Leonard Quart is Professor Emeritus of Cinema — CUNY and COSI; Contributing Editor, Cineaste; Columnist for Berkshire Eagle; and co-author of American Film and Society Since 1945 —4th Edition (Praeger).
None of these over-the-top displays aim at subtlety but their spectacle attempts to envelop us all in holiday good feelings, and it succeeds with many. Still, the abattoir much of the world has turned into repels and frightens me.
The film reminds one of Woody Allen at his best -- profoundly urban and urbane with Greta Gerwig playing an even more quick-witted variation of Diane Keaton. I’m not saying Baumbach’s film is as good as 'Manhattan' or 'Annie Hall,' but it comes close.
Much of the talk is about celebrity and how it undermines the humanity of the writer, the gap between the writer’s persona and his reality, and the emptiness of pop culture, which Wallace also loves.
Like so many of Allen’s films over the last two decades, “Irrational Man” seems knocked out -- an incomplete draft for a film rather than a fully realized work.
In “While We’re Young” Baumbach has made a more mainstream comedy. It’s one that displays his keen insight into the comic/pathetic nature of human behavior, and a social intelligence that captures the absurdities and pain of the generational divide.
Kyle has no doubt that he is fighting for both his country and his notion of God and for protecting his brother soldiers. He manifests almost no guilt about what he has done, though one knows that among his victims there are innocents as well as genuine terrorists.
Iñárritu has made an off-kilter film. If it sometimes feels too frenzied, and leaves characters and sub-plots hanging, still, it’s a truly imaginative work of art.
The artists and young professionals who inhabit large slices of contemporary, gentrifying Brooklyn don’t appear here. Rather what’s portrayed is an older version of that borough -- one built on elements of the great On the Waterfront.
