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

Also I was a high schooler during this time period and everyone loved Crash, regardless of the other music you listened to. But I also was in Virginia.

I think I relate to the story of Lady Bird more than Ghost World, although haven't seen GW in many years and wonder what I would think now. I mainly remember enjoying Thora Birch in it, don't think I've seen her in anything before or since

oh nm she was in American Beauty

Thora Birch's character had more of a personality, outside of her hair, in Ghost World. And she was smarter.

I automatically will like any movie/tv show set in high school, which is why this was such a letdown.

I like high school movies too!

with the exception of classic stuff where I've been pre-exposed to the hype/dismissal, films are often a letdown for me when I go into them with high expectations

Mean girls ftw and easy A

Ladybird was great.

i really dislike high school movies/tv shows/books/etc and avoided lady bird on account of it -- but then i saw it one day when i was home sick and thought it was much better than i expected and less depressing. the scene with the nun about love and attention is what really stuck with me.

ghost world was alright at the time but i still find it too male-gazey

i enjoy HS movies but tbh they never really feel even slightly like my own experience. lady bird actually felt closer to it than most of them (even tho i didn't go to catholic school), maybe because the stakes felt so low, there was a sense of things just sort of happening from day to day. you have a crisis and then you move on to something else. you have a terrible cathartic moment and then the next day you're just sitting in class. so, i dunno, i enjoyed the low-drama aspects of it that ppl complained about upthread. ghost world is great and much much sadder than this movie.

I think part of the problem is that they were using the clip up to to when she jumped out of the car on a lot of chat shows. I was prepared for a different movie.

i liked this almost as much as I hated little miss sunshine

i thought the party scenes were super relatable, like at the rich girl's house and when she went to new york. she kept fucking up but it was never a huge deal. i appreciated that.

i haven't seen and would not watch little miss sunshine. not my bag.

Yikes Little Miss Sunshine is 12 years old. I don't know whose bag that movie was. Sufjan's hat launderer?

Well, I enjoyed it a lot when it came out but I was still a teenager. I rewatched it a few times but it's been a long time. I haven't rewatched Napoleon Dynamite lately either. I think Lady Bird is more of a movie for grown ups than either of those. Of movies about teens I've seen and enjoyed, it's probably one of the most emotionally truthful (see also We Are The Best)

like as much as I enjoy when fiction dwells sentimentally on the supposed idylls of being a teenager, it sucks to be that age, and it probably sucks to parent an older teenager, and Lady Bird is clear-eyed about that.

I've seen people saying Edge Of Seventeen is better at doing the same/similar thing, i preferred this much more but i can see why there's a mini-cult around that film.

You guys use Letterboxd? I can't recall it being mentioned much on ILX but over there this is in the Top 10 films of the decade.

haven't used letterbox'd

in a lot of ways Lady Bird reminds me of aspects of my life - growing up at the lower end of middle class just outside a solidly upper middle class community (with parents who were really committed to educating their kids), going to catholic school, and having to fight with my parents to be allowed to attend an out-of-state college that was way too expensive for them.

the perfect high school movie for me!

j.d. so otm about this getting the day-to-dayness of it all.

yes, seconded.

what is with the love for The Edge of Seventeen? my brother loves it, saw it 10+ in theaters (...???), I saw it once with him and yeah it was good and it definitely felt different than most high school movies. mostly its pacing. but top 10 of the decade? I could be convinced

We just got around to Lady Bird last night. Enjoyed it, especially Saoirse Ronan and Beanie Feldstein, but had some of the "what was the hype about" reaction. It's a nicely acted coming of age story with some uneven writing and pacing. Gerwig has talent but I bet her next movie will be better. The wrong-side-of-the-tracks stuff was a little labored -- I think "Pretty in Pink" did it better. (With the benefit of Harry Dean Stanton, of course.)

I think "Pretty in Pink" did it better

Outside of discussions of movie endings that are on every level incorrect, I've never heard this phrase uttered.

Finally saw this. At first I thought I was disappointed by it, and there are still some writing choices that annoy me: I think Gerwig repeatedly emphasizes the family's (relative) poverty a bit too much; Lady Bird making a crack about "the wrong side of the tracks" and passing off her (boy)friend's grandma's house as her own are enough that we don't need the mother constantly reminding her (and us) how poor they all are. Also, the bit about the coach directing the play was funny until Gerwig decides to hammer the joke home a bit too much; I found his discomfort with making the switch from football to theatre a lot funnier before he started mapping out plays and barking out cheers. I took both of these things as a lack of confidence in the material that is likely the result of being a first time director, but they annoyed me all the same. I also didn't find the conclusion as moving as I expect I was meant to, and I wish the movie had found a way to end without the New York stuff, and particularly the phone call.

But the stuff that's good is very good: pretty much all of the performances (Tracy Letts is kind of a secret weapon here), the dimensions afforded to Metcalf's character, the way that the whole prom episode plays out, and the line about attention = love (truthfully, it was these last two that finally bumped me from a strong 6/10 to a more enthusiastic-with-reservations 7/10). At least two bigs laughs for me, as well: I'm thinking of Ronan's response to Chalamet's posturing about Iraq--"Different things can be sad, it's just war!"--and her later bafflement over what's wrong with Greatest Hits albums--"but they're the greatest."

― Police, Academy (cryptosicko), Friday, July 20, 2018 12:17 PM (yesterday)

great post. the ending bothers me too but ultimately the movie succeeds in making me feel the way it wants to anyway

No one made a Juno comparison? It did have an "I have a burger phone and my entire personality is based on it" oscar nominated air about it. Movies that base themselves on quirk, I want some real joy or rewatchability out of it. I really think GG is super charming, but I somehow just don't love anything she has been involved with.

Thanks k3vin!

I think "Pretty in Pink" did it better

I appreciate the spirit of this statement even if I don't agree with it.

But, hmmm...

Saoirse Ronan = Molly Ringwald
Laurie Metcalf = Harry Dean Stanton
Lucas Hedges = Jon Cryer
Timothee Chalamet = James Spader
Beanie Feldstein = Andrew McCarthy

The Juno comparison is far more insulting than the Pretty in Pink one.

GG occupies the same vibe as Phoebe Waller-Bridge but PWB is just vastly more interesting to me. Maybe I just am tired of NY faux-haplessness.

xxp I really don't think this movie was "quirky" in that sense and I wouldn't compare it to Juno (although I did love Jennifer Garner in that movie)

xpost the Juno and Little Miss comparisons are because they were all nominated for best picture. They aren't ingenues fucking fish, but who is.

I keep thinking about Ladybird and this movie that had Paris from Gilmore Girls in it called "Whatever" too.

the Juno and Little Miss comparisons are because they were all nominated for best picture.

Good point. I thought the intent was to align Lady Bird with Juno and LMS in terms of self-satisfied quirk, but I sense little (if any) of that in Gerwig's film.

ingenues fucking fish, lol

I have no idea who Phoebe Waller-Bridge is

this wasn't in any sense "NY faux-haplessness"

For fellow PWB fans this is the first episode of a new podcast called How To Fail and it's excellent, especially the bit about ballsing up a Downton Abbey audition.

https://howtofail.podbean.com/e/how-to-fail-phoebe-waller-bridge-1531470141/

people have been telling me to watch Fleabag, but I haven't gotten around to it, didn't realize she was in it

xpost, Had no clue about the podcast. Thx.

Fleabag, Crashing, Killing Eve. All highly entertaining.

Oh GG is NY faux haplessness in her general work. I just saw Francis Ha a couple of months ago and was kind of angry about how much I hated it. Like, that's a film that should be catnip to me.

And PWB wrote and created all of the above as well.

I liked Frances Ha, but I agree that it might be categorized as NY faux haplessness

Yeah it's her show based on her 1-woman play, she wrote it and exec produced it and even the title is a pisstake of her name.

I thought Lady Bird was insanely un-quirky? Like she thinks of herself as an outsider and weird but it’s more that she feels like an outlier due to economic status and her dislike of the popular kids.

I think the difference between this and, say, Juno, was the dialogue wasn’t super punchy. It’s not Ghost World because no one is wrapped up in an outlier identity (unless you count the goth crew in her house, and they act like normal people and her brother’s interviewing for norm office jobs). And it’s not a Mean Girls-style star vehicle because the main character is far from the center of her world. If anything, it’s about her figuring out how you even find your place in the world.

^agree

xp don't mean to give short shrift to Frances Ha, I think it is better than almost any other film mentioned in this thread

I didn’t really mean Pretty in Pink is a better movie, but I did feel like the socioeconomic angles in Lady Bird were presented in a more didactic way than in PiP. Where Lady Bird had flaws for me was in some tell-don’t-show tendencies.

fair

I feel like the attempt at understatedness in movies like LB mean we get more extended dialogue about “we don’t have the money!” where in obvious comedy it’s typified by a character just rolling up in a junket car with oil smoke coming from the hood as it lurches to a stop

quirk off the top of my head: early 90s outsider pink hair, jumps out of a car, runs for class office every year, buys lottery ticket, nudie mag, smokes on birthday, teacher shenanigans, did they ever say why she wanted to be called Lady Bird? Saorsie Ronan is soooo good in this though and Chalamet has dreamy eyes.

all of that stuff felt like things an "alternative" kid far from being actually that rebellious or countercultural would really do, rather than someone dreaming up "quirky" things to add "quirky" charm to a false character.... ymmv tho. i will also cop to being close to lady bird's age/generation, and so it feeling even close to "right" in getting the feel of what teenagerdom/high school felt like to me in that period goes a long way in me identifying with and finding it realistic.

I was a high school girl in the early 90s and I was a college rock/120 minutes kid, it still felt quirky. I just wanted the movie to be better and less obvious. It was so close.

wasn't it supposed to take place in the early 2000s? 2003 or something? i think the early 90s were a massively long time ago in lady bird years.

i guess i thought her quasi rebellious hair and clove-smoking were supposed to seem like perennial pursuits of the kind of girl who wants to distinguish herself from her peers and still remains more or less normal. there was nothing esp outstanding about her. i liked that about the movie tbh.

Derp, yeah it says 2002, I don't know why I thought 90s. Maybe because of the use of Crash.