Jack and I are big fans of the cringe-y work of director/writer Noah Baumbach, and predictably enjoyed his latest, about a Manhattan couple in their 40s who befriend a 20-something hipster couple. Ben Stiller (last blogged in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) and Naomi Watts (most recently in Birdman) are wonderful as the older ones, and Adam Driver (last in Tracks) and Amanda Seyfried (most recently in A Million Ways to Die in the West) are no slouches as the kids. Charles Grodin (my favorites of his work include Catch-22 (1970), The Heartbreak Kid (1972) which was remade in 2007 with Stiller in Grodin's role, King Kong (1976), Heaven Can Wait (1978), Real Life (1979), Sunburn (1979), It's My Turn (1980), Seems Like Old Times (1980), The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), The Woman in Red (1984), Ishtar (1987), Dave (1993), and a series arc on the series Louie) joins in the second act as Watts' character's father. Interesting supporting actors include former Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, Dree Hemingway (née Crisman, daughter of Mariel), Peter Yarrow (sans Paul and Mary), and Peter Bogdanovich.
I last wrote about Baumbach in Frances Ha!, which also featured Driver. Included in the wardrobe were were a couple of T-shirts I just loved. One says "some crappy band" and the other, "some college I didn't go to."
You can stream some of the songs on this youtube playlist but I didn't find any recordings online of the soundtrack by James Murphy (the LCD Soundsystem lead singer also scored Greenberg for Baumbach).
We did rush to see this when it was first released here about three weeks ago, but I couldn't get around to writing about it until tonight. It's still playing on a few screens but would not suffer from being seen on DVD (release is estimated for next month). Rotten Tomatoes' critics average 84% and its audiences 61. It's not for everyone but we liked it a lot.
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