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

My review.

V sweetly written up Alfred :)

yes. this is great and v on-point with how i remember the later stretches of high school: "both outcasts who use wit not so much as a rapier against the popular kids at their Catholic high school but as an end in itself because rapiers are cool."

i remember the uncle conversation differently though - doesn't lady bird just say "he's not your uncle," and julie responds, "it's something I'm trying out"? as in, she's trying out calling him that?

thanks!

@ Doc Casino: I saw at least one trans writer on Twitter pick up on the same thing you mentioned w/r/t the ending

beautiful review, Alfred

i found this perfectly cozy and lovely world to inhabit for a couple hours. can't wait for her next flick, but also, i hope she keeps acting or casts herself

Just saw it a second time; being prepared for the jokes made me be present enough to notice how sad I felt about many of the laugh lines

I hope she and Noah Baumbach stay together because I’m romantic but I would think/hope she’s got no further need for him as far as making movies

thanks, y'all

"being prepared for the jokes made me be present enough to notice how sad I felt about many of the laugh lines"

maybe I said this up above but when i heard the "why don't you like me" scene on the radio before I saw th emovie it made me cry. It didn't seem as sad in a theater full of people who were laughing at other parts; but I think removed from an audience I'd feel the same way again

This is another one of those films that I suspect earns very different reactions and elicits different emotions depending on whether you are viewing it as a parent vs. viewing it as a child. Perhaps gender makes a big difference, too. For example, my wife watched it as a perfect encapsulation of what it was like a be a young woman at more or less that exact age/time, and of course I can't ever fully appreciate that perspective. But I could understand what it was like to have a fraught relationship with a parent (as everyone can) and yet also now, as a parent of a freshly minted teen, what it is like to have a complex relationship with your kid. Though as a father, not as a mother, which is, again, a distinction and dynamic worth noting in this particular story.

The senior citizen crowd I saw it with really dug the Didion quote at the beginning.

lol same with my crowd!

i loved the dad in this. his gruff laugh when the mother asks 'you think miguel and diana have sex on the pull-out couch?' 'oh yeah'

Tracy Letts was really good as the dad in this (mind you, the character's so likeable contrasted with Laurie Metcalf, maybe not the most difficult role). Thought I knew him well from somewhere else, but the only possibilities are Weiner-Dog and The Big Short, and I don't think it's either of those. So it must be..."Counterguy" in the Seinfeld where Kramer goes back to work at the bagel place.

no he is in Wiener-Dog. also was in a really shitty movie this year called The Lovers

I know he's in it--I was going by IMDB--I'm just saying I have no strong association between him and the film. All I really remember is Danny DeVito and Ellen Burstyn, and had to double-check about Burstyn.

yea hes the asshole dad in the beginning. hes also the asshole dad in The Lovers. I was actually really surprised by his character in Lady Bird, he even looked different- much warmer & understanding guy

I watched this movie in Sacramento!! :)

how did the crowd like it

It was showing at the mall so the crowd was pretty normcore. They seemed to like it but were somewhat muted. There were the predictable oohs and ahhs when various local landmarks showed up. My aunt hated the editing.

I did too. Felt like the whole thing was in fast forward. No room to breathe. I’m probably just getting slower in my old age.

Anyway despite my general aversion to coming-of-age movies this was alright. The cast was very good and the dialog was funny without being overtly cutesy or precious. Some of it felt very true-to-life in a way most high school movies never manage.

I think my main issue with it aside from the editing/pacing is that I have absolutely no nostalgia or wistfulness about my adolescence and a movie like this inevitably conjures up a lot of stuff I’d rather forget about. That’s not the movie’s fault, it’s my own baggage, but it keeps me from fully enjoying it.

This move did an effective job of killing adolescence.

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.