Going Sideways

Spocko's Brain was in a bit of overload the last 5 days. Dealing with big life issues. I'm still trying to make sense of them all and move forward and not backwards. More on this later. But in the mean time read part of this this excellent review of Sideways by David Denby in the New Yorker.

Payne and Taylor have always made movies about the melancholy middling-to-lower range of achievement and ambition, the near-losers that Americans hate but that so many of us at our most demoralized become. Up until now, the dead-eyed blandness of Omaha, Payne’s home town, has dominated his work. He and Taylor have repeatedly satirized the emotional flatness and evasiveness of the place, while treating with tender respect their characters’ hesitant, inarticulate yearnings for something more. Together they have created a gallery of memorably mediocre people: the dumb, paint-sniffing but tenaciously enduring Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) in “Citizen Ruth”; the vindictive schoolteacher (Matthew Broderick) in “Election”; the soured widower (Jack Nicholson) in “About Schmidt.” There is, I believe, a quiet but persistent spiritual ethos at the heart of their intention. The blinkered, semi-unconscious sinners stumble toward grace—a moment of clarity, of self-realization. Some of them may even get there.

I didn't think Sideways was Payne's best movie, but it had its moments. Part of the reason it resonated with many man was that it so often appears that only the stories of the highest or the lowest get told. Where is the meaning in the middle? In a world of winner take all and the rich get richer do our lives count?

I often wonder about the "aspirational" republicans. Does deluding themselves work better than seeing a hard reality and associating with a class that is getting shafted again and again in subtte or not so subtle ways?