Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's "Mistress America"

for the lazy fucks of ILE

"what would you get if you wanted like a nice pasta?"

I enjoyed this one, am also a lazy fuck

"It's weird how a person who likes rocks can also be into Jesus."

Pretty sure the bit with Mamie-Claire asking pointed questions about Tracy's treatment of women is lifted from a Philip Roth book.

Pregnant women reading Faulkner's The Hamlet.

"You'll represent me, right?"
'Well, I'm a tax attorney...but sure!'

I didn't like 'While We're Young" mostly because the third act drama seemed forced and illogical - should I give this a chance?

Better than While We're Young, not as good as Frances Ha

Can't really get behind Johnny Crunch's Rohmer comparisons tho

I am not a lazy fuck. I work v hard to avoid these films.

Better than While We're Young, not as good as Frances Ha

Can't really get behind Johnny Crunch's Rohmer comparisons tho

otm

Tracy seems kinda like a John Hughes character a bit. Despite some clever lines, too many forced ones. Eh, its ok I guess.

OMD and Suicide on the soundtrack, and Luna's Dean Wareham in the movie and involved with the soundtrack.

the soundtrack was more overbearing than Gerwig.

gerwig is so good

Some of Brooke's lines were like a benign version of the dude from nightcrawler

Baumbach/Gerwig movies > Baumbach movies (based on my limited input data, wonder where others are on that)

gerwig is so good but she's so much richer than the kind of ditsy thing she periodically slips into in these films. those occasional kind of lyrical reveries she's afforded - describing the restaurant in this, describing drunkenly making eyes in the last one - are so beautiful but it otherwise really kinda constrains her, to just being a higher quality variety of wacky actress, i think. like the rewind part.

i feel like someone in the other thread made an accurate comparison about how frustrating this guy's detours are; he has the same kind of weird lazy semi-ironic fetish of farce as wes anderson & it's just so blobby to try to crescendo his films with these shitty vaudeville-wave encounters.

I intellectually understand why the farce in Connecticut was a questionable direction but I loved it both times I saw it.

I didn't like 'While We're Young" mostly because the third act drama seemed forced and illogical - should I give this a chance?

― Kiarostami bag (milo z)

WWY in retrospect is his worst film.

I kind of like WWY's third act for how strange it is; it feels more like parody than forced third act drama to me. The overblown nature of the final confrontation just highlights the smallness/pettiness of the conflict, while still taking seriously the real philosophical differences between the characters.

The whole thing starts as Stiller's fantasy of suspenseful comeuppance, then partway through it shifts back to the world the rest of the film's characters inhabit.

I liked the premise: when they start hanging out with the young Adam Driver, they realize what fuddyduds they’ve become. An aging filmmaker doesn’t condescend to twentysomethings and their Twitters and Tumblrs, what a concept. But Baumbach can’t commit to his concept. The last third is a reprise of the confrontation scene between Faye Dunaway and William Holden, with Stiller as Holden. A grievous mistake, for when Stiller plays sanctimony he comes off as a contemptible worm (he was fine playing a worm in Baumbach’s Greenberg; Stiller’s range is too narrow for him to play ambiguity without my suspecting he’s hustling me)

I thought part of the point of that sequence was that Stiller's kind of a contemptible worm. It's painfully apparent that his sanctimony is a little bit about documentary ethics and a lot about professional jealously. I mean, even if you think he's in the right, it's hard not to cringe because he's being such a total ass, thinking he's about the blow the lid off of Driver like it's this big scandal. And then it totally fails, not because the world has changed or is inherently corrupt but because Stiller's an inflexible, self-righteous purist.

I just cringed at the Hollywood falsity of the awards show confrontation.

Yeah, I get that. I just think it was a knowing and intentional falsity that worked in the context of film, analogous in a way to the sequence in Mistress America where everyone reads the short story.

One of the things I enjoy about these last two Baumbach films is his simultaneous fascination and repulsion with millennial strivers who don't come from the same Upper West Side stock he does. The weird mix of "You're full of ideas" with "Self-promotion is so gauche". I haven't seen Frances Ha or Greenberg, so this may be a longer running part of his work than I'm aware of.

Also a realistic dose of, "You're a nobody who want to be a successful artist? Well, the way to do that is through appeasing the very wealthy in the tri-state area."

Signaling his awareness that the scene's a fiction doesn't make the scene less excruciating. It reminds me of people saying, "But Kanye knows he's being an asshole!"

Eh, I didn't find it as excruciating as you; I saw a heavy dose of parody and thought it was intentionally amusing. I also think Baumbach intercut it with Grodin's speech in an interesting way.

I guess maybe instead of "knowing falsity," I should have said "intentional play with genre and tone in an attempt to make it more like an early 60s Nouvelle Vague picture," which I think is what Baumbach is up to, successfully or not.

So this was great, I've never been sold on Gerwig and I'm still not completely but her acting quirks dovetail nicely with the character's quirks (or flaws).
Loved the acknowledgement from Tracy that all of this (multiple rounds of lit mag selection and publication included) had happened in the span of 11 weeks.

Mamie-Claire kept throwing me off because she looked familiar until I realized she was 50% Emmy Rossum/50% Madeline Kahn.

his simultaneous fascination and repulsion with millennial strivers who don't come from the same Upper West Side stock he does

I actually think this is the most interesting element of this movie and Frances Ha, but I might characterize it differently. The Gerwig character is basically sympathetic in both cases, and in the last scenes of MA the idea is very explicitly articulated that this character is the type of person who feels like a failure but who other people see as cool and inspiring. That's a difficult thing to depict but Baumbach does a good job—more so in FH than MA, whose madcap zaniness I sometimes found annoying and dumb.

Yeah, repulsion was overstating it, definitely for MA and probably for WWY too. I haven't seen Frances Ha yet, but I enjoyed the most recent two enough that I'll have to check it out soon.

WWY in retrospect is his worst film.

I enjoyed a lot of individual scenes but I think you're right Alfred - it doesn't quite add up and the ending's glib. I saw Margot at the Wedding recently and thought it was surprisingly good given its rep as his worst. He's unusually keen to spend a long time delving into the psyche of a deeply dislikable character and make it compelling. It doesn't have the sprinkle of sugar that WWY resorts to.

Yeah, I liked it a lot.

worst Baumbach film yet. some cute one-liners in the first 30m (like the "autodidact" one) but really, if you're going to pace it like a wacky farce EVERYONE DOESN'T HAVE TO BE INSUFFERABLE. Some really terrible acting in the Connecticut segment too (pudgy Jewish boy, Dean Wareham).

Plz see Lubitsch's Design for Living.

“wrote a junky bio of Derrida.”

^reference porn

if you're gonna do that at least be as funny as Manhattan

When is Manhattan funny?

The woody and meryl streep scenes!

dr morbius otm, an otm dr morbius galloping into this thread of buffoons like a steed to rescue us

If you liked Frances Ha, which I remember reading Morbius did, this movie isn't much of a tonal or content shift. For me, this iteration was less novel.

...but fine on its own.

whither the sufferable characters of a woody allen film

i don't love frances ha - it has a lot of the same confused, misjudged broadbrush caricaturism of ~young people~ as this - but there are real successes about it, its structure is very fluid & accommodates these interesting individual chapters (paris, sacramento), & it accommodates a kind of modern-classical, romantic gerwig performance, her few soliloquies. this is ostensibly similar in a bunch of ways but just so kind unartfully done, & stretched over this grim, vapid story arc, inc. bumbling crescendo.

The characters are more types than caricatures -- a caricature suggests mild or strong contempt from the writer. I thought Baumbach's editing shaped the dialogic scenes to avoid the arias that, yeah, would become overbearing after a while. I agree that Dean Wareham's music and performance were menaces.

Van gaaagh.

this is a stylistic mess, unlike F Ha, and just derails completely in Connecticut.

i did like Kirke and her cute lisp.

Stupid title too.

way too much of the dialogue sounded like MadLibs.

is this the first movie to memorialize Soulcycle?

Broad City's been doing it for two seasons now. Again, TV moves ahead of movies.

i'm not sure that particular ref is an accomplishment

Everything Broad City does is an accomplishment.

way too much of the dialogue sounded like MadLibs.

maybe a bit but that's closer to what young ppl sound like than, say, that gerwig movie she made w/ whit stillman

Real teen talk: "Take the flit movement in literature, or homosexuality. It’s gone completely downhill. Right down the tubes. Before, homosexuality was something refined, hidden, sublimated, aspiring to be the highest forms of expression and often achieving them. Now it just seems to be a lot of muscle-bound morons running around in T-shirts. It’s pretty disillusioning."

What year did you write that, Eric?

aww come on everybody says that over a cup of STarbucks

fuck naturalism (in these cases), but Stillman is funny, GG and NB were not so much (this time)

tbh, I think I'm on Morbs' side this time. Not that I've seen MA, but I want to get him to watch Broad City.

Is Broad City neo-screwball? I think it might be.

Def

It's a miracle!

http://ministerioancla.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/dos-angeles-trompetas.jpg

i don't have TV, and i seldom take series DVDs from the liberry

MA struck me as a film that might have worked at, say, 28 minutes.

see I wish that of nine out of 10 movies.

Which ten?

When is Manhattan funny?

I never had the wong kind. Every one *click* right on the money.

Which ten?

― syphilis sive morbus cameronus (wins),

Make a list of Woody Allen movies.

Ghostbusters

I thought you'd never seen Ghostbusters

nope, saw it in '84 and life is finite

^^^ that's a big twinkie

Better than While We're Young, not as good as Frances Ha

Same here. I liked the first half--kept thinking, "I'll have to watch this again; I'm missing some of the throwaway jokes"--started to waver when they hit the road, where it just seemed like a lot of stuff (and felt too reminiscent of Flirting with Disaster), and then came around again at the end. There's a certain kind of happy ending I always fall for.

I thought this was pretty good. Lola Kirke's soulful performance was probably the best part for me. I didn't think Gerwig ever really quite clicked as that character she was trying to play, and some of the jokes were a bit too meticulously constructed to sound spontaneous, which works fine in a Tina Fey comedy but here it kind of took me out of the scene. But maybe Gerwig wasn't supposed to be a real 3-dimensional character but more of a reflection of the Kirke character's own projections of adult sophistication and mystery as seen from that weird liminal threshold of late adolescence.

this was p good but man that Connecticut sub-screwball farce sequence really didn't work imo, felt very forced.

that was the best part

I liked the whole thing although the very ending (like last 15 minutes) seemed kind of rushed to me.

is the farce-y middle act of this worse than the final third/act of WWY? hard to say innit but i loved the rest of it. he's got a proper issue with evenness though hasn't he?