WakeFanatic
Well-known member
Great thoughts Kickball, and I really love the comparison to LTZ, a favorite book of mine as well. Also love seeing the differing opinions that, though I knew we would get, I didn't expect to be this contrasting.
The film takes a cinema vérite approach in portraying privilege, and in terms of the title being completely dishonest it's comparable to Scorsese's The King of Comedy. In its own way the film is deeply funny, but that humor is used by the characters as a sort of crutch, a way to keep the world at arms' length. Every conversation is tinged with acute irony, the characters always relating to each other with a mean spirited disingenuousness. The humor allows the characters to maintain their own inflated sense of self worth without ever having to own up to the fact that they are really just fucking wandering around, aimless, lost in a world that they seem to not be a part of, or understand. The effect of this kind of insincerity that the characters indulge in is at once gratifying and slowly soul-crushing. It's a deeply sad vision of aging men who use irony as a way to view the world, never taking anything seriously, more often just sitting back and watching (such as the scene on the boat when Heidecker watches the girl have a seizure) with no trace of feeling. Their world view has led to a waning of affect, and what we are left with is a deeply ironic film, a portrait of a post-hipster who uses irony to shield himself, or rather because laughter is the only form of emotion that he can understand.
4 stars.
The film takes a cinema vérite approach in portraying privilege, and in terms of the title being completely dishonest it's comparable to Scorsese's The King of Comedy. In its own way the film is deeply funny, but that humor is used by the characters as a sort of crutch, a way to keep the world at arms' length. Every conversation is tinged with acute irony, the characters always relating to each other with a mean spirited disingenuousness. The humor allows the characters to maintain their own inflated sense of self worth without ever having to own up to the fact that they are really just fucking wandering around, aimless, lost in a world that they seem to not be a part of, or understand. The effect of this kind of insincerity that the characters indulge in is at once gratifying and slowly soul-crushing. It's a deeply sad vision of aging men who use irony as a way to view the world, never taking anything seriously, more often just sitting back and watching (such as the scene on the boat when Heidecker watches the girl have a seizure) with no trace of feeling. Their world view has led to a waning of affect, and what we are left with is a deeply ironic film, a portrait of a post-hipster who uses irony to shield himself, or rather because laughter is the only form of emotion that he can understand.
4 stars.