Alexander Payne is one of America’s most important contemporary artists. His last name details his area of expertise. I can’t remember “laughing to keep from crying” so much at a movie since. . . since Payne’s last film. “Sideways” is his best work, probably the best film of the year. Giamatti is upside down on the bed, half-listening to his mostly-awful best friend rant and rave about his midlife crisis, and we see what he sees. Bouncing tits on MTV’s Beach House. THAT’S the way you nail it! One shot — boom. It’s funny AND it is painful. Sneaking back to the chubby waitresses house and discovering her having vulgur sex with her husband: funny, yes, and Giamatti’s double take is hysterical. But what really happened in this scene? A quiet “good girl” gets a chance to live out her dream and screw a soap opera star only to get interrupted by real life — her husband comes home. In the hours intervening as the two friends scheme to get the wallett back she and her husband have a screaming, tearful fight (all off camera of course) and finally face facts, at 6 AM, that their life is shit. He works nights, she watches soaps and works in a rib joint. They can only take solace in each other and have vulgur, brutal, potentially violent sex. (eg — you are a fucking whore! Yes, I am a fucking whore!) The audience erupts in unbelievable laughter at this moment. The actress is all wrong. . .not what we expect. She’s fat. And her voice is friendly and high pitched. Not at all what we’ve been trained to hear from Hollywood or the porn industry for a dirty-talk moment. It’s as shocking a moment of cinema as any I’ve seen. . .like Raymond Burr looking right into the lens in “Rear Window.” It is two characters dealing with pain: the cuckolded husband and the unattactive waitress. And it is only about two minutes of this brilliant, brilliant movie. I don’t even want to get into the porch “seduction” scene or the wine-and-onion ring climax. . . .which had me in tears for three reasons: bittersweet the Giamatti had to uncork alone; proud that Giamatti finally uncorked; and loaded with bile, rage and professional jealousy in that I realize that I am just not yet able to write a scene like this.