Word: greenberg
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...weekend's sole medium-size release, earned $1 million in 350 theaters. A sexual melodrama offering the glory of hot-sheets action between Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore, Chloe will never get near the numbers of a well-promoted movie from a major studio. Nor will Noah Baumbach's Greenberg, a potential-breakout romance that won a sheaf of favorable reviews and has an actual movie star, Ben Stiller, in the title role; it took in $1.1 million on 181 screens. The Runaways, starring Dakota Fanning and Twilight's Kristen Stewart, is already DOA after two weeks. About as close...
...impressed by you," she tells Greenberg at one point. This line of thinking pretty much causes her best friend's head to explode and the entire audience to recoil in a collective say what? Should one judge a movie's artistic merits based on how annoyed you are by its characters? No. If likable is what you're looking for, it is inadvisable to trot off to see a Baumbach movie (Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale featured comparable creeps). That Greenberg has merits is undeniable. Gerwig, a funny mix of Kate Winslet and the joyfully...
...cranky as Greenberg is, he's also lonely. He tries out the few old friends available to him in L.A., including another old bandmate, Ivan (Rhys Ifans, lovely as a gentle soul who has learned to live with disappointment), and finds their level of interest in him dissatisfying. The truth is, his old friends know Greenberg to be self-absorbed to the point of parody and they hold him at arm's length...
...relationship with Roger as well. Having nothing better to do, he calls her, makes a pass and she decides almost right away that she wants him to let her in, to really like her. She's a sucker for a wounded soul and for some reason, she finds Greenberg appealing. It can't be the sex: these are the least loving, least sexy, driest sex scenes ever filmed. (He tops off a halfhearted tour of her body by asking if that's a cold sore on her lip.) Like practically every female character ever created by Woody Allen, she inexplicably...
...movie has the curious vagueness of intent that makes so many "meaningful" works of fiction not all that meaningful. I'd be happy to accept Greenberg as a portrait of the terrible insecurities and needs that bring the lovely person and the stinker together. But I doubt that Baumbach intended to make a dramatized version of Smart Women, Foolish Choices. It seems out of character, and the tone is not that of a cautionary tale. I worry that he sees Greenberg as a modern, ennui-filled love story and believes, like Florence, that Greenberg can be saved by the love...