist works when you sense there’s something good within that is unexpressed. You root for the character in the hopes that the good will come out, or that the character will survive the adventure to perhaps find that goodness at a later date. But neither Miles nor Jack evince any decent qualities at all. Miles is smug and disdainful in every conversation, he feels sorry for himself, he whines, he pontificates, and he is seething with anger. Jack is a philanderer and a big ol’ baby. Despite everything these men go through, they just persist in being their small-minded, nasty selves.

You know, when you read that, you can think it’s intelligent, or realistic, or whatever. Mostly, whiny depressive snots don’t much change. But everything in the script and presentation sets you up to expect the heartwarming moment. There is a heartwarming moment at the very end, but it’s tepid, and entirely too small in proportion to what has gone before.

Hollywood, including “indie” Hollywood, has too many goddamn movies about self-pitying middle-aged white men with delusions of intellectualism and fear of commitment. Yeah, I get it, they write what they know. But all that does is make me feel irritated that they don’t know anything else. If I met Miles or Jack at a party I’d chat with them for ten minutes and then walk away, annoyed. Instead, I was stuck with them for two hours.

Moviehole is reporting that there’s a possibility of a Serenity sequel, perhaps direct-to-DVD.

When Alan Tudyk told me on the phone this morning that a sequel to “Serenity” – that’s the name of the “Firefly” movie for those who’ve been up at Guantanamo Bay for the past couple of years – could be happening I just about dropped the phone (I didn’t though, because the last time I did that it landed in the loo. Fried itself. And as a consequence, I lost all my numbers.) Tudyk says the newly-released “Serenity : Special Edition“ DVD has been selling so hot, that there’s talk in doing another movie.

“They had to put [the new DVD] out because they’ve been selling out of the other one and so Universal’s like ‘So, let’s do another one’. And now… there’s now a chance there’s going to be another movie”.

Tudyk agrees that even if it was a direct-to-DVD movie, it’d still be worthwhile. Especially since the whole DVD sequel is a big trend.

“It really is”, says Tudyk. “Everybody in the Firefly crew – and that includes the ones who died in the movie – are excited about the prospect of doing another”.

Yes, yes, yes! I’d totally drop my phone in the loo for that!

h/t to Whedonesque.

In the past year, I’ve seen three different documentaries about competitive language games: Spellbound, Wordplay, and most recently, Word Wars. Each is good in its own right. Word Wars was the least satisfying for me, but I am left to wonder if it’s in the nature of competitive Scrabble® to be a less pleasurable experience.

Spellbound is the most famous of these films. This Oscar-nominated film is about the word contests most in the public eye: spelling bees. It obliquely manages to address a lot of social issues. In my original review of it I wrote: “The film functions beautifully as a tour of the U.S. and of Americans. With so many children of immigrants competing, it says something about the process of becoming American. But this is never a lecture; we are watching a competition and meeting competitors. They are charming, annoying, funny, and abrasive by turn, and we are thoroughly captivated. Still, most of what we’re seeing has a lot to do with race and class. It was hard not to root for the poor kids against those with access to private tutors and computers.” What was going on in Spellbound was what the competition meant to the kids and their families, and how their circumstances in life enabled or hindered their ability to study.

Wordplay, although also centered around a competition, was not really about competition so much as about the love of the subject. Everyone in this documentary loves crossword puzzles. Some people simply do them alone, daily or on Sundays. Some compete. Some attend competitions with no hope of hitting the highest levels, simply for the joy of interacting with other cruciverbalists. Wordplay is aptly named; the competitors are, at heart, playing.

Word Wars, too, is aptly named, because the competitors in this game are at war. There seems to be no inherent love of the game, or indeed, of the words. In fact, we are briefly introduced to some foreign competitors who don’t speak English very well; the game is purely memorization to them. As a player, I know both crosswords and Scrabble have an elegance to the way words intersect. The language is beautiful, and the way the words lay over one another is beautiful. While Wordplay is very much about that beauty, Word Wars couldn’t care less. In fact, competitor Marlon Hill specifically and pointedly rejects learning what the words mean. The competitors argue and trash talk about one another, they treat competing as a game of machismo—there are almost no women. While the movie is good for what it is, it’s not nearly as much fun as I’d hoped, and in fact, has turned me off from the notion of ever attending such an event.