Actually it doesn't bother me if it's a club of one - watching a movie isn't the most social thing you can do anyway.
My partner and I are pretty broke at the moment, we have upgraded our home from one to two bedrooms - yippee! - and move into our new place at the end of this month, so our mortgage payments will increase quite a bit. So, it feels a bit decadent to see a movie once a week, however I am justifying it because it only costs $9 on a Monday and because I intend on reviewing each movie I see on this blog.
Now you might say to yourself - Dizzy, I don't believe you! You are constantly inventing new goals and challenges for yourself and you never follow through and my response to that is Yes, you are quite correct but I'm working on improving that part of my personality. I have been working through a course on procrastination and hopefully I am making some headway.
So without further ado, here is my first movie review.
Movie Title - 'While We're Young'Directed by - Noah Baumbach
Starring - Naomi Watts as 'Cornelia' and Ben Stiller as 'Josh'
Supporting performances by - Adam Driver as 'Jamie' and Amanda Seyfried as 'Darby'.
Plot - A middle-aged couple's career and marriage are overturned when a disarming young couple enters their lives.
Source - IMDB
The movie starts with Cornelia (Watts) and Josh (Stiller) visiting their friends who have just had a baby. Cornelia and Josh are clearly out of their comfort zone and struggle to interact with the baby. They return home and reassure themselves that their life together is full and meaningful and best of all they have the freedom to do whatever they want, whenever they want...the trouble is that they just don't! They haven't taken a holiday in years due to demanding careers in the film industry. They are part of the middle-age rat race as much as their friends with kids are.
Enter Jamie (Driver) and Darby (Seyfried), a funky gen Y hipster couple, in their mid-twenties and also married. The pair ooze new-skool coolness and reject technology at every turn by living a 100% retro lifestyle. They prefer boardgames to online games, testing their memory rather than googling facts, using a typewriter versus a laptop and the list goes in.
Josh becomes totally enamoured with the couple and as he and Cornelia feel increasingly alienated from their peers who now have to act like responsible parents, they form a close aspirational bond with the youngsters. Josh is a documentary filmmaker and it turns out that Jamie is starting out in the same industry. He lavishes praise on Josh, and as Josh has been working on the same boring documentary for years, Jamie's admiring gaze helps to boost his wounded self-esteem.
But can Josh and Cornelia really fit into a younger crowd? Are they cool enough and is it really want they want? And are Jamie and Darby really as genuine as they first appear to be?
I really enjoyed this film with it's trademark Stiller humour. I'm not sure if he collaborated with Baumbach or the script writer, but it has a definite wry wit about it that is refreshing for American film. However, this doesn't make the movie free from a corny ending or predictable plot. The wryness is more evident in the solid performances by the whole cast.
The film is interesting in that it's exploring modern Western society whereby couples are waiting longer to have kids or deciding they don't want children at all. The film celebrates youth and the simple life of forty or so years ago, when technology hadn't bombarded our every waking second.
But moreover, what this film is really about is friendship and how far someone can fall when you put them on a pedestal.
I give 'While We're Young' 3.5 stars...good film to watch at home with a glass of red on a Sat night.
