NYFF podcast. Margot at the Wedding.

In this podcast from the New York Film Festival, Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis talk with Esquire's Mike D'Angelo about Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding (site). To download or listen, click here.

"Writer/director Noah Baumbach's films are so relentlessly peopled by awful individuals that one may well wonder if Baumbach is acquainted with anybody who's just kind of a simple pleasure to hang out with," blogs Glenn Kenny. Even so, "Margot is a fleet, strangely enjoyable film. Baumbach is only gaining in assurance as both a writer and director; this picture brought to mind Rohmer's work of the early to mid-80s, if Rohmer were more depressive and had a nastier social circle."

"It's futile to harp on the smugness of Baumbach's characters when Baumbach's writing is the problem," argues Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "As in The Squid and the Whale, the cast brings a freshness and spontaneity to what is a rather suffocating compendium of tidy Screenwriting 101 gestures."

Earlier: Reviews and previews from Toronto and NYFF.

Update, 10/8: Erica Abeel has notes on the press conference at Filmmaker: "Nicole Kidman in the flesh is like some tall blonde column emitting light, reducing the other folks on stage to mouse-people."

Updates, 10/10: "It is melodrama in passing, with no solutions, but in its movement, its energy, and its affectation, it has its own dark, delirious thrill," writes Daniel Kasman.

"Noah Baumbach is a masterful writer of cringingly sad-funny dialogue, and quite possibly an astute chronicler of a certain segment of the neurotic sorta-intelligentsia," concedes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "But we hate his characters."

Update, 10/12: "It turns out [Kidman] is chillingly well-suited to thin air and middle-aged anxiety of the Baumbach world, playing the monstrously self-centered Margot as completely un-self-aware, a writer as blood-sucking cipher who seems to exist only to mine herself and others for material," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

Update, 10/16: "It isn't a horror flick, but it moves and schemes like a great one," writes Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "The gore here isn't found in blood-'n'-guts, just via a family of thin-skinned, overeducated neurotics eviscerating each other (and themselves) emotionally. Grisly stuff."

Posted by dwhudson at October 7, 2007 1:38 PM