BEFORE: This film was directed by Noah Baumbach, who also directed "The Squid and the Whale". Again, I wish I paid more attention to who directed each film when I put these chains together, because linking by director might possibly make more sense than linking by actor - I think the only time I intentionally linked by director was when I worked my way through Hitchcock's filmography. But now I've seen two Baumbach films this year, and if I stick to my chain, I think I'll get to a third one in mid-July, right before the Summer Rock Concert chain.
This makes three in a row for Naomi Watts, and she'll be here tomorrow as well to wrap up her chain. This film's running on Netflix, so if it seems interesting to you, you'd better catch it while you can, these things have a way of disappearing without much notice. I've been lucky for the last few weeks, everything on my Netflix queue that I planned to see in June has stuck around long enough for me, except for "On the Road", that is.
THE PLOT: A middle-aged couples careers and marriage are overturned when a disarming young couple enters their lives.
AFTER: OK, so last night's film was about a child that acted very much like an adult, and his mother acting very immature - that theme sort of continues tonight with a story of a couple in middle age that interacts with another couple in their 20's. But you might expect that the younger couple would be all about their cell phones, Facebook and other social media, etc. and the twist here is that the middle-aged couple is all about those things, and the younger couple reads books made of paper, not on an e-reader, listens to vinyl records, not CDs, and they aren't even on Facebook! Yep, you guessed it, they're hipsters, so they make their own organic ice cream and they even have a chicken in their apartment so they can have natural eggs without chemicals and such. This seems like a great idea, right up until you actual spend time with a chicken and realize how bad they smell - I have to walk by a live poultry shop in Brooklyn every day and I often have to hold my breath.
It gets worse, because the younger couple takes Polaroids, ride bikes (probably fixies, ugh) and wear stupid hats. Plus they go to "street beach" parties, whatever that is, and they sit around in drum circles and drink hallucinogens that "cleanse" them (that is, make them puke - Ayahuasca, this is apparently a real thing). The only thing preventing this fictional couple from resembling actual real hipsters is that they're not overly smug about everything they do, so really this isn't very accurate at all. But the couple (Jamie and Darby) say they're married and they really seem to have it together, but do they? And are they all they appear to be?
Jamie makes documentaries and claims to be a big fan of older documentarian Josh. OK, but Jamie probably makes "artisanal" documentaries, if that's somehow a thing. They form a fast friendship and before you know it, Josh and his wife Cornelia are spending more time with Jamie and Darby, doing hip-hop aerobics and buying hats together, and ignoring their other friends, the ones with kids. If this were a Cinemax movie, you'd probably feel that some form of partner-swapping was in the cards here, and for a while this film seemed to be heading in that direction, until it didn't.
Once some inaccurracies pop up in Jamie's many different background stories, Josh starts to question how real these two youngsters are, and then starts to wonder if he's being punked, or if there was some kind of conspiracy that involved befriending him in order for Jamie to advance his career. The film then gets into a discussion about the making of documentaries, and how accurate they need to be, like whether it's OK to stage something for a documentary, rather than answer the bigger questions about everyone's motivations for doing what they do.
I was willing to bet, for example, that Jamie was in fact making a film about Josh, like catfishing him and stringing him along to get a filmmaker's real, genuine reactions to the problems of making docs. That would have been an interesting idea, but it never came to be. Instead it felt like this film had the germ of an idea, but it needed to be explored and explained further for me to really feel invested in it.
Just remember this, in the end, because it's important - hipsters are terrible people, they want to replace us older people, and they're not to be trusted. That message, I can get behind.
Also starring Ben Stiller (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Adam Driver (last seen in "Silence"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Charles Grodin (last seen in "The Comedian"), Adam Horovitz, Maria Dizzia (last seen in "Going in Style"), Dree Hemingway, Brady Corbet (last seen in "Martha Marcy May Marlene"), Matthew Maher (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Matthew Shear, Ryan Serhant, Peter Yarrow, Peter Bogdanovich, Guy Boyd.
RATING: 5 out of 10 baby music classes
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