It has been fascinating to read the polarized reviews of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, from A.O. Scott’s swooning but richly evocative celebration to Armond White’s frothing evisceration (of both the film and everything Haynes stands for). As someone in (about) the middle (here’s my review), I feel like a Man Without a Country. I even got a curt e-mail from producer Christine Vachon — with whom I wrote a book called Shooting to Kill — expressing her disappointment with me for not recognizing Haynes’s ambition. I’m so off her Christmas list.

Monday night I’m going to be introducing a screening of Sideways at Brooklyn’s Donna da Vine wine bar (378 Atlantic Ave.) at 8 p.m. I especially want to talk about the movie because a certain powerful critic (I won’t name him, but two of his initials are “A” and “O”) wrote a cheap, sleazy, opportunistic, and altogether scurrilous column to the effect that the film was acclaimed as intensely as it was because critics tend to be, like Sideways’ protagonist, pudgy, elitist, misanthropic alcoholics with no lives and not the faintest hope of snaring a dishy blonde like Virginia Madsen. To which I say, “Yes, but …”