Today's 5: Frances Ha, Howard Ashman, Mr Dietrich...

Humpday for all your office drones. Need a distraction? Quick boost? Here are 5 anniversaries and a suggestion as to how to honor each. Try 'em out and see if they make the day go faster.

May 17th History

2013 Frances Ha finally opens in theaters after an excruciating wait from its rave reviews at festivals the fall prior. It was everything we hoped for and then some and did well in our annual awards right here. 

In its honor today: dance and leap run like Frances, especially when you're on the way to the ATM...

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Posterized: Noah Baumbach

While We're Young, a two couples collide comedy with Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller, Amanda Seyfried and Adam Driver opens today. It's the 7th official feature film from 45 year old writer/director Noah Baumbach.

His first feature, Kicking and Screaming (1995), starring a who's who of hot indie actors from the mid 90s (shout out to chris eigeman and parker posey!) came out a full 20 years ago so he got started young. He got started just in time too. His brand of talkie neurotic intimate comedy burst forth during the 90s, the golden age for the American indie. Perhaps no one knew it was the golden age for indies while living through it but in hindsight it definitely was. So many directors we still enjoy burst forth in those particularly fertile circumstances of the marketplace.

So with that one in theaters, let's look back at his first six films as director (he wrote or co-wrote all of them, too). The marketing departments got really hung up on all white posters for him for awhile... but it suits his films somehow and the Greenberg poster is straight up ingenious "he's got a lot on his mind" with its empty space. So... Kicking & Screaming (1995), Mr Jealousy (1997), The Squid and the Whale (2005, a hit, making about twice as much as his films usually do), Margot at the Wedding (2007), Greenberg (2010), and Frances Ha (2012... released in 2013). 

We haven't a clue what happened to him between 1997 and 2005 (quarter-life crisis?) though there was one additional film in 1997 that he apparently took his name off of called "Highball" which could explain the coming fallow period and in that long stretch he also co-wrote Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic and made a short film.

How many have you seen and which is your favorite?
 

NYFF Surprise! While We're Young: Or, The Kids Are All Wrong

Our NYFF coverage continues with Matthew Eng on this year's surprise screening -- which was less of a secret than usual this year, continually hinted at by the NYFF themselves, even spoiled ahead of time by IndieWire...

Ben Stiller & Naomi Watts star in "While We're Young"

Noah Baumbach is showing his age.

Not that this is the first time, mind you. Anyone who stuck through his exquisitely harsh and thus totally divisive Greenberg will surely remember Ben Stiller’s crusty, titular protagonist sourly announcing to a party full of fuzzed-out twentysomethings, “I hope I die before I end up meeting one of you in a job interview.”

There’s something instantly more pronounced about Baumbach’s evident unease towards the current generational divide in his latest adult dramedy, While We’re Young, in which Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star as Josh and Cornelia, a deceptively comfortable urban couple who are surprised to find themselves befriended and seduced by Jamie and Darby, a married pair of kind-eyed, porkpie-wearing, Bushwick-dwelling hipsters, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. What starts as a casual, multi-generational friendship soon transitions into something more consuming, as Josh, a struggling documentary filmmaker whose sophomore follow-up has taken ten years to finish, finds himself both aping and inspiring Jamie, who just so happens to be an aspiring documentarian himself. [more...]

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Tribeca: Life Partners With Benefits

Tribeca coverage continues with Jason on Life Partners with Leighton Meester & Gillian Jacobs

When I say that the specter of Frances Ha hangs heavy over Life Partners, you should probably keep in mind that the specter of Frances Ha has been hanging over my entire life for the past year and a half - it nearly immediately became The Movie I Quote Constantly. But that said, Life Partners tells the story of the air-tight bond between two young women that experiences a little leakage when a gentleman caller arrives on the scene, tossing the sudden third wheel into chaos, so you know... it's not just me.

Standing in the shadow of Frances' greatness could squelch the life from anything, but Partners, with its light heart and sitcom tread, is a genial enough 93 minutes that it makes it out alive. It's not the sort of film I'll be demanding be screened for me upon my death bed, the light in Greta's eyes carrying me off into that great nothingness, but I imagine now and then I'll chuckle remembering this or that moment down the line.

One interesting contrast of note between the two films - whereas Frances only seemed a little gay for her bestie Sophie, and that tension was acknowledged and joked about, in Life Partners the Frances-esque character of Sasha (played pleasantly enough by by Leighton Meester) is actually a lesbian, but the topic of any non-platonic love between her and her heterosexual bestie (played pleasantly enough by Gillian Jacobs) is verboten. It seems a conscious decision by the film-makers but it strains towards self-consciousness - one of their friends would joke about it, at least. Life Partners isn't that interested in really difficult complications that linger though. It still has some growing up to do.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do (Six Times)

[Here's a reader/guest contributor to share something aimed at those of you who are single and not feeling the Valentine spirit! -Nathaniel]

My name is Adam and around the time that I began visiting The Film Experience, nearly a decade ago during my freshman year of high school, I had my first serious crush on a guy. While we were never technically official, I knew being rejected for a virtual profile of someone he’d never met was probably not the greatest bookend to a first romance. The years since then have allowed me to be the brunt of even more uncomfortable and sometimes excruciatingly painful rejections but I have also had the opportunity to willfully, and sometimes unwillfully, be the asshole initiator of a break up. As the cliché goes, breaking up is hard to do.

The movies have always been my go-to resource to help me pick up the pieces. The following scenes have helped me, and they might help you, to put that nearly empty pint of Haagen-Dazs back in the freezer, put on something other than sweatpants, and get back out there.

FRANCES HA

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