Additional Weekend Movie Roundup

Having previously posted about Identity, here are other movies we watched recently:

Sideways: Not bad at all. I don't think I'd have called it the best film of the year, but certainly enjoyable. In terms of quality and entertainment value, I'd put it in roughly the same ballpark as As Good As It Gets: Enjoyable, certainly well worth seeing, I'm glad I watched it, but perhaps not quite on the Greatest Films of All Time list. I do think that Maya's "Because a bottle of wine is actually alive" speech (seen in all the preview clips) is probably one of the more pretentious things I've seen in a film recently, but since in context it is late-night after-bar-closing alcohol-haze conversation, it's actually entirely reasonable (I've had late-night conversations like that); I'll forgive them for it.

In Good Company: We actually watched this last weekend, but I'm just getting around to writing it up now. Very interesting. I'd put this in the class of "Movies That Are Better Than They Have Any Right To Be". What I mean by that is that based on the people involved, the premise, and the marketing of the film, there is really no reason to expect it to be any good at all, but somehow it is anyway. Based on the marketing, and the fact that it was directed by the director of "American Pie", it seems like it should be a sitcom-ish cute comedy about a middle-aged guy, and his new younger boss who starts dating his daughter. To some extent, that's accurate, but it's actually a much smarter and more interesting comedy than what you'd probably expect.

I will also mention something I actually first said some time ago: If he plays his cards right, I believe Topher Grace could very well be the next Tom Hanks. He's easily as good an actor, with a similar charm, and he seems to be doing an equally good job of picking projects so far (unlike, say, his colleague Ashton Kutcher, who seems to be a remarkably intelligent young man in all the interviews I've seen, yet tends to pick brainless dumbass movies to act in...).He may not have had a success comparable to "Splash" or "Big" yet, but I, for one, won't be surprised if/when he does.