Baumbach is the Bed, Bath, and Beyond of indie, his newest film resembling the tacky ten dollar pre-framed black and white photos of vague French "bohemian" cityscapes that you buy and hang in a dirty insurance office's bathroom to distract you from the smell and the crack in the wall. Films whose "bitter, angry characters" are stick-figure caricatures embodied by actors neither complex or talented enough to make their character's bitterness or anger anything deeper than a mere external affectation, directed by a clever hipster con artist hiding the heart of his arch conservatism.
Anyone who would hire Ben Stiller ("Greenberg") to play an embittered intellectual railing against the corporate mediocrity of modern life should be, at the very least, highly suspect. Gerwig now stands as the latest media-manufactured "it" girl, an unthreatening and perfectly insipid creature made-to-order for a dead and non-existent counterculture.
Still, Baumbach and his muse are very necessary these days to convince an already euthanized and brainwashed Generation ZZZ that their spiritual, moral, and political malaise is a livable, "charming" and tolerable one, so that they can really, really forgive themselves for not roaring back like a million untamed lions against the state-sponsored execution of their hearts, minds, and souls as previous generations once did, for better or worse. In that sense, Baumbach may become the most cherished of contemporary cinematic frauds, a directorial eunuch as safe and as impotent as the audiences who flock to the flattery of his films rather than by those individuals perceptive enough to be thoroughly repulsed by them.
And put aside those desperate comparisons to the French New Wave, or 70's Woody Allen. What you're seeing on screen is the rotting carcass of a nation's exhausted cinema .... pointless, empty triviality posturing as wry social observation, spewed from the wealthy pockets of a talentless hack with too many inside connections and Taschen art books piled up onto his conspicuously displayed Eames chair.
Anyone who would hire Ben Stiller ("Greenberg") to play an embittered intellectual railing against the corporate mediocrity of modern life should be, at the very least, highly suspect. Gerwig now stands as the latest media-manufactured "it" girl, an unthreatening and perfectly insipid creature made-to-order for a dead and non-existent counterculture.
Still, Baumbach and his muse are very necessary these days to convince an already euthanized and brainwashed Generation ZZZ that their spiritual, moral, and political malaise is a livable, "charming" and tolerable one, so that they can really, really forgive themselves for not roaring back like a million untamed lions against the state-sponsored execution of their hearts, minds, and souls as previous generations once did, for better or worse. In that sense, Baumbach may become the most cherished of contemporary cinematic frauds, a directorial eunuch as safe and as impotent as the audiences who flock to the flattery of his films rather than by those individuals perceptive enough to be thoroughly repulsed by them.
And put aside those desperate comparisons to the French New Wave, or 70's Woody Allen. What you're seeing on screen is the rotting carcass of a nation's exhausted cinema .... pointless, empty triviality posturing as wry social observation, spewed from the wealthy pockets of a talentless hack with too many inside connections and Taschen art books piled up onto his conspicuously displayed Eames chair.
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