The Squid and the Whale: Life Aquatic 2?

This film was much darker than I expected. I guess I was thinking with Noah Baumbach would come Royal Tennenbaums style humor, but he's less off-beat than that. Or, maybe just less overtly off-beat. His scenes definitelly have an almost sporadic rise and fall and ya know what? It reminded me of real life. Sorry to speak with such weight, but it's one of those "for a reason" cliches: film should feel like real life ("RL" as internet nerds write), even if it means sacrificing some of our favorite conventions.

Not that the film didn't have some cinema conceits, but that's sort of what's happening in cinema these days: the best of cinematic technique is being used amidst much less uniformed energies, and wielded with pride. Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation. Deeply honest and surprising, exposed moments, with very "filmish" veneers.

The kids in the movie acted out in a wider variety of ways. Ways that I felt explained to me what it must be like to have your parents divorce. And I liked that these acts weren't explained. You can guess what some of it was about, but it wasn't focused on.

Lots of characters acting out angrily, destructively, and not knowing why. Only two points in the film when a character laughs. Maybe four. Immature people missing thousands of opportunities to deal with what's actually happening to them, around them. Perferring, instead, to stay in "control" by fussing over trivialities. If you can't deal with the bigger picture, you reduce your frame of perspective to something you can deal with. And watching all this made me sad and uncomfortable, but, like I said, it was uber-realistic. So that's what I mean by the whole previous paragraph: realism over naturalism. It's weird seeing the medium move into a new chapter, the way we're able to look across a huge history of paintings.