criterionforum.org

I just saw this (it was really fun, a nice mixture of Baumbach's warm and abrasive work), and I noticed that in one scene, there was a package from the Criterion Collection delivered to Charles Grodin's character (a respected documentarian). Outside of the package, there are (very convincing) spines for multiple Criterion releases of Grodin's work. The accuracy of the typeface and the wraparound Criterion banner suggests that Baumbach got actual Criterion designers to work on them, which is really cool if it's true.

The Narrator Returns wrote:I just saw this (it was really fun, a nice mixture of Baumbach's warm and abrasive work), and I noticed that in one scene, there was a package from the Criterion Collection delivered to Charles Grodin's character (a respected documentarian). Outside of the package, there are (very convincing) spines for multiple Criterion releases of Grodin's work. The accuracy of the typeface and the wraparound Criterion banner suggests that Baumbach got actual Criterion designers to work on them, which is really cool if it's true.

I noticed this too. Also side note, why does it look like Charles Grodin has aged 50 years since the Beethoven movies?

I thought While We're Young had its moments, but overall fell a little flat. It felt like Baumbach was making a movie for a very specific demographic: upper-middle class, middle-aged, New Yorkers.

I also had a problem with Stiller and Watts' sets of friends. I think this is because I'm in the age somewhere between the twenty something hipsters and the forty something new parents. Neither lifestyle is appealing to me, which is fine, but the movie chooses a side at the expense of condemning an entire generation of the other.

Luke M wrote:...I thought While We're Young had its moments, but overall fell a little flat. It felt like Baumbach was making a movie for a very specific demographic: upper-middle class, middle-aged, New Yorkers...

I actually liked that the film didn't go out of its way to broaden its demographic appeal. Starting with the opening quote from A MASTER BUILDER, the film lays out its thesis in a confident and entertaining manner without worrying if its preoccupations are relevant to the viewer or not. It's probably the first Baumbach film that I thought was wholly successful in its ambitions.

i feel like baumbach is teenager trying to make films for adults. naomi watts is great as always, adam driver's acting is lousy, but it's the writing that is really lacking here, as in all his other films (The Squid and the Whale was almost passable on the first viewing, but not thereafter).
and as far as him contributing writing to several wes anderson films, i have a theory that anderson just needs someone who can be there to bounce ideas off of (i.e., Roman Coppola hasn't shown that he can write anything of value). no matter with whom anderson writes, it's always obviously a movie written by wes anderson.
but yes, what we have here is yet another lousy movie by baumbach. charles grodin didn't even get to be funny, and you know that ain't right.
i also noticed that in at least the first half, stiller and adam driver were talking to each other so fast, that it felt like the film was speeded up. completely unrealistic.

Personally, Baumbach strikes me as sort of a new Paul Mazursky.

This may seem like a banal observation but... I was struck by a particular scene in this which has Stiller lamenting, essentially, that people much younger than he is are getting and playing with a pop culture reference he feels some ownership of because it was timed to his own childhood, and that this upsets him even though he knows that's really silly and it shouldn't. This got to me because I was an outdated music / TV junkie as a teenager, typing my brains out on Usenet throughout the late '90s, and was on the receiving end of a few similarly barbed rants... and yet, because I am 31 now and recently started working with someone who's 22, I now completely understand where he's coming from. With the caveat that my silent irritation usually stems from her not being aware of something (Vincent Price, in case you're wondering), which is really the same thing.

I actually thought the movie's thesis was sufficiently muddled and tied up in the specific personalities of its characters that I didn't feel it straightforwardly promoted any one lifestyle or philosophy depicted over another. Aside from just accepting that one does get older, it doesn't seem to espouse the view that there is one specific correct way to do that.

Returning to this in my mid-30s yielded the greatest esteem-inflation during my current escapade of Baumbach revisits. I agree with posters above- the film admirably doesn’t choose a particular side, and operates as Baumbach does best: by presenting conflicting personalities and impulses that are impotent to achieve the catharsis they crave from the external world. Baumbach validates the emotions behind the philosophies without endorsing their perspectives themselves, eventually resting in the lonely but universal space of existential plights in aging. This is a sometimes-deceptively but often earnestly lightweight film for Baumbach, made during a generally lighter period for him but packing a punch the Gerwig films don’t reach, at least not in the same way.

I love what this film has to say about generational jealousy, the facade of counterculture and the amplifying farce in capitalist-run art funding, the absurd fad of documentaries consumed and created by people blind to the accruing manipulations of the medium, and the disconnect and insecurity around perceived markers of ‘maturity’ between you and your friends that start having kids. But I also loved the implicit pathos and the constant emotional lability Stiller and Watts experience as they come together or try new ideas with different kinds of resilience, demonstrating that acceptance is not permanent or linear and cannot sturdily protect us from zeitgeist and milieu-induced sensitivities.

The final bit is a wonderful joke that’s not fatalistic in effort to achieve a depressing ethos, but another honest attempt by Baumbach to issue surrender to the inevitable “WTF” moments that’ll keep coming as the world continues to morph in friction with our vulnerable selves, which can feel like assaults, but can be pretty damn funny and humbling and enlightening too. I love Baumbach in this mode- he can’t give these people an artificial catharsis because such forced self-actualize toon would signify they have their heads back in the clouds, only new ones. If he -the obsessively perceptive thinker and feeler- can’t get that reprieve, it would be inauthentic and arguably disrespectful to repress his surrogates’ cognitive and emotional intellect. I get the way this guy’s mind works, I feel seen in his work, and I hope he returns to this kind of stuff over less-personal adaptations as he ages