hey Scott, what about the scene in "Sideways" where they have to steal Jack's wallet back from the naked man's house? That really doesn't advance the plot (and even in Rex Pickett's journal entries he's been writing he mentions how his ex-wife thought he should eliminate that scene entirely from the novel). The scene's obviously very funny, but do you think it kind of also feels extraneous (ignoring the fact that Alexander Payne/Jim Taylor obviously know what they're doing)?

Once Jack leaves the wallet behind, then the scene to retrieve it is necessary or else Jack will have a hard, perhaps impossible time going forward with his wedding, so the question boils down to is this mini-sequence necessary at all? I must say the very idea that Jack would store a ring in his wallet struck me as contrived, however two dynamics made me overlook that issue [and the question of whether the mini-sequence is important]: (1) The fact that Jack goes pursues the waitress after he just got his ass kicked by Stephanie demonstrates just how controlled by his 'joy stick' he is. (2) It provides a funny moment where Miles has to retrieve the wallet. While the latter is mostly about entertainment value, from a writing POV I think you could justify it this way: Jack needed to go down one level lower in his temporary descent into marriage-fear in order to realize just how stupid that way is, not only getting himself in trouble, but also his friend Miles. So while it would be possible to extract the 'Jack has sex with waitress / need to retrieve wallet' sequence, there's enough there to support its presence. And besides, it's not everyday we get to see a movie with full frontal male 300 pound nudity!

Thanks for the reply. Me personally, I always go back and forth on this. Reading the script, they sort of justify it and say something like "for all of Miles' failures, this is something he did right".