Solvang??

One of the smaller movies, with a pretty big critical success story this year has been the Alexander Payne film Sideways. If anyone's seen either Election or About Schmidt, you get the idea that Mr. Payne has an oblique sense of humor which one might at first consider pessimistic. Rather, I'd say that his viewpoint ultimately tends towards the optimistic. The purveying factor guiding his pictures isn't the hell Mr. Payne puts the main characters through, it is in fact what they discover about themselves.

I'll have to say that this movie would not succeed with out the impeccable casting Paul Giamatti is a struggling middle school English teacher dreaming to be an author friend of the soon-to-be-married and somewhat washed-up actor played by Thomas Haden Church. What succeeds is that these actors aren't big names or marquee faces, but they seem like real people. All the supporting characters are equally as real, and you almost forget you are watching a movie and instead feel like you're observing a week in the life of two regular guys. It isn't just their looks that make them believable, it's also their acting, and I'll admit that I wasn't expecting much, but was terribly impressed in the end.

Story-wise, you get the idea that Mr. Giamatti's character, Miles, is horribly depressed. He's two years divorced and had his book universally rejected. Unfortunately, it's his task to toast Mr. Church's, or Jack's, impending nuptials with a week in Santa Barbara, wine-tasting, and golf. What seems like routine, takes a twist when Jack's intentions turn everything on it's head.

What I took away from this movie was how smart it was. I'm not sure if it was the dialogue, the situations, or just the fact that it wasn't pretentious at all. It never seemed slow and also, it was never ordinary. From that standpoint though, I will say that it's not for everyone. For me however, it was what I expected from Mr. Payne: enjoyable and intelligent.

Overall Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars.