the loveable rogue

We saw Sideways tonight, from the pay-per-view.

May I just take a moment to rail against the fact that PPV movies are rarely shown in letterbox? I'm paying (not much, granted, but I am paying) to see the entire movie, not just the parts that fit into the pan-and-scan ratio. It's very annoying, and there are more than a few scenes in Sideways where the pan-and-scan is distracting to the point of criminality. Wake up, movie broadcasting people! Pan-and-scan is evil!

Ahem. So, Sideways. I'd say, "meh," but I did get a few laughs out of it. And I did come to care for Paul Giamatti's character (Miles). But the topic today is more Thomas Haden Church's character, Jack -- the lovable rogue.

I want to hate Jack, but mostly I just find him distasteful. I can't work up that much emotion, either negative or positive, towards him.

See, my idea of a lovable rogue is someone like Han Solo, who will pull the trigger first so Greedo doesn't grease him in some sleazy bar on Tatooine, and is certainly not above smuggling. But once Solo fell for Leia, he didn't leave town for a week to go bang every pretty girl in the quadrant before they finally got married.

Jack was repulsive and manipulative and I hated how he turned on the charm and had women falling at his feet. The thing I hated the most about it was how realistic it was, and how everyone let him get away with it. Sure, he supposedly has a "moment" where he realizes that if he loses his fiancee, he'll have nothing, but in all honesty, I couldn't help thinking, "What a load of crap! He'll forget all about this by tomorrow morning!"

Movies like Sideways perpetuate the idea that loveable rogues are good people to have in your life, when nothing could be farther from the truth. They use people, and if you do not care for whatever their passing fancy is on a particular day, they'll just leave you stranded. In this respect, Sideways is something of a public service announcement, because it totally nails the rogue character and how shallow and obnoxious they typically are.

At the same time, Sideways continues the Hollywood tradition of portraying bad boys as being the most fun and therefore somehow desirable. Nothing like having it both ways: Yeah, these guys are horrible people, really, but they're sooo worth it!

Movies are not real life. My own Jack-like college friend got me "back in the game" many years ago by fixing me up with a psycho from her work group. She neglected to mention the psycho part, well-known to her for several years, electing to allow me to discover it for myself. Yikes! In her world, "Hey, no biggie! It's not like you married the guy, no harm done, right?"

Well, yeah, but I could've done without the constant stream of post-breakup caustic messages, just as Miles could've done without Maya thinking that he was a liar and a cad.

That's what "lovable rogues" do: they put you in situations that you would never get into if it were up to you, but it never is. You just have to figure out a way to clean up the mess and move on.