Just the Ticket #152: Sideways (Comparative)
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster
In vino, veritas, Ticketholders!
I mostly decided to do this comparative format for two reasons: it worked out pretty well when I did it for The Incredibles but I hadn't done it with three versions of the same review (like my "recent" Greatest Hits vs. Archive comparisons in Ticket Stubs), and I'm still trying to get the last of my SW@ Ticket Archive content woven into Just the Ticket. If you've been following my content (and you really should Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post to tell me what movie you have negative nostalgia for, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can feel like blogs will still be relevant next year, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on said content), then you know I hated Sideways. I didn't want to re-view it, let alone review it again, and that was purely based on negative nostalgia (Negstalgia?): the strong memory of hating something when you were younger that tarnishes your positive opinion of it when you get older, like nostalgia, but backwards. Or in this case, Sideways.
First, I didn't do a Greatest Hits version of this review because it was too crass and spoiler-laden to edit into a portfolio-friendly form at the time I was putting that together, so what we're beginning with is the clarified and slightly re-written version I posted in Ticket Stubs #3: Sideways Traditions (FROM July 26, 2012), now with corrected name spellings and updated link insertions:
From my first reference to it in my review of The Trip to my many mentions of Thomas Haden Church in "Then & Now," my official third issue of Ticket Stubs brings you a review, via the many traditions observed by the stars of Sideways, many of which are antiquated and pointless.
FROM May 12, 2005 (SW@ Ticket #37: Sex Wax, Sideways Stories, & the Star Spanglish Banner): Sideways is a classic odd couple road trip movie, minus most of the laughs. In Joey Lawrence (Blossom) and Matt LeBlanc (Friends) tradition, Thomas Haden Church is a stupid actor. In his own tradition of the depressed introvert writer from American Splendor, Paul Giamatti is a downer who thinks he can't write, knows too much about wine, and drinks too much about wine. In the tradition of American Wedding (minus the laughs and the wedding), Sideways follows Church and Giamatti through California's vineyards on the way to Church's wedding. Along the way, THC (isn't that the chemical in pot?) decides he's going to get laid one last time before tying on the big iron ball, and try to get Giamatti a little piece of action in the bargain. He succeeds, they lie their asses off, the women find out, and Church goes to his wedding with deceit on his mind.
The wine talk was boring, the sex was pointless, the drunkenness was depressing, and the humor was just enough above par to keep me interested until the next subtle guffaw moment.
If you review for the San Diego Reader and you like doing the depression thing: A (***)
If you're SW@ and you don't: D (I'll give it some credit because I didn't fall asleep)
If the Lyric Fits:
Why do you drink?
To get drunk!
Tell me why do you role dope?
To get stoned!
And why must you live your life just like the songs that you wrote?
I don't know. It's just me!
When I'm down in an old gents' club and some chick tries to give me some friction,
(You know how I do!)
I say "Bring it on"
I say it all night long: "It's a family tradition."
- DF Dub, "Family Tradition"
If the Lyric Fits, wear it.
Before I punched it up with a poster image, links, and clarifying language (but still couldn't spell Thomas Haden Church's name correctly), the above review looked something like this, back when it was posted on the now-defunct Yahoo! Groups:
Sideways is a classic odd couple road trip movie, minus most of the laughs. In Joey tradition, Thomas Haydn Church is a stupid actor. In his own tradition of the depressed introvert writer from American Splendor, Paul Giamatti is a downer who thinks he can't write, knows too much about wine, and drinks too much about wine. In the tradition of American Wedding (minus the laughs and the wedding), Sideways follows Church and Giamatti through California's vineyards on the way to Church's wedding. Along the way, THC decides he's going to get laid one last time before tying on the big iron ball, and try to get Giamatti a little piece of action in the bargain. He succeeds, they lie their asses off, the women find out, and Church goes to his wedding with deceit on his mind.
The wine talk was boring, the sex was pointless, the drunkeness was depressing, and the humor was just enough above par to keep me interested until the next subtle guffaw moment.If you review for the San Diego Reader and you like doing the depression thing: A (***)
If you're SW@ and you don't: D (I'll give it some credit because I didn't fall asleep)
And now, the moment you've all been waiting for!
Starting at the top, I'd like to address my reference to Thomas Haden Church as a "stupid actor." I don't actually think he's a stupid actor, but he had been saddled with a filmography up to that point where he was mostly known for playing stupid, comedy relief characters who say dumb things so the studio, canned, and home audiences have something to laugh at. He still plays an idiotic character here (albeit with an almost sociopathic horniness that would end his character's acting career in an instant nowadays), but there are a few dramatic moments between utterances of "this wine you hate tastes okay" and "I wanna fill a random vagina because I'm bored and scared of commitment" that he handles well, and his later turn as Flint Marko/Sandman in Spider-Man 3 (and No Way Home) shows that he can just as easily be a powerful dramatic relief when things turn goofy around him. I still hate his character here, and the fact that he definitively gets away with everything he's done at his friend's expense is infuriating.
I also stand by my critiques of Giamatti's character for being too depressing, desperate, and snooty. In contrast to the impression-laden food-tasting journey I enjoyed in The Trip, Miles' radiant negativity here as he talks about tannins and skins and stems and barrels and finish and clarity and blah, blah, blah, fuck me Sideways, all makes me hate wine the way I hate mass-murdering dictators and conservative conspiracy nuts: I've never met it, but considering all available information and the presentation thereof, why would I want to?
However, there is a minor thing with regard to the "thinks he can't write" bit that I feel like being pedantic about. While Giamatti's Miles is insecure about his potential for being published, there's a decent mystery for most of the movie as to whether Miles even wrote a book at all, and the answer is one of the earliest good punchlines in the movie.
Speaking of the humor (and by contrast, the aforementioned angry depression), it divides the movie into two distinct parts, rather than being evenly dispersed throughout as I originally remembered it. The first hour, wherein the characters (Church's horny, soon-to-be-married fading actor, the appropriately named Jack Cole--because he's a massive jackhole--and Giamatti's divorced, wine-loving, struggling author, Miles Raymond) are introduced and begin their drive for a bachelor experience in the vineyards of Los Olivos, California, is heavy on drama. The few jokes that are attempted here have a noticeable, awkward silence around them, indicating that we should be laughing at something, making them feel like sad, passive-aggressive barbs instead of genuine, laugh-inducing punchlines.
That all changes in the second hour with the introduction of Stephanie (Grey's Anatomy star Sandra Oh) and Maya (Candyman star Virginia Madsen) as Jack and Miles' respective love interests. There's noticeably more humor, sex appeal, and plot in this second half, particularly with respect to Miles and Maya. We get to see him grow beyond the depressed rage of his divorce and his creative insecurities and become an open, flawed, genuinely likable character worth rooting for all the way to the end, even while he is struggling (and sometimes failing in a physically and emotionally over-the-top, so sad it wraps around to being absurdly funny kind of way) to keep a stoic face about Jack's increasingly self-destructive (and Miles-destructive) shenanigans and the ensuing, relatively tame, ultimately nonexistent comeuppance he receives for his pre-marital infidelities.
I also appreciated the visual and verbal distinctions between the two men's relationships, with Miles and Maya keeping their sexual chemistry veiled in wine-based metaphor and innuendo, whereas Jack gets an actual sex scene and sex is blatantly the subject of most of his dialogue.
We also get brief roles by Jessica Hecht (Gretchen on Breaking Bad) as Miles' ex-wife, Alysia Reiner (Fig on Orange Is the New Black) as Jack's wife-to-be, and M.C. Gainey (Tom Friendly on Lost) as the husband of a waitress whom Jack has offscreen slumpbuster sex with.
So in conclusion, I still think Sideways is a boring, mostly depressing, monotonously written movie that makes me hate wine, isn't truly funny until the last half-hour or so, is a by-the-numbers liar-revealed story, and didn't need to be over two hours long to get its point across. But there's definitely more to like about it than my immature collegiate self first thought.
Give it a taste when the year is right.
B-
As always and Sideways, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post to tell me what movie you have negative nostalgia for, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can lose my virginity on a whiskey-tasting tour, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my long manuscript of content.
Ticketmaster,
Aging like vino fino,
Out.
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