Okay, I am now officially very intensely waiting for The Squid and the Whale. While waiting, I got thinking about Noah Baumbach’s earlier films, and thought I ought to write something about them here. Matt Feeney beat me to it, at Slate, so I’ll just point you to him. That said, he doesn’t mention Highball, a strange little film about a cocktail party, which seems like a throwaway, except for some great dialogue and some glorious scene-stealing by Peter Bogdanovich, who keeps doing impersonations of various filmmakers and actors.
The best thing in both of Baumbach’s first two movies–despite the always brutally funny Chris Eigemann–is the strangely sincere earnest silliness of Carlos Jacott. But Feeney nails how good Jacott is, so, again, I’ll cop out and let his piece stand alone.
One small bit of dialogue, though, spoken by Baumbach and his brother in Kicking and Screaming, to the hero. They pester the protagonist about which animals he’d fuck, basically haranguing him into choosing an animal just to shut them up. But when he says, exasperatedly, “Cow,” they look bitter and hostile and call him “Cowfucker” for the rest of the movie. That, my friends, is comedy. Even the Hungarian will have to admit that.