“I think one character says “dawg” four times in one sentence; he does not utter three consecutive sentences without at least two utterances of said congenial term.
Well, Noah Baumbach is kinda funny, I guess.
via kottke, a The New Yorker piece in which Baumbach recounts his last relationship in the style and form of a series of Zagat Guide reviews. my favorite restaurant:
VANDERWEI’S
Be careful not to combine “four dry sakes” with your “creeping feeling of insecurity and dread,” or you might find yourself saying, “Wipe that damn grin off your face!” The bathrooms are “big and glamorous,” so you won’t mind spending an hour with your cheek pressed against the “cool tiled floor” after she “walks out.” And the hip East Village location can’t be beat, since her apartment is “within walking distance,” which makes it very convenient if you should choose to “lean on her buzzer for an hour” until she calls “the cops.”
Yesterday was an awful movie day.
my Movie Buddy and i took in 3 movies yesterday. typically when we do this, it’s an exercise meant to inspire. see, he’s a screenwriter and i like to close my eyes and make believe i work in movies, so when we watch, we watch to learn.
yesterday’s curriculum was not so helpful, in that regard.
we kicked off with a his guild screener of “Margot at the Wedding” (2007), which is Noah Baumbach’s follow up to 2005’s “The Squid and the Whale”. i edited the words ‘insufferable’ and ‘over-rated’ from that last sentence. can you figure out where they were supposed to go?
i can appreciate what is good about Baumbach movies, i just can’t bear to watch them. the characters are hateful - all of them, not a single character in either movie is spared from me wanting to smack him or her with a croquet mallet, then calmly walk over to the camera and slap Noah Baumbach across the face with his script for having created them. as my Movie Buddy put it, “I can imagine Noah Baumbach using the phrase, ‘That’s not funny,’ with a straight face.” he comes off as entirely humorless to me. there may be those who find the material hilarious. i imagine those people probably pluck the little hairs on the back of their neck as a pastime.
in his unending melancholy, i think i sort of understand where Baumbach is coming from. he’s channeling unfunny, Interiors-era Woody Allen who is channeling Ingmar Bergman, who is channeling early Swedish children’s television, but i’m just not on the same channel. i’m not an overwhelmingly positive, upbeat person, i don’t fail to see the dark spots of humanity, but it can’t be as bad as what he paints it to be. and it’s not a cultural thing, i don’t think. i lived on the east coast for 6 years and i knew a number of people i didn’t want to smack.
we turned it off half-way in and watched “F/X2” (1991), which for all intents and purposes, is a classically 80s movie. highlights include a scene with Downtown Bryan Brown using a telemetric clown to kick the nards of a would-be assassin. you see that, Noah Baumbach? that’s comedy, dammit.
we turned “F/X2” off quarter-way in and watched “National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze 2” (2006) on Showtime, which for all intents and purposes was a classically mid-90s Nickelodeon series with more nudity. but so beat down emotionally were we from the first two movie experiences (and a little drunk, mind you) that we watched the whole damn thing. and to save you some time, Topanga from “Boy Meets World” does not take her top off and if she had, it would have taken a while.
yesterday was an awful movie day.