the chutry experiment

I second you on the paltry development of the female characters. It was so shameful that it really made me wish that the narrative would take a disjunctive turn and drop Miles and Jack half-way through to start following Stephanie's life story.

And just a piddling character motivation point: if you were a reasonably worldly woman (had a child already, say) wouldn't you be at least a little suspicious of a flirtatious, womanizing aging actor from out of town? Especially when he starts telling you after a day that he wants to move for you.

Yes, it was a big problem. Not sure if I would have noticed, though, if not for Sandra Oh's more subtle performance. The depth of her involvement with Jack did seem to shift depending on plot needs.

I enjoyed the movie a lot, got a post that gets around to discussing it here--which also points out that under the circumstances I saw it, though, I might have enjoyed anything.

In any case, I didn't really think it was so much the buddy film. And in a weird way the fact that you wanted the film to veer off into the girls' world is itself a statement that they weren't as undeveloped or unimportant as Chris thinks they are, no? I mean, I basically agree with you guys, especially the treatment of the overweight waitress, but those factors didn't so much detract from my interest in Miles' story. Stephanie and Maya and Jack are not so much two-dimensional as simply not explored other than in how they show us Miles.

I have a hard time writing about movies I've only seen once if I don't have a screenplay to read, and I'm thinking fuzzy this week, but I really liked Miles' story.

I think I was in a contrarian mood when I wrote this review. Every review I read (other than Salon's Charles Taylor) was completely positive, and I wanted to try a different take. You're right to note that the female characters aren't as flat as I'm implying here, but my suspicion is that Sideways could have done so much more with them.

By the way, I also often find it difficult to write film reviews after seeing the film only once, unless I write the review almost immediately after watching the film.

By the way, I couldn't leave this comment at Scrivenings (Blogger was rejecting my username for some reason), so I'll just mention it here: I don't know that I read Miles' drinking the cherished bottle of wine as "enjoyment." If I remember, there was ice in the bottom of the styrofoam cup, and he was certainly in a greasy spoon restaurant, not in a place where I would imagine him enjoying the wine.

But Scivener's comments that he identifies with Miles are certainly important to my reading of the film, though, again, I'm not quite sure how to turn that observation into something more meaningful just yet. I like Giamatti quite a bit, and it's clear that he understands academics and intellectual characters (in fact his father was the English professor and former commissioner of baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti).

Oh, I thought drinking the wine in the greasy spoon was definitely about enjoyment. He's responding to that conversation with Maya: he says he's got this nice old bottle of wine, and she asks why he's saving it given that it's at its peak now, and he responds that he's waiting for a special occasion or the right person, and she says something very close to "opening the bottle is the special occasion." Then he finds out his ex is pregnant by her new hubbie--information that he'd usually respond to by downing a bottle or two of whatever wine he could get his hands on--but in this case he runs home and opens the nice bottle and sips it out of a styrofoam cup at a greasy spoon. It's a special occasion simply because he's drinking the wine, enjoying it for itself without worrying about the occasion or the company, and without drinking to be drunk. As I read the tone of that scene, it was nopthing like his reaction to his book rejection or even like his reaction to Maya not being at work earlier, when he drinks himself into oblivion and stumbles home. He finally gets what Maya was talkign about, and instead of hoarding this fine wine beyond its peak, he uncorks it and blissfully enjoys it, despite the lack of ideal conditions.

I think my identification with Miles is more about class than it is about being an academic. I don't know exactly how to say this, but by some miraculous series of circumstances my life has turned out really beautifully (thus far...knock wood) but there's this part of my psyche that is aware that I could have so easily been the kind of loser that Miles is, or like a character in a Bukowski novel. And my successes have allowed me to become an optimistic, happy adult, but I see within myself the possibility of the curmudgeonly cynic. I still identify with lower class, blocked, oppressed, hopeful-but-cynical characters even though that's not actually the person I became, I think because I am so aware that it could have been. Does that make much sense?

I'd have to think about why I read that scene as being about lack of enjoyment. I think that I may have keyed too heavily on the idea that he would need to share it, the fact that he left the reception of Jack's wedding so abruptly, but your reading makes a lot of sense. You're right that it has a different tone than previous "drunk" scenes, but for some reason I read the scene as a form of self-rejection, consuming the wine in perhaps the least ideal conditions possible.

I certainly understand the class identification, in part due to my family's financial struggles starting when I was a teenager (and some real struggles I had while writing my dissertation).