"We'll show them!" Take 2: "Bottle Shock"

Just imagine "Sideways" with fewer laughs, more domestic strife and Hans from "Die Hard" slumming in '70s California. OK, it's a little better than that sounds.

Bill Pullman -- another Everyman -- is a struggling winemaker in Napa ... before it became Napa. His son (Chris "I'm about to be huge as young Capt. Kirk" Pine) is a screwoff, his Latino foreman (Rico from "Six Feet Under") is making his own wine on the side, and the new student intern (Rachael Taylor) is a saucy blonde. Not good times.

Enter a British guy (Alan Rickman) who owns a Paris wine store and has trekked to California to find wines for a tasting contest against French wines -- still considered the world's best. The idea is to win attention for his own struggling business, but over time he becomes genuinely curious about what these "hicks in the sticks" are doing.

Some other interesting people here -- Dennis Farina as an American expat in Paris, Eliza Dushku (mostly wasted) as a bartender -- but the story is the thing here. This apparently is how California wines burst onto the world scene, and it's not a bad little tale. More angst and whining than I might have prefered, and I might have dialed down some of the father-son stuff.

But hey, it's always good to see Pullman plugging away and getting p!ssy with people. His filmography is spotty, to say the least. But I'll always have a soft spot for him. Not so much for his turn as Lone Starr in "Spaceballs" -- let's just head that off right now -- but "Zero Effect" and especially the one-two '90s punch of "Malice" and "The Last Seduction." Something about getting beaten up can make an otherwise nice guy get perfectly nasty ...