Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's "Frances Ha"

like you haven't sat through a crappy movie and thought about what you'd rather be doing instead

assholes

I walked out of Before Sunrise long ago because my friend and I realized we could be sitting and talking instead of stuck in a train compartment with Ethan Hawke hitting on a gal. (Liked/loved the second one, though.)

And there are several writers who deal with privilege in a reasonable, persuasive way but in Britain, at least, this issue has caught fire on Twitter, where it's much easier to get heated and phrase a tweet in a way that sets the discussion spiralling down a more negative ad hominem path.

Oops, wrong thread

You sure, DL?

Also: Teasing, Am, Teasing!

This is a good one... fell down a little in a couple repetitive scenes. I liked Sophie's line “He's a nice guy, you know, for today."

The trailer is the worst kind of nineties dr(lol)oll indie romcom.

Were you disappointed that there was no rom?

"I like you, Patches."
"I like you too Frances."

a great movie about a magic pixie girl

After a while you forget about the magic and that she's a six inch pixie with dragonfly wings. Thats the real triumph of Gerwig's performance.

she also doesn't exist to be contingent to some man, to help some dude find his inner freedom or creativity or something

i actually don't think she fulfills that archetype at all. she's a character you actually rarely see written for women: the loveable fuck-up.

still thought these characters were impossibly juvenile for folks in their mid-late 20s

come to Brooklyn sometime!

Slocki otm.

also, i don't really get the "impossible juvenile" criticism. like, would it be a better film if frances has a full time job she took seriously, paid all of her bills on time, and never ate gluten? would the world be a better place if all twentysomethings were like that?

that depends

great answer.

Perhaps amateurist shouldn't have said they were impossibly juvenile for their mid-late twenties. Perhaps he ought to have said they were unbearably juvenile for their mid-late twenties.

that's worse, almost. i thought they were fine. benjy et al were obviously privileged and i felt sort of jealous of them, but to be honest, it seems weird and corporate to insist that people who aren't hurting anyone be "more responsible" just for the sake of it. in an ideal society, everyone would have more time to loaf around, read books, and figure out how they feel about things, not less.

there are better ways to define "more responsible" than you seem to have in mind

that depends on whether any of the characters have a gluten intolerance or celiac disease.

i guess i have love for my fellow millenials who don't know what they want from life yet, and might be harboring unrealistic dreams. life is confusing.

also, fuck narrow definitions of "responsibilty"

Youuuuuuuuuuú

gluten is p bad for everyone at this point i think

well I bought some gluten free granola and it kind of tasted like sawdust mixed with honey, but it wasn't too bad, tbh

As Seth Rogen said in This is the End gluten is what we call anything that's bad for us.

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