Recently, rewatching Sideways, I was thinking that few directors manage to capture what life really looks like as well as Alexander Payne (with help from his fantastic production designer Jane Ann Stewart, who worked with him on Election and About Schmidt, too). Granted, not all films are meant to look like real life, but of those that are, Payne's are near-perfection. It makes his characters that much easier to empathize with, though I'm not a great deal like any of them.
I started thinking what characters I am like, and which films feel the most familiar, which brings us to the QotD: What film feels most like your life?
To which I answered: Oddly enough, Sideways, and yeah, Paul Giamatti. I'm a writer who knows the scar of checking that mail again every day and finding nothing but rejection and no love.
You wouldn't think it would be so hard to sell a lesbian love story in the US in 2005, would you?
But anyway, Sideways is...uncomfortable. At least for me. And, I suppose, to anyone who likes to close their eyes to reality and inhale a bouquet (sometimes a wine is just a wine, but not in this movie).
And it is sorta kinda not fair that they made a movie about a failed writer whose possible/probable salvation is represented by Virginia Madsen. I have had a crush on Virginia Madsen since 1984. It ain't fair to mess around in my dreams like that.
2 comments:
I know this is going to sound so awful, but have you considered submitting it under a female pseudonym? After all, some publishers might simply read the title, see it's written by a man and think it's porn. Sort of a reverse 1800s female-writing-as-male thing. George Sand, George Eliot, and those Bell "brothers."
I've considered it idly, but...it all seems like a bad movie.
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