Nicole Holofcener - Classic or Dud?

Please Give was excellent.

i watched the 1st three back to back recently, still not seen PG

I finally saw it. Review here if interested. nrq OTM about Rebecca Hall.

fair enough, i practically ws tbh

please give was... ok i guess

i do love rebecca hall

you're ok i guess!

i haven't seen it yet, but i have to reflexively stan for holofcener.

<3

^^would watch holofcener marathon with

thanks horseshoe

oh you

Classic!!

i totally want to be best friends w catherine keener! btw i tried webmailing u abt a week ago horseshoe and it wouldnt send

everybody wants to be friends with catherine keener. that's like her thing.

lol!!!

plax i just webmailed you my other email address!

But we know Catherine Keener would be nice to us for a minute or two and then, if we didn't leave her alone, just shoot us down.

Please Give = very ugly film. some laughs.

Lois Smith's cute grandson was nice tho (apparently he was in the American Pies)

whatever happened to the Holofcener marathon?

please give was great, i thought. became obsessed with catherine keener's ridic beautiful face over the course of it.

rebecca hall kind of looks like young molly ringwald but cheekbonier to me

amanda peet

i can't, it's too good

What do you mean by 'very ugly'?

Still one of the best I've seen this year. I just loved Amanda Peet in it.

nicole holofcener movies make me really sad sometimes. like the bit at the end of walking and talking where they're walking downstairs to the wedding. there's this thing she does where at weird moments she focuses on something small and intimate and it like crushes me.

otm

attn: Amanda and others, walking and talking is now available to watch instantly on netflix. ty ENBB for letting me know!

YES
haven't seen it in years, wonder if i would still like it?

YOU WOULD

also i am listening to is this desire? and thought of you. that is the end of my Amanda updates.

:)!!!!

ew
EW
this sponge smells

like a hot dog!

i can't stop smelling it!

Holofcener reminisces about making walking and talking

Studios and independent companies would say it’s too “soft,” which I imagine means “the room is just too girlie.” I thought that was bullshit, but at the same time I didn’t fight what they said was “soft “about it—that there was no big hook and that it was about women.

Amanda Peet is really good in Please Give. Everyone is good in it, but I was most surprised that she was.

she's really touching in it, i feel so much for her character. you know she's a bitch because she's sad.

yeah, she really looks like a beautiful girl I know who, when you meet her you think "what a bitch" but when you get to know her you realize how much that attitude masks a pile of neurotic insecurities. So even though Keener and Platt and Hall and the horrible grandma and Rookie of the Year are all great in it, I was most taken with Peet, like she really got to me.

I don't know why it took so long for me to watch this, considering my affection for Walking & Talking and Lovely and Amazing. Friends w/ Money I liked at first, but it was on tv the other day and I couldn't get with it, possibly because nothing really sticks with me except for Scott Caan being louche and McDormand chewing shit up and running into a door (and that awful gay husband plot). Please Give maybe is her best? It seems so much more cutting and no-bullshit than the others, except I didn't give a shit about the daughter's jeans.

also some times I was watching it, with the furniture store and apartments and the traveling to see "the leaves," I thought this was the most NYT movie ever.

I was pleased to see her name in the credits of a recent Parks and Recreation episode.

Please Give maybe is her best?

yep

worst!

xp yeah I think Mike Schur lauding Please Give after that episode was the reason I finally decided to watch it

I thought this was the most NYT movie ever.

It struck me as the kind of movie Woody Allen used to make - you know, when he was good.

i don't get why people are always so down on friends with money, i really liked it. i watched it with my mam.

it's a good movie, but it's a little trite

so early reports on the new one

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-toronto-2013-nicole-holofceners-enough-said

Partly because I was in just the right mood, I think--not a great first two weeks back to work--but I really liked Please Give. I remember liking Lovely and Amazing and Friends with Money in a very general sense, but not as much as I did Please Give. Still haven't seen Walking and Talking.

All six principals were great. You could single out any of of them--for me, Catherine Keener made the strongest impression. (But I can see why other people focus on Amanda Peet.) Keener's been a really forceful, assertive presence in just about every film I've ever seen her in, so the tentativeness and distractibility of her character here was striking. Two scenes I found especially moving: Keener's attempt to volunteer at the gymnasium (felt I understood her character perfectly there), and Keener and Rebecca Hall right after the grandmother passes away. Couldn't remember where I'd seen the teenage daughter till I checked: Spanglish.

Please Give is probably her most mature, least vague film to date, though I also remember quite liking Lovely and Amazing. Friends with Money never quite coheres, though, and I was especially baffled by the whole business of Frances MacDormand's is-he-or-isn't-he-gay husband? Do New Yorkers, particularly those who work in the fashion industry, really feel the need to remain closeted in the 21st century.

Her latest, Enough Said, looks promising. The idea of James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss as an on-screen couple just works to well in theory for it not to work in practice.

I resecreened Please Give last week because I was recently at a party listening to a crush of mine talk about how she frequently gets antiques cheap from craigslist and estate sales from people who don't know better (she's a weekend interior designer). I told she should check out that movie because it's about that sort of thing. Upon revisiting, I'm wondering if I should have kept my mouth shut.

Doesn't Catherine Keener essentially have the same job in both Please Give and The 40 Year Old Virgin?

A disappointment. I don't get Mendelsohn.

He’s terrible in Rogue One and Ready Player One, the only two things I’ve seen him in. Granted, those aren’t good movies, but reviews of this film tend to single out his performance as a problem (Mendelsohn “plays [his character] like a benign Dr. House,” writes Bill Chambers).

Maybe it’s the Tarrytown location but I kept thinking of the HBO show Divorce, and how Thomas Haden Church would have been an improvement

The film’s ok, though - it’s just nowhere in the league of any of the previous 5. And I don’t understand why it needed to look so ugly.

liked Mendelsohn in Starred Up; maybe he should just play prison dads.

Yeah I think he made a conscious effort to move away from just playing criminals a few years ago but he was good at it!

it's not very good at all, no. numerous problems including Mendelsohn, also why do I give a fuck about these people, also the editing is bad.

She was interviewed on Bullseye last week, and while I thought Jesse was a little too fawning (not the first time), they got into the "unlikeable characters" thing.

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510309/bullseye

maybe I'll give it a listen. it wasn't that they were unlikeable to me, it was more that...it didn't do a good job making me care. you're plopped into a situation with little context. honestly it seemed like maybe there were bit chunks of the screenplay excised. and even what's there...there are just weird transitions, everything seems rushed, like someone edited a lot of pauses out between people talking to crunch it into time.

Holofcener co-wrote Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the Melissa McCarthy film (the director, Marielle Heller, did Diary of a Teenage Girl a few years ago, which I think I liked better than Eighth Grade). I didn't know a thing about Lee Israel going in. Very low-key--a little too much so, I'd say, for such a tabloid story--and I found her buyers were suspiciously easy marks. (It's 1991, mind you, and maybe I've seen those clowns on Pawn Stars too many times--I was waiting for one of Israel's customers to say, "Just let me get my guy down here to take a look at it.") I'm normally immune to the sappiness of scenes like the last one between McCarthy and Richard Grant, but they carried it off well.

I don't think The Land of Steady Habits has ever gotten a screening here.

I quite enjoyed it, one of the more legit American queer films in recent memory.

(Ben Mendehlson is) terrible in Rogue One and Ready Player One, the only two things I’ve seen him in.

I can’t imagine ever watching those, but he’s good to v good in The Year My Voice Broke (1987), The Big Steal, Metal Skin, Idiot Box (all ‘90s) and Animal Kingdom (2010). The only thing I’ve seen him in since was a Statham/Deniro nothingness filmed in Australia - it’s possible he’s lost it, or straight up doesn’t bother in American stuff.

can you ever forgive me was great

I was lukewarm on Can You Ever Forgive Me?, but I think I liked all the films I've seen that she directed herself. (She also did some Six Feet Under episodes.) I've seen the trailer for You Hurt My Feelings a few times, and as such things go, looks promising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20GWk5cWPBs

New one is legit good, maybe great. Probably her funniest? JLD has some absolutely miraculous reaction shots, and her depressedly eating a cookie on a $10K couch is perfect

and 93 minutes!

As a comedy, I wish this had been funnier--I smiled here and there but only laughed once or twice. (To be fair, people around me were laughing a lot--sometimes howling, which doesn't really help when you're not feeling it yourself.) I liked the more serious side of the film better, and could relate to lots. Jeannie Berlin seems very busy these days.