Two Great Movies

Movies are so hit-and-miss lately that I wanted to share two excellent movies I’ve seen back to back.

I caught a sneak preview of Sideways, which is easily one of the best films of the year. It has a well-rounded mix of humor and depression (since Paul Giamatti‘s Miles is truly a depressing character in some ways), and the writing crackles.

I also enjoyed the setting and premise: two friends go on a tour of the California wine country. I’m not a wine connoisseur by any means, but my stepfather works at a winery in Napa, so I have a sense of that world. The movie gets it totally right about the types of wineries – in one scene the winery with the most people, most merchandise, and grandest tasting room is also the one with the worst wine.

For another perspective, see “A Connoisseur’s Guide to Sideways” at Slate.com, which includes this tasty paragraph:

Sideways is great wine porn. The vineyard scenes are, of course, stunning, and the wines paraded across the screen will certainly put that knowing smile on the faces of those who like to drink well. When Maya and Stephanie join Miles and Jack for dinner one night, the bottles come fast and furious, and all are recognizable, estimable names: Kistler, Sea Smoke, Andrew Murray, Dominique Laurent (a slightly odd presence, given that Miles indicates early on that he is no fan of excessive oak). When the ladies retreat to the bathroom for a moment and Jack chastises Miles for having subjected the table to a lengthy disquisition on Gaston Huet’s Vouvrays—perhaps the ultimate insider’s wines—I nearly fell out of my seat. Huet’s Vouvrays, mentioned in a major motion picture? Delicious.

The other movie I saw was The Incredibles. I’m a long-time Pixar fan, and I’m ecstatic that they keep putting out movies that are good not because of their 3D animation but because of their stories. (The selection of trailers before the movie reinforced this: Robots and Madagascar look terrible, especially the latter, because they’re just retreads of the same character-looking-for-meaning-while-getting-hit-in-the-head-for-laughs theme. Hey Katzenberg, et. al: moving to 3D doesn’t automatically make a better movie.)

Incredibles deals with some serious stuff, such as settling into a routine, keeping a marriage together, and being true to one’s self. The writing is great, the animation is stunning, and I daresay it’s probably the Best Bond Movie of the Last 20 Years (when you see it, you’ll understand what I mean).