Adapted from the novel Sideways by Rex Pickett
Unsuccessful writer Miles takes his actor friend Jack on a wine tasting tour as a last hurrah before Jack's wedding. Miles is mostly focused on the wine, but Jack wants to have one last fling (or more) before settling down, and is also determined to help Miles get over his recent divorce.
I'm just going to say this up front: I strongly disliked this book, and I thought the movie was even worse. I think it might have helped if I knew or cared anything about wine, but since I don't, this story has essentially nothing to recommend itself to me. The main characters are a pretentious wine snob who complains about everything and a smarmy playboy who objectifies women. Pretty much all they do is get drunk and pursue women. To be fair, I must point out that at least Miles was opposed to Jack cheating on his fiancée, but he was too busy being obnoxious to do anything about it.
The book was bad enough, but the movie changed or eliminated most of the few things I didn't dislike about it. There's a whole scene in the book where this guy offers to take Miles and Jack boar hunting, but then starts shooting at them, which is very weird and rather out of place in the story (I assume that's why it was cut), but it was one of the few times when the book held my interest, so I was sad it wasn't in the movie. This elimination also means that Jack's girlfriend doesn't get to have a gun when she confronts him after finding out about his engagement, since in the book she used the one they took from the boar hunter. But this fits in with the theme of most of the changes from page to screen: the movie takes away pretty much all of what little power the book gave its female characters.
One thing that surprised me about the book, given that it was written by a man from a man's perspective, was how much it emphasized women's sexual pleasure. I was disappointed but not surprised that all of that was cut from the movie. For some reason Hollywood is okay with men being crude about sex, but draws a line at men talking about how much they like to satisfy women. This isn't news, but it was particularly evident in this adaptation, and I found certain offensive lines of Jack's even more offensive when compared with what he actually said in the book. In a similar vein, Jack's fiancée (whose name is Babs in the book and Christine in the movie) is way more aware of what's going on, telling Miles at the wedding that if Jack slept with anyone during their trip, they were even, which definitely does not happen in the movie. I also thought it was weird that the movie cut out the whole Jack paying Maya to sleep with Miles thing that led to Miles punching Jack in the face and one of Jack's many trips to the ER (all but one of which were eliminated from the movie), since that was pretty crucial to the story in the novel, and the entire remainder of the story suffers from the elimination of that scene.
The point I'm trying to make is it would be one thing if this just wasn't my kind of story. I wouldn't be happy about having to read and watch it, but I could go with that. But the thing is, I felt like this was a terrible adaptation. Almost all of the interesting parts of the book were eliminated or changed to make them less interesting, and the story barely holds together. Apparently, I'm in the minority here, since this movie has 7.5/10 on IMDb and 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, but I think this might be my least favorite winner of this award so far.
Coming up next: Brokeback Mountain, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
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