Let us anticipate Greta Gerwig's directorial debut "Lady Bird"

I enjoyed this movie but:

Loved this so, so much. The matinee I saw was completely sold out. I loathed Frances Ha and Mistress America, just awful, so I went in somewhat skeptical, but was relieved that none of the whimsy or boring sensibility of Baumbach/Anderson/Allen rubbed off on Gerwig.

lol what.

if you told me baumbach directed this I would have believed you. just about everything about this felt like a baumbach movie.

surface level margaret

just about everything about this felt like a baumbach movie.

maybe superficially, but despite the familiar coming of age movie trappings and predictable arc, it just had a different feel than Baumbach & most other coming of age movies. besides the lack of characters with unrealistically hip taste, the relationship with the mother and Lady Bird's normalcy was refreshing and felt more nuanced. she wasn't that cool or edgy or histrionic. the way the material was handled was noticeably different imo, much more subtle.

saw this today & liked it fine, but I never really connected with it? it felt like a lot of put-together bits and pieces. i didnt hate it, i just was kinda nonplussed. a lot of good funny & good emotional moments tho. and sacramento looked lovely :)

the dysfunction between the mom & daughter took me put of it, i think.
Like, i could tell from the get-go that the mom & daughter were close & they got along, so all the sturm and drang felt like white noise. like, the tension between them was kinda low stakes. i couldn’t really invest in it because I knew they’d be fine. of course theyd be fine.

*took me out of it

i loved this movie

just about everything about this felt like a baumbach movie.

this is nonsense. these characters were eminently normal. the parents were not narcissistic intellectuals.

I didn’t get the impression that everything was “fine” between lady bird and her mom at the end of the film — both characters clearly wanted a better relationship with one another, but there was definitely a lot of work to be done. it felt very authentic to me

baumbach comparisons are limiting. Gerwig has a sense of empathy that is obvious scene to scene. Loved this movie and ladybird OTM for leaving a car because the clientele didn't agree with the song. Friendship is beautiful.

Saoirse Ronan introducing at MoMA tonight, if you can squeeze yr way in

This is fine, maybe even the best teen-protagonist comedy since, I don't know, Rushmore? The Baumbach influence is noticeable in the jokes and cuts (not to mention it has the d.p. from 3 Noah films), and I'm not sure he didn't make the better film this year -- they're at least comparable and Meyerowitz is at least as "serious."

My main quibble is it stopped surprising me in the last 10 minutes, basically the entire NYU coda.

these characters were eminently normal.

hmmm, define your terms.

"You're going to have so much unspecial sex in your life." Great line but not sure even a jaded Howard Zinn-reading heartbreaker would come out with that at 17.

I'm not sure how I would've handled Timothee Chalamet saying this to my face w/out turning into a puddle of goo

he's a very pretty boy, but I kinda want to slap him. and not for fun.

what'd you think of Ronan, Metcalfe, Smith, etc?

The nuns and priests here are very accomodating (and sometimes damp with anxiety), not really in the Catholic school tradition. Kinda sickening the one who fawns over precious little Lady Bird, who has called her a cunt and pranked her, although "I thought it was funny" pretty good defense if defense is all you got. Did like the non-nun guidance counselor who had a hearty laugh in the face of LB's pretentions, though also she is not white so it figures to LB/this movie's POV(see "brown" etc. above).

I thought they did as well as they could, as well as they were allowed to, and have done better with better material, hopefully will continue to do so, if you're asking me.

Metcalf is a great actor (saw her on the NY stage before "Roseanne"), and in spite of Mom clearly being written as a "juicy part," delivered. Tracy Letts also underplyed the dad very nicely. Ronan carried the movie and you couldn't hate her even when she dumped her BFF for awhile. Sister Lois reminded me of some of the better nuns who taught me. All-around great casting, probably GG's most essential strength.

There are a lotta priests and nuns "not really in the Catholic school tradition" if you're defining that as pre-Vatican II. That had changed somewhat even in the late '60s when I wore my blazer and tie. (That Lois Smith line at the dance "Leave room for the Holy Spirit" is an old dancing-advice standby.)

Agree with all of that, but it comes down to the way so many movies with strong ensembles end up using them for convenience/overselling of the central character---as I said, lady Bird, her mom, several others make sense motivation-wise/comceptually, but the final results are worked into these efficient reminders of mediocre YA, TV, etc. I'm guessing Gerwig, as a young blonde female indie actress-turned-firsttime-director, felt compelled to develop her material this way, to please the moneymen. May not even have been aware doing so, not in those terms, they may be givens, another variation of the internalizing and self-filtering some Hollywood workers have copped to (especially the former Weinstein assistant who broke the confidentialy agreement she originally signed so as not to be blackballed at Harvey's height). Not that it's Hollywood-exclusive---an editor can imply or say to me, "Don't even think of doing it that way," and so I don't ('til maybe some downtime blogging, obscurely enough---can't do that with movies eh).

what does being young and blonde have to do with it? Also, you're making quite an assumption about motives without evidence.

Yeah what the hell

The way she was seen by the mostly male powers that be. As a young female with no track record. And I said I'm guessing.But however she thought about it, no doubt the director had to negotiate.

No track record as a film director.

I'm not deprecating her, I'm guessing at how she was perceived.

Since the movie seems promising but compromised.

btw Gerwig co-wrote AND co-directed Nights and Weekends (2008) with Joe Swanberg. Probably 'uncompromised' by dow's standards.

Would like to see that, thanks for the tip. Still not much of a track record by moneymen standards (think she and Seth Myers were kicking around the idea of her doing a superhero movie).

meant for this morning's posts to start w response to Dr. Morbius's query, "What's a 'watered-down nun'?", on last (x) movies you saw, for a variety of takes, venting ect.

So wrong thread, sorry.

This is now A24’s highest-grossing release, ahead of Moonlight. This movie did not seem compromised to me.

Curious where dow would rate John Hughes classics on the compromised scale.

No compromises there either -- they're exactly as shitty as Hughes intended.

I'm not sure if you have to be/have been Catholic to find "Make Me a Channel of Your Peace" a hilarious HS audition song or not.

I’m not good enough at gauging intentions to be a practitioner of that scale, I guess. xp

Yeah, for all I know it's fully realized and she's totally happy and all aboard the threshold of a dream like ex-Lady Bird in New York.

In which case good for her and I'll go back to my usual (Stanwyck and Vikander and Jennifer Jason Leigh etc.)

btw i finally watched 20th Century Women and that's one of Gerwig's most varied performances: cancer survivor, late '70s punk feminist who tries to get the young men to say "menstruation" at a dinner party, etc.

What'd you think overall?

I liked it. As it was an autobiographical Mills films, it was full-gauge "California," but that's unavoidable and done with an appropriate level of satire. Bening listening to Black Flag and then Talking Heads with Billy Crudup and saying "Well, I guess we're art fags" was a LOL.

i haven't lied in two years

I liked this film - it was very enjoyable and very easy to get along with.

But after so much hype, I was surprised how unambitious it was. It seemed close to a standard 'indie quirky high school flick' where somehow I had thought it would be much stranger. Kind of in the territory of NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, say, though obviously much less quirky than that. I can't quite think of the other things it reminded me of but it felt like there were loads of them.

The other thing was, I was surprised how little 'struggle' was involved. The main character's family was relatively poor, financially challenged by redundancy, etc - that was the challenge. There wasn't really much else that was WRONG for Lady Bird. She seemed to have everything - race, height, looks, smarts, even eventually college results - and to have a range of cool friends too and no 'mean girls' picking on her, no real jeopardy ... and at the the end she transcended all this to become ... a New York hipster in 2003! (She could almost have been a classic ilx poster in that sense.)

So not much seemed at STAKE ... not much seemed very troubling or worrying or challenging; our heroine started off from a good place and went to an even better one. I suppose this seems a slightly unusual approach to narrative.

The other thing was, I was surprised how little 'struggle' was involved. The main character's family was relatively poor, financially challenged by redundancy, etc - that was the challenge. There wasn't really much else that was WRONG for Lady Bird.

from our end! For a high school teen, everything isg wrong.

I see it as a comedy, so the low stakes were not surprising to me. She's dealing with ordinary adolescent problems that nevertheless feel absolutely important to the vain, imperfect person in the middle of them.

Alfred otm. everything menial felt life and death to me in high school and we largely see things through her perspective

not sure the movie would have improved if Lady Bird needed a miracle liver transplant

alfred otm

Alfred OTM. Imagine being the Beanie Feldstein character and how this story would feel!

Agree with the pinefox.

No I don't wanna

Imagine being the Beanie Feldstein character and how this story would feel!

That's kind of my point -- the story of that character WOULD feature a degree of exclusion, disappointment, insecurity, etc - to a degree that Lady Bird's didn't.

It wouldn't be revolutionary, but a whole film from Julie's POV would be more of a 'victory for the outsider', 'solace for the overlooked', kind of thing, than the actual film was.

On the other hand you can say it's just a quite charming comedy and fun to watch and doesn't need to be different - and I agree. I think I'm only puzzled in the context of a load of hype that suggested it was groundbreaking and special.

'victory for the outsider', 'solace for the overlooked'

Not seen the film described as such, not interested in imagining the movie turned into this.

I for one am always happy to see a movie skip the tropes of conflict and succeed, which I think Lady Bird does.