Listen Up Philip (Perry)

[dreamdead]

http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/listen_up_philip_poster-631x360.png

[dreamdead]

This could be labeled misanthropic, but it's so cheerily focused on raising up Moss's character, and a lot of the female secondary characters, that I find it instead remarkably humane, caring, and just rather wonderful. There's no filter on Schartzman and Pryce, which results in a constant cringing tendency, but the mid-film focus on Moss and Pryce by themselves is this film's greatest strength. It moves the film from a typical young male/elderly male mentorship film to something more interesting. Moss's scenes are a wonder, and the way the film captures her excitement, her decisions, and everything else is so, so good.

A little less excited by the film's treatment of academia and that sense of backbiting, but it makes sense for the worldview and at least Schwartzman didn't pursue a student. Also, those book covers, man. So good.

[Pop Trash]

I went back-and-forth about how much I liked/didn't like this one. Ultimately, it feels too much like an inferior Noah Baumbach film for me and Noah Baumbach is still doing just fine thank-you-very-much.

Also Mike D'Angelo's take down of it is really interesting. Apparently there are some semantic flaws in the voice-over which he pointed out but I didn't notice myself.

[ledfloyd]

Wasn't the voice-over intended to be a caricature of hyper-literary writing though? The flaws could be intentional. And if they're not they still kinda work.

[Pop Trash]

Wasn't the voice-over intended to be a caricature of hyper-literary writing though? The flaws could be intentional. And if they're not they still kinda work.

Oh come on. That's really reaching. I don't think Philip Roth makes 'intentional' semantic mistakes.