Tastes good to me.

Believe the hype: Sideways is that good. It's funny, 'cause I wasn't expecting to love it as much as I did. I adore Alexander Payne's first two films (Citizen Ruth and Election) but found the much-acclaimed About Schmidt to be one brilliant performance swimming in a sea of flimsy satire and cheap secondary characters. Plus, I was a little underwhelmed with the self-consciously quirky trailer.
Wrong. Way off.
This time around Payne has ditched his beloved Nebraska-setting and much of the satiric-edge (but not his eye for piercing social detail) and delves into the lives and disappointments of two middle-aged men driving through California wine country. I think I responded so strongly to the film because Payne is so willing to a) take his sweet time to develope such lived-in characters and b) allow them to be really complex, kind-of unlikable people. That's Payne's greatest gift (and where I thought he totally missed the mark in Schmidt): his laser-like/objective eye for detail. It's why his first two satires cut to the bone and why this character(s)-study is so rich. The people who populate Payne's films have shitty haircuts, cramped apartments, botched relationships, really embarrassing but honest drunk dials, listen to Bonnie Raitt, spray anti-odor stuff on their feet, do the Times crossword in pen, drive cars that need a good carwash, and so on. In the end, I felt like had just spent a couple weeks reading a huge novel about these characters. That's the kind of intimacy and depth that Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor and his super-talented cast created. And that's a wonderful and rare thing. Enjoy it while you can.
(Sidenote: The J posted a quote from Alexander Payne about his filmmaking MO. Dead on.)