Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's "Frances Ha"

this is a very good movie that is nearly impossible to describe without making it sound totally insufferable

life, liberty and the quiet acceptance of failure

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Monday, November 18, 2013 3:24 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the new title of a mets blog

There is a lot of juggernauts I haven't seen but this is shaping to be my film of the year.

it sounds like The Charisma of Greta Gerwig, The Movie, which i believe i will pass on for now.

Actually, I thought she was kind of under-utilized in this, esp. her comic chops. This was a bit dry for my taste, but Baumbach usually is. I preferred Damsels in Distress a ton as a Gerwig showcase.

I know it sounds weird to say someone is under-utilized in a movie in which they are onscreen almost the entire time.

gerwig so awesome in damsels. never got around to seeing this cuz i'm a baumbach skeptic at best and that nyer profile really turned me off these two (much love for jennifer jason leigh) but it's short and it's on netflix so maybe.

more like Dumsels. that movie blew assholes... its not a patch on noba's fraha

Damsels bizarre idea of comedy reminded me of Andie MacDowell in Hudson Hawk

said it before, say it again, DID is probably the most convincingly surreal American drama (as opposed to Lynchian horror) I've ever seen in my goddamned life

You say surreal drama, I say failed comedy

Absolutely adored DID. A rare example of a movie that got better and better and better the more it went on, to the extent where I'm obsessing over it now. I see very few films that create and sustain their own reality like this - I would even describe it as one of the few genuinely surrealistic American films of recent years. A gentler, more polite, more naively prone to snobbery yes perhaps but more compassionate reality, where the impossibility of all the characters - the nobly dumb fratboys, the perpetually self-possessed (even in despair) damsels, especially Violet, whose brazen, luminous impossibility is allowed to tear through the fabric of our given reality by that glorious ending. So yes - a film with no obligation to fulfil any logic but its own.

― imago, Thursday, 17 January 2013 20:26 (10 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's a Bunuel college flick y'all

ok ok I'll watch it again
really different flavour than the realistic Frances Ha, though, which seems to be aimed at eliciting "I know, right"s out of creatives who've lived/worked in that city

Damsels bizarre idea of comedy reminded me of Andie MacDowell in Hudson Hawk

― flamboyant goon tie included, Monday, November 18, 2013 8:34 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol

Damsels rules so hard. I can see it not being to every taste though. You must have a high tolerance for silliness. I totally agree with it being one of the few films of recent memory that fully inhabits its own dream-like logic (Tree of Life is another).

Plus it has Adam Brody saying he would be gay if only gay people were still like Oscar Wilde.

Liked this a lot. Thought that the b/w actually helped as her life feels more and more uninhabited. Loved how the movie was broken up into just sets of addresses - could really relate to that.

Paris trip sequence terrific.

This was astonishingly bad

Just a warning to ppl out there who haven't seen the movie and read this thread

This was astonishingly bad

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Wednesday, December 11, 2013 1:03 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was so in love with her roommate I didn't notice her.

Alumni party scene shot Vassar alumni house

Shot at

I thought this was much more enjoyable than it had any right to be. Definitely better than Greenberg.

i liked greenberg, even if it was a little too typically indie. i preferred squid and the whale. found frances ha affecting just for the life crisis/career crisis stuff, and felt empathic towards greta gerwig's character (but only after that dinner table scene, up to then, she was unbearably smug), but i also mostly just hate her (didnt mind her in damsels though, just because there i think she actually moved past her default mode a bit), and couldnt get past my hatred for how flat and 1D she is as an actress. i dont mind quirky, but shes just much too knowing. can she actually even act? her whole thing in so many films ive seen with her seems to be about how we are in on the act of her trying to act, like 'look at me acting!' good things about this film - its like an old 70s/80s new york film - the guys look like theyre from an old jim jarmusch movie. funny how we dont see actors (italian/european/'ethnic-white') who look like that anymore. but when will directors realise that making your film in black and white (esp DIGITAL B&W) does not instantly give your film profundity or depth.

"Squid and the Whale" remains the best Baumbach film by miles and miles.

OTM but Frances Ha would probably be No. 2 for me.

Ditto. I watched K&S again a few months ago and could barely finish it.

Squid and the Whale really is a great movie and seems way beyond his other work.

I realize there's another thread for it, but am I missing out by not seeing Margot At The Wedding?

Margot is the only film of his I haven't liked.

It's not bad but it made me feel pretty shitty. Maybe partially because I saw it at a matinee in an affluent suburb and it was me and about 10 senior citizens.

It's awesome

Margot was how I discovered Karen Dalton's "Something on Your Mind," and that would have been enough for me right there. There were other things I liked too--the kid's performance is one thing that comes to mind. Didn't affect me as much as The Squid and the Whale, though.

I have this half-baked theory about Baumbach films that the divorce-damaged kids in Squid and the Whale are sympathetic because they're kids, but that Baumbach's other characters tend to be like kids from the same experience and milieu who are older but never really grew up, and they stop being as sympathetic.

Margot was how I discovered Karen Dalton's "Something on Your Mind,

Let Me Make You A Cool Mixtape direction

Well...throw in Kenneth Anger and the guy who made Mean Streets and Who's That Knocking at My Door, too.

I think he's an indie "it" guy but this movie is the only place i can think of where he was dreamy. On Girls his character can be pretty dark at times, and is always a little "off" and not in a cute way.

― Treeship, Tuesday, May 28, 2013 8:38 AM (6 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

way late on this, but false^

also GG looks like nellie mckay

gg got a gg nom

I'm sort of agnostic about Baumbach - his movies get really close to something I like/appreciate/get something out of, and I can't tell if that's ironically what makes them good or what makes them, you know, fall short - but his pile of glass gag in "Kicking and Screaming" is one of my all time favorite jokes.

Wasn't a dedicated Gerwig thread, so.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/greta-gerwig-star-cbs-how-679633

ok i am gonna call that 'how i met greta gerwig' from now on, i don't care if that doesn't make sense

this movie sucked 1 butt

Pretty, but aggravating. Something like the cinematic equivalent of what its prettiest (yet sill aggravating) character might call "undateable."

fantastic movie! i'm amazed this thread hasn't been revived for a year.

anyway check this if you liked the film, and avoid it like the plague if you didn't. Gerwig goes through *all 42* takes of the 28 seconds-long 'scene in the bathroom' (which she co-wrote) making notes on each one. in the end Baumbach went back and used 'Take 29' anyway, having made his actors go through a full hour of unnecessary re-takes. i don't think i've read a piece like it before, ever.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazine/one-scene-42-takes-and-2-hours-in-a-bathroom-stall.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

trailer for the new one seems really whit stillman (like, more so than usual) - quite excited

he doesn't sit about that lad.

we can start a nu thread

http://www.youtube.com/watch?t=14&v=TL-B8SdE6D0

god, this is stilted - I don't expect better of Gerwig, but Baumbach feels like he's regressing the more contact he has with mumblecore people