Remember Saturday nights at the movies?

You and your pre-teen friends would gather en masse outside the theater, gossip and flirt, pay seven bucks, go into some random theater and then continue to gossip and flirt for two hours, much to the chagrin of fellow moviegoers.

If you miss those days of social irresponsibility, fear not — you can live them for at least another 40 years. I learned this when I unwittingly attended a screening Saturday night of Alexander Payne’s “Sideways.”

The movie’s terrifyingly positive reviews, with their “You’re either for us or against us” rhetoric (The Wall Street Journal said “‘Sideways’ makes you glad about America, about movies, about life”), had crippled me to a point of cinematic somnambulism. It was like when I was a kid and would see dreck like “Casper” because, as the Cranberries insist, everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I?

I should have known it would be a disaster when, as I waited to get my ticket torn, a woman eagerly handed me a coupon for a free glass of wine featured in the movie. Yes, promotional tie-in.

The theater was packed 20 minutes before the movie started. I sat in the back row. I could only watch in horror as the theater continued to pack itself with everything that is wrong with “independent” films today. Thanks to the efforts of theater chains like Landmark and Century–the latter with its pseudo-posh “Rhythm Room” bar replete with oversized posters of international classics (you surely know your stuff if you drink martinis under “La Dolce Vita,” or “The 400 Blows”)– independent films are marketed at an awful demographic: members of the liberal upper-middle class who have no patience for paintings or opera.

“Sideways” is “Reality Bites” for the Kerry crowd. The extremely talented Payne has made an amazing movie. Though I am not old, I feel Payne captures middle-age pathos with the same heart-rending poignancy he milked out of retirees in “About Schmidt” and teenage ambition in “Election.”

Paul Giamatti is a wonder. Thomas Haden Church uses his full-voiced machismo to its logical end. And the tragically overlooked Virginia Madsen gets her due. Payne’s sense of rhythm is impeccable, and the film is beautifully edited, funny, bizarre and, ultimately, pretty moving.

Of course trying to experience these subtleties amid the smell of mink and the shine of bald heads is about as much fun as enjoying “Independence Day” when the kid in front of you farts the whole time. And the physical appearance of these people wasn’t the only thing bothering me — it was their infantile behavior.

Now I have no concrete examples of said behavior, just implied instances when it looked like people were being snooty. There was a small dispute over the buffer seats surrounding my date and me. When we offered politely to move one way or the other to create more space for a Vuitton-toting militant patron of the arts, we were greeted with snarls and a flip of her hair, littered with split ends. Bitch.

The woman who finally did sit next to me wore a dramatic black coat and reeked of an awful, expensive-smelling perfume. She was relatively harmless until halfway through the movie, when she opened a beer!

I don’t actually know if it was a beer. But it was definitely a carbonated can of some sort. It could have been a Coke, meaning that, despite her hoity-toity aspirations, she still sneaks soda into a movie– something I stopped doing in high school. I half expected her to pull out a smuggled bag of Twizzlers.

But enough surface description. These people flock to see “Sideways” because it’s “independent,” it needs their patronage and it speaks to them. Unfortunately for “Sideways,” the movie was made exactly for these people — the film revolves around a wine-tasting road trip — and my crowd laughed with hysterics at every wine-based joke, regardless of whether it was funny. Although I do the same with any joke about Led Zeppelin.

There’s nothing “independent” about “Sideways” — Payne is a major name in filmmaking, it was released by Fox Searchlight and it has a marketing budget large enough to give free wine to moviegoers. But it is marketed as independent, and these people turn out in droves just to see what The New Yorker is raving about this week.

And so, Saturday night at the movies remains what it always has been — loud, brash and annoying. It’s just one audience is drunk on caffeine and another tipsy on expensive wine.4

Communication junior Kyle Smith is the PLAY film columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].