So, early this week, I saw Sideways. Without a doubt, the best thing about it was the bleu cheese burger that accompanied it, since I was at the Alamo Drafthouse, prince among movie theaters that it is. Other than that… this review is going to have spoilers, because it’s hard enough to come up with anything to say even if I don’t worry about them.

It’s one of those movies about nothing. You know the type, because it’s predicated on the American short story form from the 1960s or so through today. Take a few people, or maybe only one, and insert them in a situation. Take some time period (between hours and days) in which you paint a portrait of their lives. Then, in the last moment of the story, the person (or people) breaks free, effects some kind of change, and whatever happens to them next would be far too bourgeois to actually mention, because it was all about painting the picture and then escaping from it.

So. You have a plot such as it is, which consists of a failed actor (Joey Tribbiani at his logical mid-life extension) and a substantially more-failed writer on a trip through SoCal wine country (which you the viewer should interpret as a trip to escape from their lives) for a week, and the antics they get into, which mostly consists of falling in love with a couple of local wine-country chicks. The wacky twist is that the actor is going to get married at the end of the week.

The acting was somewhere between good and great. The story was sufficiently un-engrossing that when people showed up at the 20% full theater a few minutes after the movie was in progress and chose to sit right next to me, my natural discomfort around strangers was far more forebrained than what was happening on the screen. I eventually moved down a couple of seats, so that was pleasant, probably the third best thing that happened while I was watching the movie.

The thing it had the most going for it, aside from the acting, was the whole wine-snobbery schtick. You could tell they were serious, the kinds of things that wine connoisseurs actual say, and that they meant them. But when you got away from that, and they were describing various wines in the ways that these people never do, at least in public… there was some real love there, the kind of thing that makes you believe that maybe you should have certain bottles from certain vineyards stored away, to enjoy just when they reach their peaks.

So, missing plot, good acting, good dialogue, and decent subject matter. Plus, a couple of distinctly hilarious scenes (one about merlot, another with a naked towtruck driver who probably looks about the way you think he does), which were the second and fourth best things about the movie. No, second and fifth, because the creme brulee I had for dessert was moderately divine.

The funny thing is, the review ends up looking, at least to me, like I liked it. Which in some ways I did. I’m totally onboard with there having been actor nominations. But Best Picture? I weep for 2004, that this was on the list of best films of the year.