Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story

Alan Alda microwaving his lunch while strategizing with Driver = small comedy classic.

also the fact that we were with driver more just got me acquainted with what an obstinate shithead his character often is, as much as he is also sympathetic, bc the characters in this film are really well drawn imo (i loved scarjo's family)

oh god i loved alda in this so much

Good interview with Baumbach, including his choices on POV shifts. (When Charlie gets the Macarthur, we're seeing it from Nicole's POV not seeing the moment where he finds out. Same with when he's served.)

This movie is great! Lots of laffs!

My only complaints are the like four or five edits that were super melodramatic and the dogshit Randy Newman score, but just great script, powerhouse acting, lots of great lines, good small moments, good big moments

Can’t stop thinking about how the last straw for Scarlett’s character in “Marriage Story” was her husband didn’t know her phone number. In 2019. I BARELY know my own phone number. If you’re not my parents or the parents of my childhood best friend, I don’t know those digits.

— KatieEllen Humphries (@MsKatieEllen) December 8, 2019

http://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/noah-baumbach-music/

When I think about Bert Jansch in The Squid and the Whale, and Karen Dalton and Jorma Kaukonen in Margot at the Wedding, not an especially interesting list.

Yes! I had the same thought! Thanks for the reminder. He's a shitty writer!

I don't think it's a dishonest movie anymore though. Just nothing left for me besides the performances. It even looked lousy, at its worst looked like that one fuckin Instagram filter that makes beige look like piss.

xp

well!

idgi was your tv dying

i thought a lot abt the phone number line also, that tweet statement feels like such a universal truth that i cant believe it wasnt brought up to baumbach & the line made it in anyway so... idk

i feel bad for the twitter person barely knowing their own phone number, you still need it for a lot of things

also i can't go in on this movie for bad writing at all, the letter writing that opens and closes it is phenomenal and it's so fucking funny throughout

the movie looked fine! no idea what's wrong with fb's tv/computer/phone/whatever

director eating crackers...

Baumbach is not a great visual stylist or whatever, but it looked perfectly fine. No worse than usual. No worse than all the rest of the American Oscar industry focused mainly on narrative and acting.

a lot of visual flair to be had in the way both the camera moves and the way the actors move within the shot in this film imo

that was not a great sentence but tbf i’m not awake

I didn't need this to look like Mandy or whatever. (otoh...)

i think i loved most when this film got explicitly stagey: scarjo walking around dern's office, driver and alda gravitating toward the microwave (what a detail imo), the argument/breakdown, driver's sondheim performance. it's not a play within a play or anything like that but it's more like there's an intriguingly light meta-transparency covering everything, like as soon as the director's distracted from his work it suddenly dictates the pace and choreography of his divorce. it keeps the movie from being bogged down by excruciating realism, and honestly in these scenes the visual, the text, and the performances combine into idk something i'd call cinema? it's powerful, and it feels like baumbach's career has been building toward this since kicking and screaming. the one scene from frances ha that stuck with me is the one of her walking three hundred blocks for an atm just to get cash for a cash-only restaurant; it's a moment that's so perfectly exaggerated that it feels more true than truth. and this film feels like a sequence of similarly exaggerated truths that, because of the way they're exaggerated, feel way more personally true (not necessarily personally true for noah baumbach, whose biography i don't care about, but personally true for me)

someone should program a double feature of this and possession

little bits like Laura Dern's dropping Tom Petty's name when as an attorney she shouldn't have did work in that hyper-realist vein

and of course ScarJo and Driver would know the differences b/w Station to Station and Let's Dance-era Bowie costumes.

also: the way Baumbach choreographs the kitchen scene in which ScarJo's sister is supposed to serve him.

couldn't help but recall during the Halloween scenes that ScarJo recorded with Bowie

also: the way Baumbach choreographs the kitchen scene in which ScarJo's sister is supposed to serve him.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 10, 2019 7:41 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is SO good

honestly I could have used more of everyone in this movie who wasn't ScarJo/Driver

really any scene with Julie Hagerty, whose comic style depends on a hyper-posed airheadedness.

one of the strongest supporting casts i can think of

the actual camerawork and staging was great, and yeah I agree the whole ensemble is great

I saw it at a theater

btw i would like to disagree thoroughly with the idea that this movie is an exculpation of the bad behavior of the dude. absolutely not

I think it would be really funny to go on Twitter and yell at this movie for being "MRA propaganda"

I loved that Alan Alda said the system was stacked against the father, but that was as it should be, because it was to protect mistreated women. Had that scene been mishandled, yeah, it's MRA propaganda.

yeah I don't think it is either, it's not specific enough. he's made movies about divorce, he's familiar with the material.

thinking more about it, I keep coming back to Wiseman. the thoroughness in showing each step of the process reminded me of Juvenile Court, Public Housing, some others... Baumbach isn't for me but I feel better about this movie now, I think there's more going for it than I initially thought.

xxp

Can only imagine the eureka moment when someone thought of that Serious Moonlight costume.

this was good, alternately funny and moving, cast is uniformly excellent and keeps things interesting. Plot was kind of inert and I kept thinking Driver was too young for the role (which is odd given that ScarJo is the same age, I guess she's just been around longer and I assumed she was older). Visually it's workmanlike, as is par for the course with Baumbach. Didn't strike me as a departure or exceptional - there's other stuff of his I found more engaging (Frances Ha, While We're Young, Greenberg, Squid and the Whale) - but at least he's consistent and I get why ppl/critics are grateful for a guy that just makes regular movies about adults adulting.

*Shakey wanders to microwave with lunch*

I admit I wanted to know the punchline to Alda's joek

https://decider.com/2019/12/09/alan-alda-joke-marriage-story/

not a full enough version imho (ie, "it was great, the hotel renovation was done...")

It’s a good joke!

definitely worth paying legal fees for imo

it's kind of indulgent in the movie cuz it's unfinished AND I don't see how it applies to the Driver character

joke + ticking clock is probably my favorite scene in the movie

alda and driver play wonderfully off of each other

it's kind of indulgent in the movie cuz it's unfinished AND I don't see how it applies to the Driver character

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius

That's the point, though? We've all been in scenarios with inapposite jokes told by people trying to make us comfortable.

the goy? who cares!

but yeah the point is that Alda is wasting Driver's time by being diversionary

well yes, go for shark Liotta

The real problem with MARRIAGE STORY discourse is this is the first Ray Liotta meme I've seen and the only memes I want to see from this movie are Ray Liotta memes. https://t.co/1rbSiFcNSr

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) December 11, 2019

I know Liotta's not looking fit lately, but, boy, are the ruddy face, choice of ties, and bludgeoning voice perfect for this kind of showboating fraud (who happens to be very good at his job).