Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's "Frances Ha"

nobody wants gluten! that's why they call it gluten!

it's my impression that gluten will go the way of over the counter heroin within five years

i meant mostly that they talk like 10-year olds. i don't care if they have jobs or not.

"omg are we besties" and stuff like that. "tell me the story of us."

meh, sillytalk during sex sounds bad outta context too

but the whole movie was this

that's how twentysomething women talk, in my experience. i thought the dialogue was convincing. people are goofy and unguarded around their close friends.

i appreciate your clarification concerning your use of the term "juvenile," though.

was amused to learn nebbishy "undateable" roomie plays Bugsy Siegel on Boardwalk Empire.

is boardwalk empire worth watching?

for about a season and a half.

The banter btw Frances and the roommate = best part of the movie.

Which roommate?

benjy

I liked this more than I thought I would. It WAS strikingly like watching a long episode of Girls, but with emotional depth I find lacking in Lena Dunham. The friendship itself was a little bit unbelievable, but mostly because of the co-star, who I found unlikeable and somehow just didn't seem like the person who would be Gerwig's best friend. Whereas Gerwig made the attachment, and the loneliness, extremely believeable. The Paris trip was one of the saddest sequences I ever remember seeing in a film.

i really loved the part when she goes back to vassar to work at a summer camp and is self-conscious about how old she is compared to her co-workers. wrenching

Yeah that was great I thought. It kind of pushed the loserdom in directions that movies don't usually push it, but that felt real and believeable.

I really thought she might kill herself at some points. Like if this wasn't an American film and wasn't a Baumbach film I might have thought it was going there.

haha really? i thought she seemed really well-adjusted... like, her life can get hopeless by objective measures but it doesn't take much for her to start enjoying things because she is not a depressive personality.

Um, she was a depressive!

Plus the film alluded to it at least twice -- the bathtub scene and the teetering on the edge of the water in Paris scene.

Two things I thought were really amazing about the Paris sequence: (1) I don't remember ever seeing another film that, instead of romanticizing Paris, deliberately portrays it in a boring light (even at times making it look not much different from Brooklyn) and (2) she doesn't exchange words with anyone the entire time -- even the bookshop keeper merely wags her finger instead of speaking.

i'd need to watch it again. to me it seemed like she was kind of a confused, aimless youth dealing with the fact that she wasn't "moving forward" in the way her peers were, and this caused desperation, but i didn't feel like she was ever teetering on the edge of the abyss or anything

maybe she was never actually suicidal, but she certainly came off as depressed

what did you think of this movie compared to greenberg and the squid and the whale? because of the black and white and some other stylistic choices it felt less oppressively real than those filmes -- which i had in mind watching this -- and this might have been part of the reason i didn't think she seemed that unhappy. my brother vastly preferred this movie to the others but i'm not sure.

i really loved the part when she goes back to vassar to work at a summer camp and is self-conscious about how old she is compared to her co-workers. wrenching

― fervently nice (Treeship), Saturday, July 27, 2013 10:58 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, i've been in her boat (and may be again) and this hit home. her constant need to "explain" why she was in her late 20s and working there.

jesus my internship last summer. the girl who sat next to me was in high school.

she did seem depressed, though given the slouchy, self-deflating personae that surrounded her, it wasn't easy to tell.

xpost

you just have to be kind of zen about it + don't even try to make friends.

i think i am too close to her experiences to be objective. i think in her circumstances, she held up well, and carried herself with wit and dignity even though she was self-deprecating sometimes.

like, she didn't let herself get too down on herself, to the point where she would really be stuck, in my view. and in the end she was doing ok.

at the end she triumphs and people like her art--we learn she is actually talented, despite everything leading up to it seeming to imply otherwise. this is unrealistic since most people aren't talented.

or happy

idk if it was that unrealistic. the people praising her performance were her friends for the most part, and they liked it because they like her, which seemed realistic. i think she was just going to go on to be a mid-level dance instructor, not a major choreographer.

also, to say that things don't get better is to deny the voice of the people, who have spoken on this issue. Do you think things are going to get better or worse?

I don't think it was unrealistic -- the film doesn't imply that she's some kind of brilliant choreographer who has finally found her niche. If antyhing I think it suggests her as someone likely to continue to work day jobs while arranging her occasional little dance performances. She is "talented" but not remarkably so.

i'm still disappointed that baumbach deviated from his original script, which was to cut from the final scene at vassar -- when the best friend leaves in the car with patches -- directly to this title card:

http://images.cafepress.com/image/31560864_400x400.jpg

Seeing the trailer two or three times kept me away from this for weeks, but there was an afternoon rep showing today, and I ended up liking it more than I expected--may even see it a second time. Not that I should be surprised, but the trailer takes all the cute stuff and packs it into two minutes of cuteness overload. The tone is much more even throughout the whole film.

Frances is a nice addition to all the lost female characters I've connected with in movies. There've been many, though I'm blanking out right now. (Liza Minnelli in The Sterile Cuckoo and Holly Hunter in Broadcast News come to mind...they're not very good matches, I know.) Loved the last five minutes: Frances' dance production reminded me of the end of Rushmore. (Stuff in movies is always reminding me of other stuff in movies: Rachel, Frances's substitute Sophie, reminded me of the young Meryl Streep in The Deer Hunter.) Wish Baumbach had used something other than "Modern Love"--I got through it the first time without hating it--but that's a quibble. I had to check afterwards to see who Dean Wareham was. Spencer--don't remember that character, so I still don't know.

omg i loved this

yea its a good movie

The feeling of being in NYC with oblivious-to-your-budget rich kids, they nailed it

Yes. Baumbach should have used this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg979_PfWiM

If I don't like Girls but think Damsels In Distress is one of the best films of the last...30 years, will I like this?

sure

I mean I don't like girls either

oh you

more like frances BLAH

right

I liked this a lot and have mixed feelings about "Girls." Also I love Greta Gerwig.

Watched the beginning of this, seems good. Like the Woody Allen/Manhattan look