The Squid and the Whale
paren
537 Posts
Noah Baumbach is that dude. Kicking and Screaming was my shit back in what... like '95 or so but The Squid and the Whale is even stronger. Great stuff.
dialogic!
dialogic!
Comments
and i was a big royal tennenbaums fan...
this film has nothing to do with the royal ten. apples / oranges.
turtles are reptiles...
my 2 cents
-e
I got to meet Jeff Daniels (for the second time) when he made an appearance at the opening show for it in Michigan. I had to tell him that I was proud that he did great job at a serious role. I mean, it only took him half his life to get there.
It was produced by Wes Anderson - I think that's what he meant.
Definitely thought it was one of the filets of 2005.
and baumbach co-wrote royal tennenbaums. whatever, i thought this movie sucked ass and i was really pysched to see it and in a movie watching mood. it wasn't funny, it wasn't deep, it was just watching a bunch of bourgeouis fucking neurosis on a big screen for two hours. nothing really happened, plotwise or charector development wise... yes, there occacional moments that were funny or interesting, but they were really few and far between. sorry, i think the emperor is wearing no clothes on this one... and i gotta say most of the theatre walked out saying the same thing...
yeah, mad i wasted fucking 11 bucks and two hours of a perfectly good friday on a movie where nothing happened... slightly...
Yeah I saw this yesterday, and I gotta say your description pretty much mirrors my thoughts upon leaving the theater. That said, they got the archetypal Park Slope family spot on. Watching the flick felt like hanging out at my girl's parents house on 7th Ave. and I thought the line about across the park not being Brooklyn was a gentle but spot-on lampooning of the litte Park Slope bubble. Really though, this was like watching several days in the life of any self-obsessed and self-consciously "intellectual" family, which is to say it was pretty fucking boring and uneventful.
It's very accurate in the way that it deals with divorce and the way parents can be really selfish sometimes (as their children struggle with a sense of identity).
I could see where the 'royal tenenbaums' comparisons could be made. It's the same type of humor. Jeff Daniels is like the Gene Hackman character a bit...upper middle class, selfish, rude and completely unaware of his influence on his own children. The only thing missing would be the set pieces that Anderson is famous for.
The acting was amazing, especialy Laura Linney and was that Billy Baldwin? But seriously, what are you people getting out of this? The first time Jeff Daniels said "difficult", I thought it was a great line, but the twentieth??? I know the whole point of this movie was that everyone is talking out of their ass. Its obvious that Rogue's writing has absolutely NOTHING to do with Kafka, but Noah Baumbach should actually do some reading instead of just implying he does.
Seriously, watching this movie was like reading some asshole's journal. This asshole writes his journal by rubbing his ass along the paper. The asshole then thinks there's actual nutrients in those pages instead of just decomposed nonsense that has already been eaten and decomposed twenty times before him.
"I want you in my mouth!" Amazing.
Well, I've never heard of this one, but I can recommend two other new(ish) films that I enjoyed and my friends & family hated: La Moustache by Emmanuel Carr??re and Whisky by Juan Pablo Rebella & Pablo Stoll.
Now carry on.