Word: baumbach
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Everyone knows a baffling couple like the one that takes shape in Greenberg, Noah Baumbach's defiantly unsettling new film. One half of the couple is a genuinely lovely person. The other seems to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. You come home from being at a dinner party with them stumped as to why the lovely person hasn't noticed that their spouse or partner is a total stinker. You ponder, maybe for the first time, the term co-dependency. Mostly you wonder how this pair ended up together. (See the top 10 actor-director pairings...
...light, lovely, and clever comedy that finds the director’s vision coinciding with pure entertainment for the first time in years. A stop-motion animated riff on Roald Dahl’s classic book, the film reunites Anderson with frequent screenwriting collaborator Noah Baumbach (director of “The Squid and the Whale”), casting George Clooney as the title character in a war for land and life against a trio of demonic factory-farmers. Clooney is the latest in a line of charismatic paterfamilias—common in the director’s films?...
...hero is back to his dapper self in Fantastic Mr. Fox, directed by Wes Anderson, co-written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach and animated, in gloriously anachronistic stop-motion, by Mark Gustafson. In his corduroy suit, Mr. F. is a woodsy gentleman crook, a raffish Raffles specializing in chickens. When his wife (voiced by Meryl Streep) becomes pregnant, Fox retires to write a newspaper column and help raise his underachieving son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman). Yet the artist in Fox yearns to pull off one last heist: raiding the farms of Franklin Bean (Michael Gambon) and two other big landowners...
...Clooney is the Danny Ocean of canids, with the complication of paternity. The family vibe here is as tense as in earlier films by Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) but with a stalwart, creative dad who will somehow make things right. There's a similarly fruitful tension between the movie's hip, careless tone and the painstakingly retro stop-motion technique. The result is not a collision but a concerto and, for audiences, harmonic bliss. (Read "George Clooney: The Last Movie Star...
...Noah Baumbach thinks he's funny, though his intermittent gags fizzle painfully. He also thinks - and this is his larger sin - that he is a serious fellow, which he definitely is not. He is merely unhappy in a vague and annoying post-graduate sort of way. He's the kind of filmmaker who thinks that if he sets his star to masturbating on camera, he's making a statement, when all he's actually doing is signifying the true spirit of his movie...