Greenberg (2010) – Blu-ray Disc
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Noah Baumbach
by Walter Chaw The ideal follow-up to his Dorothy Parker-cum-Rohmer shrine Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's Greenberg is a deepening of the filmmaker's examinations of the peculiar voids over which we stretch the niceties of interaction betwixt the miserable intellectual elite. It's the Algonquin Roundtable reconstituted as wits without an audience: all outrage without an outlet, there's even this sense of panic attached to Greenberg's little whorls of nervous intellectualism, as if Jonathan Edwards's penitents were literati at risk of being cast into the hell of everyone else. Just as ignorance is bliss, the opposite is most assuredly also true, and it's the product of that deep, consuming contemplation of the navel that is the foundation for Baumbach's films, from his post-grad Kicking and Screaming through to his portraits of agonizing relational disintegrations The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. The anxiety that drives his work is the fear that the armour equipped to defend against the perception of ordinariness doesn't fit well, and that the discovery of the idiot driving the sage is not merely likely but inevitable. His are films, then, of a certain deep discomfort with the projection of the self–and Greenberg, ironically, is an examination of all of Baumbach's issues carried off with what seems like absolute confidence. If Baumbach suffers from the same self-doubt as his characters, he's no longer showing it in his films.
by Bill Chambers I found the imposed misery of Never Let Me Go a lot less provocative and haunting than the self-inflicted kind one encounters in Benedek Fliegauf’s Womb, whose one-word title seems to not-unduly affiliate the picture with Jonathan Glazer’s great Birth. I love this movie, but it took me a few days to digest it, and I’m not sure I’d have the patience to sit through it again. It’s challenging from the get-go, what with the quasi-kiddie porn of its opening sequences, in which a beautiful young boy and girl start sleeping together, and the girl caresses her skin, then the boy’s, as if trying to decipher some message between them written in Braille. (For pure eroticism, though, nothing trumps the pair watching a snail writhe across a kitchen table–and it’s here that I wish I possessed Walter Chaw’s vocabulary for discussing suggestively Romantic images such as these.) The girl, Rebecca, moves to Tokyo, and grows up to be played by Eva Green. She returns to the little beach community where she met the boy, Thomas (Matt “Doctor Who” Smith as an adult), and looks him up, having transparently spent the intervening years pining for him. When they meet again, he’s so thunderstruck that he dumps his current girlfriend on the spot, and the two impulsively begin a life together as eco-activist–an amateur entomologist, he breeds cockroaches, speaking to indelibility and infestation–and muse. Just as suddenly, Thomas is killed on the way to a protest, and Rebecca, feeling cosmically robbed, has and implements the lunatic idea to be artificially inseminated with Thomas’s clone and cultivate in the child an Oedipal complex, so that at some point in the future she will get to be with a facsimile of her lover, even if he is, technically, her son. What ensues is a distaff 
by Bill Chambers Friday began with Jack Goes Boating, the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars as the title character. Jack is an airport limo driver who’s been the third wheel in the lives of his married friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Ruben-Vega) for so long that they’ve decided to intervene by setting him up with the mousy but receptive Connie (Amy Ryan). The movie, adapted–and, one suspects, significantly “opened up”–by Bob Glaudini from his own Off-Broadway play, casually parallels their burgeoning romance with the evaporation of Clyde and Lucy’s relationship. In a 