squid and the whale Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, a semi-autobiographical film about a Brooklyn family's experience with divorce, was the sleeper indie hit of 2005, and after its success Baumbach shot to prominence as a director to watch. His highly anticipated follow-up effort, Margot at the Wedding, returns to similar themes of family love and loathing; it stars Nicole Kidman as Margot, a high-strung writer who, along with her son Claude (Zane Pais), goes on a pilgrimage of sorts to her childhood home, where her estranged sister (Baumbach's wife Jennifer Jason Leigh) is marrying an unemployed painter (Jack Black) she just met. Baumbach -- who, it must be noted, bears an uncanny resemblance to Adrien Brody -- sat down with us in Toronto to talk about New York, family dynamics and just what's up with all those masturbation scenes.

Cinematical: After Squid and the Whale, a lot of people looked at you as a Brooklyn artist, the way they might look at someone like Jonathan Lethem. Did you have any temptation to make another movie set in Brooklyn, or did you deliberately move away from that?

Noah Baumbach: It wasn't deliberate or not deliberate -- I started writing this movie and it became what it was. It wasn't a response to anything in particular. I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist. I will say that when people would respond to Squid with a kind of Brooklyn-centric reaction I was pleased with that, because obviously Brooklyn means a lot to me.

• Bukowski: Born in to This - There is a morbidly fascinating fly-on-the-wall vibe that pervades John Dullaghan's profile of the late Beat writer Charles Bukowski, a base familiarity that parallels the Ham On Rye author's own inimitable hard-lived life and style. Epic in scope (and length), first-time director Dullaghan compiles dozens of meticulously screened hours of archival footage, coupling the best of it with new interviews with Bukowski survivors to present a terrifically real character study of a little-studied real character. The watchable Chuck-alike Happy Hour, starring Anthony LaPaglia as a booze-addled writer, is also just out.

Odds and ends for Tuesday:

• Master thespian Jack Black will join the cast of Oscar-nominated screenwriter Noah Baumbach's new project, and untitled film starring Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, aka Mrs. Baumbach. Black will play the husband of a woman (either Leigh or Kidman) who is visited by her sister (whichever one isn't playing Black's wife) and the sister's 12-year-old son. Ok, it sounds boring - but then so does "It's about some people getting divorced," and The Squid and the Whale was fantastic. Let's give the thing a chance.

• Philip Seymour Hoffman (did anyone else notice while watching the Oscars that he's built EXACTLY like Jack Black?) is taking his Oscar-winning ass over to Fox Searchlight, where he'll costar in Savages with Laura Linney. Based on the previous item and this one, it would appearing there's a run on grim little family stories: this one is about a brother a sister who are forced to care for their elderly father, a man who has been distant their whole lives. Needless to say, much is learned by all about family, responsibility, and love. Sorry, I teared up there for a second.

• Isn't royalty just hilarious? Universal is hoping so, because they just invested in a comedy pitch called Once and Future King, about "the tumult felt in the British royal family after it's discovered that an Australian farmer is the rightful king of England." What's insane about this is that it apparently actually happened: the maybe-king is now the 14th Earl of Loudoun, and lives happily (and royally) in New South Wales.
  

Here are a few reasons that the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards rocked:

• A song about each best feature nominee, including one sung by Macy Gray with the backing of an all-Capote band.
• Casual dress, including lots of nice, broken-in jeans, and refreshingly less made-up ladies.
• Swearing. Lots and lots of swearing.
  
• Shockingly frequent mentions of brilliant, largely overlooked films like The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and The Squid and the Whale.
• Garrett Scott's Occupation: Dreamland won, which resulted in a classy, sad speech by co-director Ian Olds.
  

Here is the main reason that the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards were totally disappointing:

• All the same goddamn movies and people won: Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee, Philip Seymour Hoffman (whose speech, about how much fun he's had hanging out with his fellow nominees over the course of the awards season, was pretty darn wonderful), yadda yadda usual suspects cakes. It was like watching a drunker, less formal Oscars, about 36 hours early.