(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
All this is by way of introduction to saying that I didn't like the latest fave rave of the Yuppie Fascist Film Critics of America, Sideways, directed by Alexander Payne, based on the novel by Rex Pickett. Sideways is undeniably funny in parts — if you can't laugh at fat folks fucking you've just got no balls at all — but overall this film is less believable than Blade: Trinity. None of the people in this film would be spending time together in the real world, wherever and whatever that is. Do fading TV stars (Thomas Haden Church,
3 as "Jack") hang with eighth-grade English teachers? Do eighth-grade English teachers (Paul Giamatti, as "Miles") have the cash to become serious oenophiles? Do gorgeous blondes (Virginia Madsen, as "Maya") leap into bed with whining, unpublished novelists?4 Do gorgeous, hip young chicks (Sandra Oh, as "Stephanie") tell pot-bellied ex-jocks that they need a spanking?
What's particularly irritating (or at least what I found particularly irritating) in a film that asks to be taken seriously is the use of one of the very lamest film clichés, background music to cue us that what a character is saying is absolutely pure, absolutely good and true. When Maya makes her big speech about how a bottle of wine is a living thing,5 we hear, ever so subtly, a tinkling piano in the background. It's only three fucking notes, but three fucking notes of tinkling piano is three fucking notes too many!6
The proof of the pudding, of course, is that his novel drives Maya into ecstasies. "How you must have suffered!" she tells him, overwhelmed by its depth and passion, despite the fact that throughout most of the film it seems that Miles makes other people suffer. He's hurtful and obnoxious because he cares, damn it! Because he's special! Give him a chance! He'll be another fucking Woody Allen!
1. Actually, God has a great sense of humor, if you think Hell is funny.
2. When I had my first hot roast beef sandwich at age ten I was in heaven. White bread and gravy! What a concept!
3. Jack doesn't look like he's fading, he looks like he's crashed and burned. Church is a long, long way from his "glory" days in the execrable sitcom Wings back in the early nineties. With his dour, Eeyore disposition, Church always looked like he could handle a good line if he ever got one, but he never did. (Neither did anyone else in the cast.)
4. When I showed my (first) unpublished novel around, I didn't get laid, I lost half my friends. When I finally did get published, I lost the other half. No wonder it's lonely at the top! Everybody hates you!
5. A bottle of wine is not a living thing. Does it have a pulse? Unless you mean all those billions of bacteria swarming around inside. Yummy!
6. Because of its faux subtlety, the tinkling piano shtick is perhaps even more irritating, though less loud, than the howling choral music used in horror films to tell us that some sort of seriously unholy shit is about to come down. Please, Hollywood, cut us some slack! I'm begging here, goddamn it!
7. It pains me to say it, but the New Yorker is pretty readable, most of the time.
8. French for "slaughterhouse." Like I care!
9. Charles Bukowski (right), patron saint of the terminally fucked up, certainly had a horrible childhood, but as an adult he was a bully, a drunk, a wife beater, and a bad writer — just not my type at all.
