Sideways

When you watch an old movie from the era when you were not really watching movies yet it is one thing, you have an excuse for missing it the first time around. When you are my age and watch a movie from eight years ago, sometimes you wonder where you were.

This 2004 movie was released to almost universally positive reviews. The film won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and all the actors and actresses were lauded for their performances.

For all that the movie is small and self contained. Paul Giamatti plays Miles Raymond, a writer who cannot get published, a self professed wine aficionado, and a middle school English teacher. In the course of the movie he comes to the realization that his ex wife is not coming back to him. How he comes to realize this is more painful than most of the ways in which one could.

Thomas Haden Church plays Jack Cole. Jack was the college roommate of Miles and is now an actor who is about to be married. The two men take a week together in the wine country of California. They, however, have different reasons for the trip. For Miles it is a chance to get away, enjoy some wine, and spend time with his friend. Jack wants only to have some last sexual fling before his impending marriage.

Their trip, the people they meet, and the conflicts that develop show lonely people trying to make the best of a world that continually disappoints.

Giamatti might well be incapable of a bad acting performance, Church, who I last saw in Wings ,is much stronger than one would expect and Virginia Madsen playing a love interest of Miles is as always perfect.

Another of the nothing movies as in " What happens in the movie?" with the usual response being Nothing really this movie shines. Proving again that things do not need to blow up, we don't need models we just need a good story we can relate to and good acting. This movie serves that up in big servings.

Easy A

This movie came via Netflix last weekend and my wife and I watched it Saturday night. Emma Roberts plays Olive a high school girl that feels invisible. She has a good friend, Rhi, who acts further advanced than she is.

In Olive's English class they are doing a section on The Scarlet Letter and unlike most of the students who have just watched the movie and relate it to Demi Moore she has to, embarrassed almost by it, admit to her teacher, played by Thomas Haden Church , that she has read the book. The Scarlet Letter becomes the backdrop in a literary sense of the movie that follows.

Trying to avoid a camping trip with her friend Rhi, and her friends hippy parents, she lies and says she has a date. This lie later manifests into that she had sex with the college boy she had a date with. This conversation is overheard by a young Christian girl who is overzealous to say the least. She ( played by Amanda Byrnes) spreads the rumor like wildfire and soon everyone is assuming she Olive is a bad girl.

A gay friend asks her to pretend to have had sex with him so that he can escape the rumors about his sexuality. She agrees to do so, at a party they go into a bedroom and make all the requisite " sex" noises and the rumor is sealed.

The story takes off from there with the ramifications of an ever expanding series of lies and exaggerations until Olive giving in to the ludicrousness of it all starts wearing a Letter A on her clothes to identify with Hester from the Scarlet Letter.

At times I commented that the movie was stupid and it was not really even that good. Still by the end of it the story did come full circle with some cute eighties flashback references and the tie to Scarlet Letter was clever.

Worthwhile but do not have too high an expectation.