Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's "Frances Ha"

stick your head in a trough, waterboy

otm re: manhattan

i think waterface is otm in regard to manhattan. although i don't know if it's a great film or if i just love it, and whether or not i should make a distinction between these two things.

'noah baumbach' and 'greta gerwig's fraces ha

Laughed a lot at the "How about we fake fight?" scene.

Loved how this felt more like an unpredictable short story or novella than a more standard screenplay. Ad the black-and-white brought me back to seeing Stranger Than Paradise, She's Gotta Have It, etc., at the arthouse as a teenager (saw it at a mainstream-arty multiplex).

Saw Dean Wareham in the credits. He must've been one of the Paris-convo dinner-party guests, or was he somewhere else?

This also made me think about how people (esp in their 20s) fantasize about compatible roommates as much as true love.

Yes. He stood out because he looked too damn handsome -- and I recognized his voice.

This also made me think about how people (esp in their 20s) fantasize about compatible roommates as much as true love.

For Frances they were one in the same. I found the ending where she's looking across the room like that, so teenage, but she's older than that.

Yeah--and, related to that, the movie reminded me of a kind of early-post-adolesence time of not seeing the overt sexual undercurrents to certain moments, so it was credible that she could loaf around in bed her with her best friend without sensing any tension, and be kind of aware and kind of not to the guy's overt propositions.

the sexlessness was one of Stephanie Zacharek's few complaints.

This also made me think about how people (esp in their 20s) fantasize about compatible roommates as much as true love.

― The End**^ (Eazy), Sunday, June 2, 2013 10:03 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hah awesome

The sexlessness was one of the most admirable, real things about the g-d thing!

yeah seriously

this was really great, guess i have to seperate what a corny lech baumbach personally seems like from his work, will do

I'm not sure I want to watch Gerwig having sex tbh

Eric Ha

back when she was at salon zacharek used to complain that every movie was 'sexless.' charles taylor was (of course) even worse.

was interesting to me how fran's overenthusiastic spiel @ the dinner party before she goes to paris abt shared thoughts & eye contact across a party etc etc so closely mirrored hannah in girls near the end of the one mans trash ep. think they both really tap into a specific & true type of neuroticism abt the desire to connect/share experiences

wow mid-life crisis bro was careful not to put his new young girlfriend in any romantic or sexual situations in the movie they made together, he must really love her for her mind

i don't think it matters why romantic plots were avoided, but the fact that they were was something i appreciated about this movie. also, baumbach and gerwig co-wrote this why is everyone assuming baumbach was the major creative force here? if anything, i think the difference between this movie and baumbach's generally bleaker older work points to the strong presence of gerwig.

I can't get past Greta Gerwig being the name of a young person. Greta Gerwig should be the name of some high school friend of my mother's who is always showing up in her pointless stories, and who I never actually meet, or maybe meet once when I'm 12 at a dinner party my parents throw and she's in town "Oh great news, Greta Gerwig is coming!"

old-fashioned names are hip again. my cousin just had a kid and named her millicent.

wow, that's taking it far

are Muriel Spark's novels hits with the smart set or

all the cool young actresses are named eunice kranmer these days

Seems weird to complain about sexlessness. I like the way the film prioritises friendship over romance (and passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours) and avoids the MPDG trap. It would be hard to introduce a relationship for Frances without rendering the movie much less interesting and making you wonder if the guy she falls for is proxy Baumbach.

I'm not sure I want to watch Gerwig having sex tbh

You haven't seen Greenberg then.

I brushed my teeth during that scene.

That was a good scene if you like bleak slapstick humor

greta gerwig's middle name is celeste

(Making the rounds on Tumblr)

http://24.media.tumblr.com/2f9b69b6092ee1d7d37aae03d182b691/tumblr_mnvpcuPXer1qz7gtqo1_500.gif

Frances Ha is Playing At Your House

james murphy's life seems pretty great

'noah baumbach' and 'greta gerwig's fraces ha

― Lamp, Sunday, June 2, 2013 2:06 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark

wanna know what u think lamp

haha whoa

User Reviews

"Francis Ha" Is Nothing To Laugh About
(1 star out of 10) 6 May 2013 | by kiss_trigger-570-471334 (United States) – See all my reviews
Baumbach is the Bed, Bath, and Beyond of indie, his newest film resembling the tacky ten dollar pre-framed black and white photos of vague French "bohemian" cityscapes that you buy and hang in a dirty insurance office's bathroom to distract you from the smell and the crack in the wall. Films whose "bitter, angry characters" are stick-figure caricatures embodied by actors neither complex or talented enough to make their character's bitterness or anger anything deeper than a mere external affectation, directed by a clever hipster con artist hiding the heart of his arch conservatism.

Anyone who would hire Ben Stiller ("Greenberg") to play an embittered intellectual railing against the corporate mediocrity of modern life should be, at the very least, highly suspect. Gerwig now stands as the latest media-manufactured "it" girl, an unthreatening and perfectly insipid creature made-to-order for a dead and non-existent counterculture.

Still, Baumbach and his muse are very necessary these days to convince an already euthanized and brainwashed Generation ZZZ that their spiritual, moral, and political malaise is a livable, "charming" and tolerable one, so that they can really, really forgive themselves for not roaring back like a million untamed lions against the state-sponsored execution of their hearts, minds, and souls as previous generations once did, for better or worse. In that sense, Baumbach may become the most cherished of contemporary cinematic frauds, a directorial eunuch as safe and as impotent as the audiences who flock to the flattery of his films rather than by those individuals perceptive enough to be thoroughly repulsed by them.

And put aside those desperate comparisons to the French New Wave, or 70's Woody Allen. What you're seeing on screen is the rotting carcass of a nation's exhausted cinema .... pointless, empty triviality posturing as wry social observation, spewed from the wealthy pockets of a talentless hack with too many inside connections and Taschen art books piled up onto his conspicuously displayed Eames chair.

15 of 50 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No | Report this

Bold anti-hipster stance

that guy also made this thread http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0587944/board/nest/209194977

it's a shame those maoist film critics retired

http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/movies/

would have read their review of this film

I would definitely question Frances's anti-imperialist credentials.

noah baumbach did kcrw's guest dj project. i approve of his picks, even/especially the supertramp.

http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/gd/gd130605noah_baumbach

That screed gabbneb posted could have been written by Greenberg himself!

wanna know what u think lamp

it's hard to sort out how i feel about 'frances ha' as a film or even like, 'greta gerwig' as person from how i feel about my own life i mean i even just got back from a probably ill-advised trip to europe and so i wasn't really watching very critically. i'm also bored and anxious with portrayals of urban near-adulthood generally, they all seem to occlude the most important or central parts of the xp in some meaningful way, i wonder how much any 'successful' portrayal of this mode is betrayed simply by being 'successful', i think i wanted it more incoherence, more ambivalence, but that probably wouldn't have made it a better movie...

nice.

I haven't seen any of Gerwig's pre-Greenberg mumblecore movies. Aren't they meant to be all about incoherence and ambivalence?

so mickey sumner is stings daughter? huh ok

What you're seeing on screen is the rotting carcass of a nation's exhausted cinema .... pointless, empty triviality posturing as wry social observation, spewed from the wealthy pockets of a talentless hack with too many inside connections and Taschen art books piled up onto his conspicuously displayed Eames chair.

Although I like some Baumbach, this describes how I feel about the bulk of today's "indie" film

Generation ZZZ

this is p good morbsian wordplay ish

"roaring back like a million untamed lions" put it over the top for me

WARNING: The Deep Thoughts of Greta Gerwig, Artiste
by kiss_trigger-570-471334 (Sat May 4 2013 20:22:26) Ignore this User | Report Abuse

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If this is what the American "independent" cinema has come to, it's time for the funeral rites:

“I also think we have to believe in a happy ending,” Gerwig said. “We have to, otherwise what is anybody doing? I always have this frustration that, in a therapeutic sense, it can feel you have one of two ways of relating to your parents: one is you’re in denial, and the other is you can be really angry at them. And I’m, like, there has to be a way in which you just LOVE them.” She continued, “And I feel that there has to be a story that’s true to its marrow and also filled with joy. There has to be that. Otherwise, it’s utterly depressing.”

She went on, “This is lofty”—a lot of emphasis—“but in one of Hamlet’s soliloquies he says, ‘This brave o’erhanging firmament,’ and he’s talking about the air and the stars and how everything is so alive and so beautiful, and at the end of it he says, ‘It means nothing, it means nothing, and I don’t want to live.’ And I’m, like, ‘How can you see everything and then feel that way?’ I always want to find the reverse of that—to see all the darkness and find the light, as opposed to see all the light and resonate with the nothingness.”

by kiss_trigger-570-471334 (Sat May 18 2013 21:59:07) Ignore this User | Report Abuse

UPDATED Sat May 18 2013 23:07:32

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Frances: Were like a lesbian couple that don't have sex.
Sophie: I know, right? But like, if we have sex, then we might threaten
our demographic and Apple product placement deal, and we need to reaffirm
our hetero/traditional orthodoxy under the guise of hip independent film.
Frances: Oh, wow....that's like so self-reflexive...let me think about that.
Sophie: Are we gonna play fight again so we can sublimate our physical desires, while on the surface appearing "cute" and/or "quirky"?
Frances: Oh, wow...this is getting a little too, you know.... meta-Freudian for me, Soph.
Sophie: But you have a BA in psych.
Frances: Yeah, but...I want to be a dancer because I always wanted the legwarmers from "Fame" thing to come back again to hide my fat calves.
Sophie: Let's put on some disco music, which will help with that pop-cultural
retro reference thing in the dialogue and soundtrack, because, you know it's millennial.
Frances: Uh-huh.
Sophie: Yeah.
Frances: It's the story of us, like were in a film of ourselves, while I'm in actuality sleeping with the director in real life to get acting jobs, playing myself playing a version of me in black and white, for no reason, watching myself do the laundry and trying to find a job while dropping fancy author's names and picking my teeth and making quirky facial expressions and then becoming famous for it...you know? I'm a muse.
Sophie: Amused?
Frances: No, a muse.
Sophie: Oh. That's very charming. Your so very charming and eccentric, Frances.
Frances: Does that mean were gonna have sex now?
Sophie: Not at all. We need to focus on money and careers and romantic affairs with boys who remind you of John Paul Belmondo, but in a hip "recession-era" way. But not "Girls".
Frances: You are the man, Sophie. That's rad, another obscure 80's pop reference of outdated expressions for extra-hip quirky charm in the dialogue of like, the movie of our generation of itself, with us...you know?
Sophie: I know.
Frances: Take off your socks.
Sophie: Sex?
Frances: No, socks, silly.
Sophie; Do you think we'd look better in color?
Frances: Probably not.
Sophie: That's so existential.
Frances: Do you want to French kiss, like were in "Breathless" or like, you know, like Noah loves Eric Rohmer and Godard and all those French ticklers he has and he puts them up my..
Sophie: No.
Frances:Ok....ahoy, matey. I'm going to make another quirky noise when you try to touch my shoulder, ok? For restraint's sake, if not outright prudery.
Sophie: Now that's tragic.
Frances: Shakespearean, kinda.
Sophie: Good night, Frances.
Frances: Good night, Sophie.

its v disingenious 2 hold up gerwig & baumbach as some counterculture indie stalwarts, they co-wrote madagascar 3 right? or @ least baumbach did