Required Viewing 01: Sideways

We're in Wayne Media. We're in Wayne Media. You are a bad girl. Now I need to be spanked. Sideways is the best comedy of the year.

Oops. This is our week to get crazy. An Academy Award winning movie. These girls want to party with us. They want to drink Merlot.

We're drinking Merlot. I am not drinking Merlot. Wow. And winner of two Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture. You're getting married on Saturday.

It was a nice way to respond to that. Sideway on the DVD today. Hello everyone and welcome to the CultureCast. I am your host Chris Dashew and I, or wait, no, this is Required Viewing, right? This is Required Viewing.

Okay. Hello everyone and welcome back to Required Viewing, a sub-show within the CultureCast. I am your host Chris Dashew and I'm joined by the other host of this show, all the way from somewhere in the lovely Napa, Santa Barbara wine community out there in California to your friend and mine, the professor of media and communications at Texas Tech, Dr. David D. Perlmutter.

Thank you so much, Chris, and welcome to our second required viewing. I hope everybody has their Blue Book's out. This is what we have to resort to now in the age of AI. That's right. Everybody, you can't have AI writing things in person.

If you have clicked on this episode within the CultureCast feed, I wanted to let you know what this show is. We talk about movies, maybe not that you need to watch, but that have something worth talking about within them. And we tend to talk about a movie from all angles, not just one movie. specialized direction which is the other important thing we kind of advocate for a 360 approach or a holistic approach to looking at and talking about film better film to do that with than a film about two men going to the california wine country and getting drunk and getting into all kind of troubles is a midlife crisis in film form talking about the 2004 alexander payne directed and Alexander Payne written with Jim Taylor based on the book of the same name by Rex Pickett, Sideways.

So like I mentioned, the film is directed and written by Alexander Payne and Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor on the screenplay based on a book by Rex Pickett and it stars Paul Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church as Miles and Jack, two friends who go to the Wine country for the weekend only to have, you know, a series of misadventures or adventures or, you know, anything on the sliding scale. In a lot of ways, I would compare it to The Hangover, but for adults as opposed to, you know, for the for the 20 year old crowd. This is definitely for a certain group of people. of a certain age. And I think we'll talk about the intended audience, especially in 2004, because this also feels like a much a pastoral time compared to 2026.

But to Dr. Perlmutter, this was on your list of movies to talk about. So I am so curious because we have not really talked about this film. We just decided to do this film. Why are we talking about Sideways?

Why is it required viewing? Well, let me start out by pointing out something about this film that I rarely do and I rarely refer to. I leave that to you. Let's talk box office, okay? This film in 2004 cost $ 16 million to make.

I was looking up some of the history and the The deal with the director was that you've got to keep it under $ 10 million. We know that that's the one promise in Hollywood about you've got to keep the budget under something. Among the many broken dreams and broken promises on the streets of Hollywood, that's one of them. It did balloon, I put that in air quotes, to $ 16 million. And $ 16 million is, I looked this up, is $ 28 million today.

Okay. So the film made in worldwide gross $ 110 million, from $ 16 million to $ 110 million. And one of the reasons this is in required viewing is because we sometimes need to remind ourselves that the term blockbuster or hit has been changed to only mean something that costs a huge amount that eventually brings in a huge amount. Right. So like we'll talk about a film that costs two hundred million dollars and it makes a billion dollars.

And you figure, you know, twice the budget of the movie is the publicity and the costs of distribution and things like that. But like once upon a time, Hollywood said, oh. You know, we can spend only $ 16 million and we can bring in a hundred and set nine. And that's really a point about films is that we don't have to live in a world where there's only giganto brontosaurus sized movies that fail because they only make a hundred million. This film made a huge profit for the studio.

And so it's worth pointing out in the sort of history of filmmaking that once upon a time, And of course it does still exist. There's still $ 20 million films that are made, $ 10 million films that are made. But it's something to keep in mind. And I usually don't talk about box office that much. Then also you use the word adult.

And as we like to talk about, Chris, since I'm a journalism professor, I'm fascinated by words and what they mean, what they meant, what the meaning is changing to as I meet a new generation of students and they can tell me that a word means something that I didn't know it meant in today's world. This was an adult movie during a time where adults, people, it could be 20s, could be 60s, say, let's go watch a movie. And it would be a serious movie with humor, but about pretty much serious adult situations. There was no compromise of like, oh, we got to have something for the kids. We got to have something for the action characters.

And we just serious adults doing serious adult things very entertainingly in the sense of like, wow, this is so fascinating what's going on. And it's a very screenplay driven film, which is another comment about today, because as we've both said, and many of the other guests on your show have pointed out, is that we live in this world where you can throw a lot of money at a film and the carpentry is going to be great if you throw it. hire the right people and the costumes are going to be great. But like no amount of money will buy you a very good screenplay. And this film from day one, from people going into the movie theater and remember our other key term, word of mouth, telling other people, hey, this is a beautiful film.

You should watch this film. This film has an excellent screenplay. It's extremely well written and it should be held up as a case study of a movie that good acting, wonderful scenery and backgrounds, love the soundtrack. But at the core of this, the flagship of watching this is damn good screenplay that I bet. And there's a story that the original story, uh, pain, the director was on a plane and said, okay, I'm going to do this.

The form when he read an original version of, of the story. And you can see why people might have right away kind of like, what a great story. What an interesting story. Let's get some great actors, which they did. Every role is, I think, played very well.

But man, screenplay, screenplay, screenplay. I am right there with you in terms of approaching this. Because look, just to get this out of the way ahead of time, I love this movie. I've loved this movie since the first time I saw it when I was in my early 20s. I am in my mid-30s now.

And it is a film that I understand now more as an adult ever... Way less than I ever did as someone in their 20s. And I don't think that the characters in this film are in their 30s. They seem like they're probably in, you tell me, they seem like they're in their mid 40s, like early to mid 40s. You know, just past their prime by the way that they're describing it or in that kind of decline the way people describe it. kind of look at it.

And I think that that's the interesting juxtaposition here because you've mentioned like, what does success look like? And I think that that is what this movie is about in a lot of ways is what does success look like and what does sustained success look like and how do people hang on to that or grasp at that or continue to hold on to that long after that time is gone. That's pretty much the Thomas Hayden Church character. But I think it's interesting to juxtapose the film's message against the film's own, like you said, success and existence within the industry because this is a you know the term indie darling gets used a lot in the mid 2000s and like you alluded to we do still still see things that blow up like this did we are living in a time where back rooms and obsession both came out this year within weeks of one another and they made similarly to this movie Millions of dollars on a very small budget.

And like you've alluded to, it still exists. It's as rare. It's rarer now than it was. Then. It felt like back in the mid 2000s.

I mean, you know, I think of the other films that this film exists within the same scheme of, which is a, you know, Little Miss Sunshine or Lars and the Real Girl or those kinds of films. When I looked this up, it opened in four theaters. I'm not knocking Supergirl. I haven't seen Supergirl. It opened in 3,700 or something like that theaters.

It opened nationwide. Yeah, it opened nationwide. And I'm not saying that the films are comparable in any way, but like, isn't it fascinating that the word of mouth by adult was so strong that something that opened... art house, you know, in the open. in a tiny amount of theaters. I mean, I think Obsession and Backrooms probably opened in more than four theaters. Yeah, I assume that they opened nationwide as well, or at least, similarly to Sideways, opened closer to nationwide and became more available as, like you've said, the word of mouth still exists.

It's just, it's now social media-driven more so than just like... I guess the way I look at it is, and again, as a journalism professor and as someone who went to school for journalism... The undercurrent of how you measure those things at one point was a lot harder to measure exteriorly. And now with social media, you can see those markers clearly with the word of mouth. You can see word of mouth now in a social media age more so than you used to, because back in the day, word of mouth was nebulous.

It was like literally people telling each other about movies. Now you can see that dialogue happening with social media. And I mean, forums and other things were kind of the early days of that, like, full forums and blogs and stuff like that. But as time has gone on, word of mouth has become social media. And that's how you can measure it, is it's easier to measure now because there's a verifiable way to see, well, look at all this social media traction our thing has been getting.

And then there's an increase in the people watching the movie. Causation and correlation, sure, not always in the same camp with one another, but Something like this probably is the best way of measuring what was the untangible quality of word of mouth. Because like you've told your story about Star Wars plenty of times, going and seeing... My mom tells a similar story. Her dad went and saw Star Wars seven times in theaters.

It's one of those... And I know that he was telling people that he knew about Star Wars as well. It's a thing where it's not that it doesn't happen anymore... It's just I think it's so much more muted now because of the options everyone has. And 2004 doesn't seem like that long ago, but it is in terms of where we are now in 2026.

It's only 22 years ago. But in terms of the technology and the access we have to information about people's tastes and how they interact with movies, we have never had more information than we do now. And every day that we continue further is more information that we're getting, especially with A.I. and people able to interact with A.I. and give A.I. things that they're not even willing to give to other things like we're getting so much more information now. that word of mouth is almost a, and I'm sure it has been now for a while, maybe decades, even a measurable amount versus just like, well, there's an organic groundswell. Like what does that mean? We don't know.

I guess I 70%, 75% agree with you. We do have a situation where the publicity space around the film can be bigger than the film. So like, A film can be talked about, but people may not necessarily always go see a movie because obviously a lot of the talking can be, it sucks, don't go, right? Right. To use academic terms there.

So here, and again, this is our entry point to require viewing, is that organically, I mean, they did have an advertising campaign. You can go online and see the trailer for this. And by the way, the trailer is sort of interesting in that I don't think it completely sells the movie that well. I mean, anybody who's watching this should go look at the trailer as well. If they haven't already seen the movie, but word of mouth existed and was my, our point is that it was incredibly powerful and it still is.

It still is. And I can see it in the classroom, right? Like when I can see it on my online classes, like, because I'll ask students, what are you, what are you watching? Right. And, They will, they will say things like, and I, I actually saw this happen with backrooms where a substantial number of students had watched the backrooms YouTube videos and were eagerly awaiting the movie.

And then a substantial number of students who hadn't watched the movie in the first week and were evangelizing the movie to, to others. So like, and, and. Most of that was no Hollywood marketing department needed to be part of that exchange. Right. It was done before and was done at the word of mouth level.

Now, the word of mouth may be partly on social media, but it was also kids in the dorms talking to each other. Which is a thing that again it's just you know you look at a movie like this and it wasn't kids in dorms it was adults at coffee shops i assume like what's funny about this movie at work right like i mean again like to talk about more social spaces less business ones but yeah like work or water cooler it's funny like i don't know And again, we haven't really talked about personal perception of the movie so much, but I love the world that this movie came out in in the mid-2000s, where this is the kind of movie that, like you said, people would go to the theater and watch. Be like, we're going to go as adults to see an adult dramedy.

Like, how heady, right? Like, what purpose and reason to go see a movie? And I think what's funny is these Alexander Payne movies... Omaha, Nebraska's own Alexander Payne, I should point out, his movies all have a certain kind of feel to them tonally. And they are all, I think, of a piece.

And I think that that is an obviously when we talk about auteurs and auteur theory, I think Alexander Payne has a very specific way of making films and a very specific kind of film that he tends to make. You know, if you look at his oeuvre, as it were, up until this point, there were Citizen Ruth, Election, and About Schmidt. Election and About Schmidt, they feel very much like Sideways in terms of their tone. And then if you look at the films after Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska, downsizing and then the holdovers where he works with Paul Giamatti again I think he as a director Alexander Payne this is a kind of movie that he can make successful and a kind of movie that he can make only he can make which is in a serious but fun adult dramedy that goes out of its way to respect the audience in a way that yes it's the early 2000s and we're in this kind of second phase of indie filmmaking and these kinds of films are becoming more prevalent and As Judd Apatow films are becoming prevalent on one side where we have the fun adult comedy, we also have this kind of more serious, I would say, maybe black or dark adult comedy that has a little bit more of an emotional depth to it.

I'm not saying Judd Apatow films don't. It's just the emotional expectations of the audience with this film. I think, is what brings me as a viewer back, which is it does not expect the audience to not engage with the characters emotionally. That's the expectation that it wants from you is to be engaged with these characters. And any good adult dramedy or comedy in this era is expecting that of the audience.

And I think that this movie, yes, it's Oscar nominated and we'll talk about what does the success mean in terms of those kinds of qualifiers. But this is a movie that for me, I think still exists within a very weird space, which is it is successful 22 years later for the same reason it was successful 22 years ago, which is The characters feel like real people because they're being written by a director who has spent his entire career working on projects or working with people who are doing character pieces. And that's the focus. That's so important that, again, the Hollywood term that I don't know whether people in Hollywood use the term anymore, but they used to say, we're making a prestige picture, right?

Like, we hope we'll win the Academy Award. Like, we hope we'll be a great vehicle for our star to really get her acting chops out, you know, and show what she can do and type of thing. And it can be a more intimate movie. This movie, let's talk about the characters for just a minute now and the situation. I like the way that Alexander Payne, and he did this in About Schmidt, I felt, and I think he did this in Election, which the two I could, you know, I could add to our list if we have ever want to.

We probably should. I would love to cover all of his films because he is a he's a very specific kind of director who does a very specific kind of thing really well. He is like we are not in a lot of ways specialized in one specific thing, which is adult character dramedy. And they work like gangbusters. Yeah.

And he in this film, we have these two main characters and he's taken the form of a very familiar story and Actually, we just had a gigantic film that come out with the form of that story of the hero's quest. And he's reduced it to a modern day sort of semi-absurdist and a little bit sad about these two men. One of them is getting married and they decide to go have a last, you know, boys out weekend together to Napa Valley. They're both one much more than the other, but they're both wine people. One of them, one of us is what we used to call wine snob, you know, and can talk about every kind of label. and they go on this drive right up there.

And we can use some terms like they discover themselves and they learn things about themselves, but these are very flawed people. Like a lot of his characters are deeply flawed. I don't think he's, unless I've missed it, There's never been a truly pure heroic character in any of his movies. They're always people who have... They're broken in some way.

They're not successful. Or their success turned out to be not what they thought it was. I feel like I need to mention about Schmidt here where you. Have a guy who. who was so, this is so 1990s and 2000s. He was a company man, 50 years of whatever with the same insurance company.

And he got the dinner and the speech. And then he realizes it's over and everybody's moving on. And his legacy is a bunch of boxes being thrown out. That's a literal scene in this. And likewise here, we have Paul Giamatti's character, He's a would-be novelist who nobody really thinks much of his novel, including his best friend, right?

Right there. And he's teaching high school, middle school, I forgot exactly, English. And he's correcting student papers. And he's not where he wants to be in life. He has this one thing, wine, that he's an expert in and he can show off his skill sets in.

He's blown his best relationships. with, with a woman who's getting married to somebody else. And then you have the other, the other, uh, really what a great, you know, we, we talked about how in movies, old Hollywood, they always used to P P pick people who are physically different to be partners. You know, it's Abbott and Costello, right? We're not going to moral and hard and Costello, right? Yeah.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I was just so impressed by the, the delineation of how these people are people we can know. We, we do know sometimes they're us.

I have no problem saying in some of his films, I go like, yeah, there's a little bit of me there. There's a wistfulness or something that happened and I'm familiar with. And very few directors are able to draw those sketches as well as him. And that's why we go on this journey with these two people who are, again, deeply flawed. They do things I highly disapprove of.

Right. Right. But they're not 14-year-olds. They're adults doing adult stupid things. I think you put it really aptly as well, which is every character in an Alexander Payne film, at least the ones that I've seen, they are so realistically drawn and realistically created.

And the screenplay allows them such free reign, both the actors and the director, to... really play around with expectations. And like you said, these two characters in this film are deeply flawed. Neither one of them are, again, like good people of what does that mean? Like, you know, everyone I think is various shades of gray. I think some people are just darker gray than others in terms of the things that they're allowed to do and willing to do and, you know, allowing themselves to do.

Obviously, with Thomas Hayden Church's character, there's a a wider spectrum in terms of his behavior than Paul Giamatti. But like you've already alluded to, not only is it their physical representation that is a hard juxtaposition line, but also just the way that they act, the way that they act towards other people, the way that they treat other people, the honesty with which they interact with each other and themselves. I think is another line of hard delineation. And I think what's funny is, and you've already alluded to it, Alexander Payne really gets a lot of mileage in this movie out of just the two of them being so different. Because a lot of the scenes in this movie are just the two of them sitting and talking.

This is. again, an adult movie in the sense that, you know, we talked about this with Miranda on the Keddie episode where it's like, is this a deep movie? And sometimes deep can also mean boring because it's sitting there and just asking you of the audience to engage with the film intellectually and emotionally, less in a like, oh, look, there's a, there's a woman and she's jumping off of a building and she's shooting at the Hulk and she's falling through the air. Like that's engaging for some people and exciting for some people. And I'm not diminishing that at all. I'm more alluding to the fact that there are also people who will find this kind of movie engaging and stimulating where it's a conversation with two people and you see the two of them kind of working in and around each other.

And it feels like one friend is constantly trying to thwart the best intentions of the other friend. It is the way I put it yesterday when I was watching it to a friend of mine who I have gone on me and, you know, a bro's road trip before. Not as like a last hurrah, but in a lot of ways. There is no designated driver in this relationship. No.

They keep, certainly Thomas Hayden Church, he is so good because he's playing again, a word that is not used that much anymore. He's playing a cad. A total cad. Yeah, like he's in his 40s, he hasn't achieved anything except maybe he's going to get he's an actor who's appeared on a couple of infomercials, a couple of commercials, a couple of soap operas. He's not achieved success by the standards of being a Hollywood actor and he's aging out.

And so he's thinking about, you know, I guess I'd get a job with my soon to be father-in-law's business, right? Right. But what is his quest? Okay, this is not the quest for the Holy Grail. This is a quest, like, he wants to get some action before he's married, and you're going like, what?

What, buddy? That is the dumbest, wild, most self-destructive quest imaginable for an adult, you know, in their 40s to do. And Paul Giamatti plays somebody who, again, he's sort of lost and listless, and he's trying to do this, and it everything he's flailing around and they're sort of bringing out the worst each other. On the other hand, there's a, there's something beautiful there that they actually do no matter how much they bicker and fight. You can tell that they're actually friends and they, they sort of care about each other beyond.

As much as they can. I think it's one of these things where I think you've alluded to it so well. It's, They care about each other as much as they can, which is to say they care about each other as much as they care about themselves, which is, you know, it vacillates on a spectrum because we see Paul Giamatti caring about himself in some scenes and in other scenes, just completely rejecting it. And again, like I alluded to before, the first time I saw this movie, I was married. And now the most recent time I've seen this film, I am divorced.

I haven't spoken about it a lot because it's my personal life. I don't speak about my personal life very often. But I would not have had any kind of angle to come at this film at other than the one I came at it from before, because that was just the life I had lived. And now that I am in a completely different era of my life, I see so much different things that I can, you know, be empathetic towards the Paul Giamatti character about. Because again, like the self-destructiveness after big emotional events, especially when you're not well adjusted the way Paul Giamatti is written to not be, I think feels so, it feels realistic.

It feels understandable. We don't need to see him talking about his ex-wife over and over again. It kind of just peeks through enough. And it's so smart and well done that they just, they elicit empathy and sympathy at times for both characters, but disgust at other times for these exact same characters because they feel like real people and that is not an easy thing to do by any stretch of the imagination frankly it's one of the harder things to do to create convincing characters especially in this narrative this is it look this is the adaptation of a book the book I'm sure does so much more heavy lifting than this movie does because it's you know, it's three, four times as long. It takes twice as long to read, three times as long to enjoy than the movie does.

The movie's two hours. The book is not a two-hour read unless you read really fast. And that's the thing that I appreciate about this movie is it takes something that is so much deeper in a narrative perspective literary fashion and is able to I also think translate that into a film sense as well like this is a really good adaptation of a book too that is a success that is that exists outside of all these other things that is a success that exists outside of how much money it made and who directed it and who was in it like it's a successful adaptation of a book. And that in and of itself is not a given, especially in this day and age when. It was unpublished to when it was read.

So it was it was there was more of a creation there. I just wanted to add it's a big deal to spend. I was reminding myself the running time of 127 minutes. OK, so spending two hours and seven minutes with people who make you uncomfortable a lot, who are so awkward, who say the wrong thing. I mean, There's misogyny here.

There's self-destructiveness. There's stupidity. There's a long list of human foibles. But yet we keep watching because part of it for me is that there are consequences. This is not one of those movies where people do stupid things. mean things, destructive things, and just get away with it, laughing, running to Mexico with a billion dollars or something like that.

Thomas Hayden Church, it's not too much of a spoiler to say, he has numerous painful consequences. for his idiotic, childish behavior. And you sort of hope for both of them that at the end of the film, they've grown a little bit. Like, they've made their transition from their teenage years into their actual 40s. I hope that's the case there for them. I was actually saying, gosh, I wouldn't want to...

I don't think there should be a sideways two, but, like, I hope there wouldn't be... I hope there wouldn't be much to talk about because, like, they've realized... That the paths that they were on were not giving them anything back like what they wanted. So maybe they've lucked out that they made all these dumb decisions and come away chasing. That's what you sort of hope for any character, right?

That there's an arc and that they've learned something. And then when the credits roll, if they're still alive, they're going to do better than what they did before. Well, I can tell you that Sideways 2 and Sideways 3 exist because they are books that were optioned to be created after the success of this movie, because that's the other thing that's crazy. We never got another one of these movies, even though this movie made 10x its return, which it's because of Alexander Payne's un- uninterest in being involved in a further kind of exploration of these characters and i think that what you just alluded to is why because by the end of this movie the hope is that those characters have made that decision and learned that lesson and i don't know if i need to see any more because my hope is that they.

Have done franchise we don't yet know But. Rex Pickett turned it into a franchise because there's like three or four books now. And in the second book, Jack's getting divorced and Miles is now successful. And it's the inverse of what we had at the beginning of this movie and what the vestiges of they're holding onto in this movie, because that's the other thing. And I think that that's the interesting thing about this movie for me is the conversation that the movie has about what does success look like?

What does it mean to be successful? Because like we've already alluded to, Miles seemingly not successful. Jack was successful, is successful, getting recognized in public for having been a doctor on a soap opera. By his approximation, that's success. By yours and my approximation, that's success in the rear view, not in front of me.

And again, I think that's what's interesting about this movie is It has a conversation about what does that mean to be successful or have that like midlife crisis for two people who, by the end of the movie, are no better off in a lot of ways than they were at the beginning. In a lot of ways, one of them is worse off. And the other one, I think, again, could be trending upwards. We're not sure. Who knows where the last frame of the movie leaves us.

But that conversation about success, I think, is so interesting because you have two people who... do and don't consider themselves successful grappling with what those things mean in their lives in this midlife crisis that they're having. Because I perceive this as like a midlife crisis movie as well. Like a total midlife crisis movie. Yes, this is their last hurrah. It would seem that Jack has taken longer than others to get married because, you know, Paul Giamatti's been married and divorced and Jack has never even gotten married.

So that's that interesting, again, like one more wrinkle that they add to the character interactions is this juxtaposition of the two and how they treat that aspect of their own lives. The movie has a lot of angles that it comes at things from, but I think for me, the one that's very interesting is just these two characters and what they define success as, both internally and externally. Yeah, let's take another character, and Virginia Madsen plays Maya, who, like a lot of these characters, what I appreciate is that a lot is implied but not filled in. And we have to have everybody's backstory. We live in a world now where everybody has to have an origin story in which every single moment, toilet training and third grade bullying, whatever, is delineated explicitly, right?

Nothing is implicit. But in adult movies, which they're still, as we've said, still exist, you can have a lot filled in on the edges of the painting. They're outside the actual painting of what's going on. And so Maya comes along and she's working as a waitress at a restaurant, a server at a restaurant. And Paul Giamatti's character, Miles, knows her slightly.

And of course, Thomas Hayden Church is immediately thinking about sex and say, hey, you know, you should you should try to. And We get these implications, just this implicit knowledge of like, oh, she's divorced too. And she's looking for something. We don't know exactly what she's looking for. Maybe working as a server wasn't what she set out to do when she went to college.

But it's not fully defined. We're just getting a portrait of a human. And we're immediately sympathetic, both Sandra Oh character and and the Maya character are much more sympathetic than, of course, our two male characters. They really don't do anything terrible in this movie. On the other hand, I think in terms of women on screen, they are not just ciphers.

They're not just reflections of the male gaze or something. They're not just extras for the men to do something and react to them. they're active agents with power. And in fact, Thomas Hayden Church's accountability and some of the disasters that he encounters are with the agency of Sandra Oh. And Miles realizes, oh my gosh, this Maya is like the perfect person. I need to live up to her expectations, not be a little snitty 14-year-old throwing a temper tantrum.

Again, they play this important role in the lives and talking about required viewing. This is again, something that I think is so important is that are your characters flesh fleshed out for us on the screen, but that there is this subtext and implicit text that you don't need to explain, but with good acting and good writing enriches the experience. And, you know, I, I think for me and you, you already alluded to this with, uh, with Thomas Hayden Church playing this like cad or this complete, just like, and you know, I love Thomas Hayden Church genuinely as an actor. He was someone who I, at a very early age, interacted with as an actor in Georgia the Jungle, where he played the villain in that film.

But it was, again, like he steals the show in that movie because he's so funny. And in a movie full of people that are really funny, Brendan Fraser, Leslie Mann, like you have all these great actors in that movie, but Thomas Hayden Church sticks out because he is just, leaning into the villainous kind of you know over the top nature of the character and in this movie he's doing that same thing he is able to lean into this role in a way that just it doesn't feel like a role It just feels like a fully embodied, real character. I'd like to point out Thomas Aiden Church went to the University of North Texas, which is very funny. That's where I went to school. I don't think that he's on the wall of the school like so many other people are.

I know that they like to tout that dr phil mcgraw went to the university of north texas as well but i would uh gladly claim uh sideways own thomas hayden church because he is for as good as paul giamatti is in this movie we just need to take a step back paul giamatti is great in everything like literally when he played rhino in the amazing spider-man he was great when he plays miles in sideways he's great when he's in any number of things that he's been in and again he's a i mean american splendor. Is This guy played John Adam. He has a wide range as an actor. It's Thomas Hayden Church. He missed a range today.

Thomas Hayden Church is the surprising one in this movie because he's the one who, it's not that he's not a serious actor, but the expectation is that the depth that he brings to the character will not be able to match that of an actor of Paul Giamatti's caliber. And I think what's funny is every time I watch this movie, I walk away with something else. Every time I watch this movie, I focus on a different performance and scenes because you can only often focus on one performance in a scene and like focus on it and focus on what the actor is like reacting to someone else. Like, Because, you know, if they're not talking, sometimes you're looking at what the other person's saying as opposed to the way someone is reacting to the way that the other actor is talking.

And I walk away the most recent watches from this movie with just how terrible of a person Thomas Hayden Church is in this movie. To the point where at the end he's like, I'm nothing without my... My fiance, like he's just acting. He's just acting. But the thing is, Paul Giamatti knows that.

And as his friend, it's not that it's okay, but I love that the movie essentially doesn't have him confronting him and going, stop acting, you're acting. It's that unwritten moment between the two characters. And it's earned because Thomas Aiden Church up until this point has been so engaging that you feel like he can get away with this one moment with Paul Giamatti, where it's a complete, again, lie. He's lying there in that moment, and Paul Giamatti knows it, but we as the audience are at the point with the characters now where it's like, you know what? Paul Giamatti's character, this is the put-up-or-shut-up moment as his friend, and he does what he needs to as his friend in that moment, which, as a viewer...

I get to that point with the characters and it doesn't feel fake. It feels earned. But I appreciate that the movie doesn't have Giamatti confront Hayden Church in that moment because there's something so just slightly lovable about Thomas Hayden Church. That's the bailout moment of this movie is he's not completely beyond reproach. He's just 99% beyond reproach.

And I found myself rooting for that 1%. This is something that we will discuss in many of the films that that we see in one of the theories of human psychology goes back thousands of years is that you're born with a certain character and your life simply allows you to express it at a greater or lesser level. And then there's others who will argue that like people can change. Right. And of course, many, many horrible things have been caused in the world by people who didn't change and people who did change.

But I do think, These performances are so good that despite the fact that if you listed what these people did and just said, yeah, I know this guy and he did this, this and this. Objectively, you'd say, like, why would you spend any time with that? But let's go back to Miles, Paul Giannetti's character. OK, he steals money. He forgets.

He basically forgets his mother's birthday, shows up with some half, you know, a card he scribbled on in the doorway. And then he steals money from her. His mother, obviously on some sort of fixed income assisted living. Now, again, we don't know. We don't know.

Was she a terrible mother? And he always resented her and the mother didn't protect her, him from abusive. I mean, we could fill in some things there. It's not relevant. The point is that on the screen, and this is sort of an ethic that we'll talk about.

I like to only interpret what, it's my preference. It's not like a rule for me or my students to always follow. But like, I like to only interpret what's on the screen. I don't like those internet discussions where somebody says, oh, you know, the director explained this later. Or in comic book number 37, that's it.

And I know that's not what you were doing with. No, but it is. Yeah, but that's, you know, off-screen stuff is not really pertinent, I think. It's been made pertinent now, but it's not. This is a complete movie to me and a complete arc of a character.

And It actually is interesting. There have been movies where I've gone, hey, gosh, I'd like to hear more about that. I mean, I did see Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I remember as a young person going, boy, I'd like to see another movie. Little did I know where it would eventually lead.

But the idea of beating a franchise to death was not there. in the zeitgeist of the culture at that time anyway. But in this one, you list what they've done. It's awful, but you know, you, You come away, and again, this is a tribute to the director's storytelling and to the whole, everybody in the cinematography, the music. Let's talk about Napa Valley. Actually, I was reading, it was filmed in a couple of, they did construct a soundstage.

It wasn't like all in the thing, but the California set, it was actually filmed in the San Ynez Valley, but it's adjacent to the idea of this beautiful backcountry California city rolling hills, a little bit dry, the perfect wine country, right? Yeah. And you're okay with that. Like, I'm okay spending two hours with these cads, flawed, sometimes jerks who say things I would never approve of. I think it's something, and that's a great testament to a movie that we're willing to do that.

Well, and I think, you know, you've alluded to that because there are plenty of films that the characters are written a certain way, the way that they're written is intentionally off-putting, and me as the audience receives them as such, and I am off-put by them, and I do not want to see them on screen. But that's the intention of the screenwriter and the director. And that's a success, and I can't really fault them for doing that. A film that always comes to mind is Casino. because Sharon stone in that movie is just the worst, but that's the point. And I think here we have that kind of dial turning left and right, kind of with, with some level of not interchangeability, but I think some ease or kind of looseness, because like you said, there, these characters exist on a, on a range because we have to like them by the end of the movie.

We have to like them in some capacity, at least Paul Giamatti's character. I, And I am curious kind of your thoughts, because, again, this is just going off of what we see on screen and how Alexander Payne presents everything. To me, it seems like by the end of the film, we're not meant to like Thomas Hayden Church's character. There's that redemptive moment and he kind of passes by it, flies over it, chooses not to take advantage of it. And that juxtaposition at the end is why we continue on with Paul Giamatti's character kind of into the coda of the film.

But Thomas Hayden Church's character, I think, is meant to be that kind of shepherd, the Virgil to Giamatti's Dante, as it were. But then by the end of it, Giamatti has to continue on on his own because he realizes he is going to hold himself accountable as opposed to Thomas Aiden Church, who there's no accountability with his character whatsoever in any capacity. Yes, I guess being a teacher, it's part of my paycheck to always have hope that the student who struggled at the beginning of class and maybe didn't turn in the best paper and seems to not be getting the material, no matter what you do and say in office hours or during your teaching time, we'll pull it out, right? I mean, I think if you become, and this is actually, this is one of the reasons I sort of semi-identified with Miles was that, of course, he's a teacher, right?

And he doesn't seem to be a ridiculously cynical teacher either, which I sort of admired. The whole film, among the The negative things he doesn't do is bad mouth his students and say, yeah, I got to read all these stupid essays from these students, which is a teacher stereotype in movies and television about the teacher who's given up teaching. So he's not Robin Williams with the students jump. I bet he's not the kind of teacher where the students jump up on their desk and burst into spontaneous applause. But but like you could see, like, he's actually probably a pretty good teacher and has good discussions in class.

So. I felt that there's more hope for Miles than for Jack. But as I said, I use the term 1%. I have 1% hope that Jack might go, wow, this marriage with this beautiful woman that I have made still possible through the intercession of my one last burst of stupidity on my part. But then also my friend covering for me is my last chance at real adulthood and something close to happy, real happiness and real success.

So 1% is maybe 30% for Miles and maybe 1% for Jack. And what's interesting is like we've kind of already talked about with these characters and them being so complex in that moment at the end where we see Thomas Hayden Church and he's You know, I'm nothing without my fiance. And, you know, I need you to get my wallet for me. And, you know, if you don't get my wallet for me, they're going to find out I did all this. It's like I wager that your wife's going to find out eventually one way or another.

It has nothing to do with this wallet. And that's the funny thing. I think that's why Giamatti ends up doing what he does, because he's doing his friend a solid. in spite of the fact that he knows that his friend is the way that he is, because even in spite of having his face bashed in by a motorcycle, by Sandra Oh, in a scene that is, like, a shocking amount of violence in a film that has no violence up to that point, like, she really goes off on him. He still continues to, you know, kind of revel in his bad ways. I mean, to the point where he's literally hitting on another waitress the same...

With the... The nose tape a la Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. sitting there with Paul Giamatti trying to hit on this waitress who just happens to be married to MC Ganey, which is very funny. And all of that kind of absurdity surrounding, you know, Paul Giamatti sneaking into someone's house and seeing these two people having sex and like stealing the wallet back and all this kind of wild Coen Brothers-esque kind of adventure. I think it's a very interesting kind of moment in this movie where, like you said, there should have been a off-the-gas moment for Jack long before... Sandra Oh is beating him over the head with a motorcycle helmet or MC Ganey is chasing after him naked in the street. neither of those things were enough.

And they should have been, but they're not. And they should have been, but they're not. And like you said, it's that 1% versus the 30% of kind of redeemability or understanding with these characters. And the fact that there's any of that in this movie is such a success to the screenwriter that they're able to get us to understand or sympathize and empathize with these characters that are doing these really, I wouldn't say deplorable, but kind of detestable things. I mean, again, Thomas Aiden Church's character would not be the first, last, or only man to do what he did.

But the unrepentant nature with which he does things is kind of the juxtaposition. Because Paul Giamatti almost overcorrects for how bad he feels constantly. You see that in that scene where he calls his ex-wife and he's kind of talking to her. like she's still his significant other two years later. That, I think, is a stereotype that does work for this movie because Paul Giamatti is able to play that sad sack so well. But like you said, he is a complicated sad sack, which I think is... such a successful turn of character in this movie i will point out paul giamatti the only one of the of other than sandra oh i would say of the three main characters virginia madsen thomas hayden church paul giamatti Is Giamatti the only one who wasn't nominated for an Oscar?

Which is weird. Is this just like what they expected of Paul Giamatti in the early 2000s? This is just the kind of characters that he plays, so he's doing it really well. He wasn't nominated for Best Actor, which is surprising. Because he's, again, unsurprisingly really good in this movie.

But this character has some nuance to it that the sad sack divorced guy sometimes doesn't have. Yeah, and I was reading... A little bit of the background in the film, and I honestly had never studied Alexander Payne as a director. I mean, I've watched Election and About Schmidt, and I'm happy to talk about them, but I hadn't thought of him that much as sort of a director of, I won't say the little people, of stories of people who wouldn't normally be featured in movies as the protagonists. But I was reading that what he wanted to do here was reminiscent, and this was a film, and again, I'm not that old, but I remember in the 70s and 80s, there was still a reference to a movie, 1961, divorce Italian style.

And it actually sort of embodied a type of film that apparently Paine wanted to hit, and you've described it, is this mixture of physical comedy and drama, And verbal sparring, often with a character who you don't sympathize with because of their actions, but because there's a certain sadness. And they're not successful as a cat. Let's put it this way. They keep trying to be a debonair, fooling around and divorce, adultery person. type of situation, but they're not very good at it. And so you have these mixed feelings about them.

And boy, he was able to pull that off in an American context very well. And I think that that's, again, there's some films which are harder to make than others. And I don't mean like you have to shoot in Antarctica versus shooting in a stage in Hollywood, just to pull off those layers and complexities. And I think that's partly why we're saying this is required viewing is that A character study can be officious and boring and pretentious and just have people talking for two hours about, I don't know, politics or art, and we cannot be interested in this. But I am deeply interested in these people talking.

I'm not cheering for them all the time, but I care about them, which was a very, very difficult thing to achieve. Being able to be directly emotionally engaged with a character in a movie, I think, especially in this day and age, in the 2026 lens to take, again, to do our 360 holistic view of things, to look at this movie in 2026 and realize that these kinds of movies do still come out in theaters and they do still have big name actors in them. And they do still get nominated. But it just doesn't feel like they're making the splash that this movie did anymore. And that's I mean, there's a whole host of reasons.

2004 is such a different time in terms of the. level of access to things I mean we're just in the like right before if not like pre Netflix if not early Netflix days we're not in the streaming world by another like you know four to five years so this was a again like there were only a certain amount of things that you could go watch at any one time and this was a movie that was in theaters that you could go watch there were other things in theaters you could go watch. And people went and saw this movie in droves. And it's not because, like we said, it's a big, explosive, action-packed movie. It's a big, explosive character movie where these characters are making big choices and doing, again, comedic, sad, darkly humorous things.

And... we are wanting to see how the other characters react to those things. And that is the big, climactic, bombastic explosions in this movie's kind of area of things. And that, for me, is a success in more ways than... a Marvel movie making double its budget. Like, this movie is able to get me, like you've already said, to engage with and empathize with people that I see some of myself in, but in a lot of ways, like you've already alluded to, if I knew someone like Thomas Aiden Church's character, I probably would not be friends with them. I would keep them...

You know, I might be friends with them, but I would keep them at an arm's length, is what I would say. Like, you know, you wouldn't be someone... Go ahead. Again, as you pointed out, we're not seeing the lion in winter. We're seeing the people in midlife, right?

Right. And so you can imagine... In fact, they allude to this a little bit. Like, you can imagine their roommates in college. I mean, there are friendships which are...

You're thrown together friendships and your friendship... Like, hey, I'm in college and this is my roommate. And like, all right, we'll hang out together. And this sort of inertia there. And you can imagine... that maybe in the younger versions of themselves, they had more fun, and it turned out better, you know, in terms of what they were trying to do.

These are the kind of friendships which, like, serious people should drop at some point in their life. Well, and that, I think, for me, is kind of the thing as, and, you know, I think it's also important, you know, as a, I think that this film is multifaceted in its success because I think, for me, also, we can talk about the re-watching of a film and we've talked about this a little bit I saw this film when I was in my mid-20s either right before I got married or right after I got married I am now divorced and my ability to comprehend the Miles character I think has changed so much in that time because there are things that just that character embodies that you can only understand if something like this has happened to you or you've been engaged in something like this and it would seem that Paul Giamatti character is still opining his wife who is no longer with him his ex-wife and again like that is a very specific kind of divorced person on top of everything else not every person who's divorced is opining their partner plenty of people 50 percent of the people even are the ones who left.

So Paul Giamatti is the one who got left clearly or, you know, something to that effect. Well, he drove her away. I mean, he was pretty clear. But she left him is my point. Like she left him.

Him driving her away is something that he has to realize, which I think, again, like that's the growth of the character. We don't know if he's ever said that before. but we see him say it in the film, in the week of the road trip, this kind of last hurrah, this dark midnight of the soul spread out over a week. I mean, this is one of those, we're not coming back from this trip the same people we left as, is kind of what they don't realize. The transformative nature of a road trip, I think for me, is still a very romantic notion and one that And I don't believe in a lot of like romantic things anymore as an adult, because like you said, as an adult, we have to have hard conversations with ourselves about do we want to have these people in our lives anymore?

Do we want to be friends with someone like this? Do I want to be friends with someone who gets me into these wacky and wild situations where I have to go and do this stuff? I'm I have a tolerance maybe that's higher than others. But I also if I was being asked to break into someone's house to steal someone's wallet back, I'd probably say this is my line, my friend. This is on you.

Your bed, you made it, you lay in it. To be an adult versus to be a young adult or an old teenager or whatever you want to call your mid-20s or early 20s, this film just doesn't have the same impact then that it does now when you become an adult and you start to have regrets. And you start to look back on the things that you maybe didn't do or missed out on. And in your 20s, there's no room for that because you're kind of you're facing forward, not looking back. And the longer life goes on, the harder it is to stop yourself from looking back, because at some point and you may not know when this is, you're going to crest over the top of the halfway point of your life.

And all you have is looking back because there's very little left in terms of looking forward. It just time anyways, not in terms of quality or anything else. And that's kind of the conversation that Thomas Hayden Church has with Paul Giamatti is, you know, do you want to keep looking back or do you want to even for a second look forward? And we see that reinforced to Giamatti over and over again. Sandra Oh's character is like, hey, Maya really likes you.

You should call her back. And, you know, his mom is like, you should really find someone to like, you know, be be there for you and be in love with. And it's like you can't have that without the divorce. You can't have those moments without the yearning or wanting or lacking or, like you said, pushing away of someone else the thing that you want and you pushed it away unknowingly or knowingly. Paul Giamatti would never cop to knowing about it ahead of time.

But after the fact, he might. And we see that in the movie. And I think that that's... Another success of this movie is seeing characters have growth and knowing that, yes, they might just be fictional characters. And I've thought about this as myself, as someone who's gone through kind of my own growth in the last couple of years.

People sometimes ask, like, was there a catalyzing moment? Was there a catalyst? And like, yeah, the catalyst was I just didn't want to be like this anymore. And sometimes it is just that. They don't necessarily have to go to Napa Valley for that to be the case.

Sometimes there is kind of an exterior catalyzing thing. Like watching your friend implode even further his life when he's on the precipice of what so many people would consider to be security, financial security. It's clear that Thomas Hayden Church's fiance has money, her family. has money. He does not have money. There's a job for him after the marriage.

All these things that most of us would be looking forward to as things that are benefits, he is rankling at. And Paul Giamatti looks at that and goes, well, I wouldn't be rankling at that if I had that. Thomas Aiden Church can't take his own advice that he's giving to Paul Giamatti, which is look forward, not backwards, because the reason Thomas Aiden Church's character is doing what he's doing in the film is because he's trying to hold on to that fame and notoriety that he had. He can't take his own advice. Thomas Aiden Church can.

And what's funny is by the end of the movie, we see Paul Giamatti has seemingly taken the advice of someone who could not take their own advice. And change can happen. Again, Napa Valley, sure, maybe it was that transformative moment for this character, but you can change and you don't have to have a reason why. Wanting to change is reason enough. Yeah, and sometimes it's not the advice necessarily that somebody's giving the words.

It's that you see by their example. And it could be a good example, like somebody you modeled and we use the word role model and mentor, or it could be a bad example. And I think Paul Miles is... looking at his friend's behavior that he probably was okay with when they were 20. It was fun then. It was a lark then.

And there were fewer consequences, and there was less of an end point there. And he's saying, now that he's in his mid-40s, like, yeah, this doesn't work anymore. And your broken nose and the fact that you had to run naked through a field to get away from an angry... husband and that I have to go steal a wallet. You have to crash a car. It just didn't make a list of the absurdist, you know, pratfall sitcom, again, Italian comedy, crazy things that happen here, but they're each sort of hammering home this life lesson is like, okay, it's time to be an adult.

Accept who you are, what you are. It's okay to have ambitions, but don't be delusional. Don't lie. Don't heard other people to try to achieve your dreams. I mean, part of the word arc, again, I always just love to look at words and, Okay, when we say a character has an arc, there's a slight problem with the word arc because if you actually draw an arc, it's heading down.

Right, it comes back the other way. Right, because most arcs you start. So arc is a good word, but what you want is you're hoping that there's a trend line at the end of the movie where the character has learned and is on their way up. Right. Yeah.

Um, and it's okay if there were bumps along the way. Growth is not linear. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So I, I think that this is one of those movies where I, I think part of the huge box office was a lot of adults identified with this moment of like, what do I let go of my, from my youth? And that's a principle of a lot of religions, by the way, as well as the, the idea of like, there's things that make sense when you're a child and there's things that make sense when you have the responsibilities of an of an adult. And so I think people identified with that. They're not just the beautiful, the scenery and the situation and the humor that just many funny scenes where you're laughing. I laughed out loud in many times in this movie, usually, I mean, it's a very old fashioned laughing out loud.

Some, I read somewhere recently on the, on Reddit, somebody asked like, how old is humor? Right. And of course we can go back thousands of years and see plays by the Greeks and the Romans that were meant to be comedies. And then you go back further, and I am absolutely sure that when some Cro-Magnon tripped over a leaf, the other guy standing around laughed at him. Hey, Gorky, you really looked funny there.

So I'm pretty sure physical humor is as old as consciousness. Right. Maybe dolphins and elephants are laughing at each other and us sometimes. But the point is that through great storytelling, laughter can be self-instructive. And so we're left hopeful, remonstrated ourselves, like, you know, I don't want to be these guys.

And what else can you ask for our film? What's funny, I think, about our entire discussion of this movie is we have not mentioned the whine of it all at all. The fact that Pinot Noir ended up becoming such a popular wine for years after this film. I think, you know, the wine, look, you can look at the wine as a number of things in this movie. I think, and this is just me, that one of the greatest successes of this movie is the fact that there are scenes that allude to the fact that Paul Giamatti is a Pinot Noir grape and that he needs all this kind of specialized, it's okay to need special attention and care and need, and sometimes certain kinds of things need more special care and attention than others and i think that it's very interesting that chiamati really understands and kind of empathizes with the plight of the pinot noir grape and we kind of hear this kind of like him waxing kind of melodically about it over and over again throughout the film and that's because i think he like him like the grapes and wine that he loves so much that the grapes make i think he feels like a pinot noir grape or wine which is you know The kind of care and attention that goes into 90% of people is not something that's going to be super effective for him.

He needs something a little bit more, a little bit different. And I think it's just brilliant that the movie is able to weave that in through the film. Because like you said, to go back to your initial point about the advertising for the movie, the advertising of the movie makes this look like a wine movie. And I'm not saying it's not a wine movie, but the wine is really kind of incidental. The wine is a thing that is used to, like, make the scenery more interesting, make where they are more engaging, but the wine of it all is just a thing that one of the characters happens to be kind of really passionate about.

But this is not a winemaking movie, but boy, the trailer for the movie would make you think it is. Well, I always think about that famous Latin phrase, in vino veritas, in wine, there's truth and, uh... as in like when people are under diminished capacity, they say things that they normally wouldn't say. I think the research on this is that sometimes you say things which you're not thinking, you're just in diminished capacity. And sometimes, yeah, you do say things which you've kept inside you. But the wine, to me, is a great tool because it's obviously one of the bonds of their friendship, right?

Right. Differently. Like, Miles is a true cognoscento. He's like, he takes such pride that he has this bottle and that bottle. And of course, his interest in Maya is not just physical, is that apparently she knows wine.

And so he's talking about wine. So he's in love with her wine intellect. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there certainly were, again, I'm sure for thousands, somebody in ancient Babylonia was a Mede snob or something like that.

But like, it is itself a fascinating example of conversations which don't have intrinsic interest to the audience. If you think of maybe people in their 30s and 40s, 50s who watched the film back then, as opposed to today, wine was much more popular than it is today. There's a sort of challenge for the wine industry and Generation Z who are drinking more mixed drinks and other things. But wine was like the middle-aged person's drink. Right.

Right. Wine with dinner. In fact, it's always interesting. And we're going to we've talked about this in some other films about like the amount of consumption. I think if you go to restaurants today, you don't see people ordering four bottles of wine.

No. With dinner anymore, as much as you don't see people smoking as much anymore. But the wine brings out character, sort of teases out in the same way that Miles gives all these wonderful little speeches about like, can you smell the. faintest little soupçon of asparagus, and he's talking about how to swirl it in the glass, and will it sniff, and just his physical description. This great actor, we've talked about this before, how I think some actors are full-body actors, and like, boy, Paul Giamatta, you feel his his shins acting when he's describing his love affair with mine. Is there any better actor who does the hang dog then Paul Giamatti he does the hang dog face so well just like the Charlie Brown like lowering of the head in the walking forward and just. the pooching out of the gut, just looking sad and pathetic in a way that Paul Giamatti is able to do.

And I don't know if it's his eyes or what it is about his facial expression. It's his eyes, right? It's totally his eyes. He has some of the most expressive eyes of any male actor in Hollywood. And I think that he's just, you can see in his eyes, because a lot of the film is shots of him looking at something else and you don't see what he's looking at because what he's looking at is unimportant. you're seeing him and how he's processing the world because you understand his character so kind of inherently, especially if you're watching this movie from where I was watching it from.

And that's what I love, like you said, about Paul Giamatti as an actor. He is just able to elicit the exact reaction he wants with every part of his body. And I think Thomas Hayden Church the same way. Like, it's just what the expectation is is completely different. You know, Thomas Hayden Church in those moments where he's with Sandra Oh and her mom and her daughter, it's like, this guy is so... full of it entirely full of it but they don't realize that and even if they do realize it it's they don't care because if if you want to be fooled and someone fools you can you really be upset and i'm not saying that they wanted to be fooled but They gave themselves over emotionally to Thomas Hayden Church, and he was not playing fair, which you have if your expectation is everybody's going to play fair.

Some people aren't. And that's, you know, Thomas Hayden Church's character is just not playing fair. And I think that's Paul Giamatti's character. You know, if I were him, I'd be done with it. But again, that's the point that he has to get to as the character.

And I like that there is this back and forth with him. in Thomas Hayden Church and they feel like real people which is just in filmmaking it's so much harder than it sounds because people are complex and difficult and easy at times and you want people to be successful and redeemable but there are some people that just aren't and it just is some people don't have arcs as he says in The Sopranos where's my arc and it's like well maybe you don't get. One into a ditch is your arc yeah. Yeah that's your arc I guess this is sort. Of my wrap up comment that this playing off of what you just said there is that you're sitting down to write a book novel narrative or screenplay and one challenge is how do I have the audience care about what happens to a character and I guess this is the suggestion that I make to my students is that if the answer is a simple one then it's probably not the right answer so for example it is so easy to say okay Well, their parents were killed by a criminal, and so the character dedicates himself to fighting crime.

Okay, well, you know, that worked once. Right. But if you're doing it today, you got to come up with something else. And the more seriously you want to be taken as... a creator and we've agreed that there is no auteur for a film, like every aspect of a film, but like more seriously, you want to be taken as a writer or cinematographer or anything is you have to think are, even if it's a superhero, this is sort of what gets me is that somehow the creation of superhero or some home, sometimes this is true in horror and science fiction as well. There seems to be this theory that we can throw away the normal rules of characterization that I've just said, where you have to find complexity and depth and think about the grays and not make them so underlined and underscored and headlined and just so simplistic.

And this is a great teaching tool. I think that's what I'd like to end on is that I I have mentioned this film. I've talked about this film. At least once in one class, in a graduate class, I've assigned this film as an exemplar of character building and storytelling. And nothing we've done here, if you haven't watched this movie, really spoils the movie because you're not getting plot points as the most important thing. you're getting impressions of getting to know people over two hours and seven minutes.

And I agree. If you go into this movie with the expectations set in the right direction, which is a adult character drama, comedy, dramedy, as they would have called it, or do call them, I don't know. It's a comedic drama. I don't know if it was portmanteaus or unnecessary. I find this to be, like you said, a really good example of a maximalist approach to character building with a minimalist budget. and a minimalist approach in a lot of the other ways, they get a lot of mileage out of a little, because this is effectively a stage play.

It is. You don't have to set it in all these stunning vistas of Napa to get the point across. Like you said, this is a character drama about characters interacting with each other in a believable, engaging way. And for that, it is a success. All the other things are secondary successes, but The main success, like you said, is creating two characters that feel lived in and real and we can empathize with and detest all in the same breath because they feel real, like real people.

Because people are complex. And I think the best movies give us a window into our own complexity and allow people to say, yeah, it's okay to be complex and it's okay to have multitudes and be multifaceted. You don't have to just be one thing. And no one person is one thing to everyone. But I would say if you are worried about growth in life or changing, a film like this can make you realize that sometimes change is hard, but change is worth doing.

Because on the other side of it, like we've already alluded to, Paul Giamatti has found someone in this film that... is perfect for him in every way. All of those ways more or less have nothing to do with physicality. It's all about engagement mentally and emotionally, and that's what the film is preaching, is mental and emotional engagement with the audience, which is an impressive thing to pull off in two hours and seven minutes with a $ 10 million budget. We may not be talking about a film that is as economical with its budget on the next episode, but this was one good one to go out with because on the next episode, we're gonna be talking about a film that's more or less known for having a huge budget and being more or less excommunicated by the studio Before it even came out, we're going to be talking about Waterworld, which is a film of another stripe entirely, Dr.

Perlmutter. It has nothing to do with wine drinking. Shocking, I know. Or drinking water, even. Well, sort of drinking water, I guess.

What do you do with a world full of water that you can't drink? Yeah, you'd think there'd be more wine bottles stored and at least low enough in the ocean. Yeah, Waterworld is not a small, intimate character study. Is it? No, it's not.

It is 180 from where we are now. But, uh, I'm super excited to talk about it with you on the next episode of Required Viewing, which is on the CultureCast subfeed. So that's where you can find it if you want to listen to more episodes of this show. This show comes out every Thursday. The CultureCast comes out every Wednesday.

And other shows on the Weirding Way Media Network come out all the days of the week. So if you want to hear them, head on over to WeirdingWayMedia.com, where they're at the projection booth. Be it. The Feminine Critique, be it Fomentories, be it Midnight Viewing, those podcasts, or even 80s TV Ladies. Those can all be found over at weirdingwaymedia.com.

Like, rate, and review the show on iTunes and Spotify. Those are the two places you can go to help the show out non-financially. Patreon.com slash CultureCast is the financial place that you can go to help the show out. Yeah, come on back for the next episode when we talk about Waterworld, a complete 180 pivot from Sideway. So so