While We're Young

Year of Release:  2014
Director:  Noah Baumbach
Screenplay:  Noah Baumbach
Starring:  Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried, Charles Grodin, Adam Horovitz
Running Time:  97 minutes
Genre:  Comedy, drama

New York City:  Josh Schrebnik (Stiller) is 44 year old documentary filmmaker and teacher.  After making a splash with his debut film, he has spent ten years working on his follow-up, and is married to Cornelia (Watts).  One night Josh meets 25 year old aspiring filmmaker Jamie Massey (Driver) and his wife Darby (Seyfried).  Josh is enamored with the free-spirited hipster couple, Cornelia is more reluctant, but still finds herself drawn to Jamie and Darby.  Before long the older couple are adopting the tastes and lifestyles of their younger friends, at the expense of their older friends.  But things go wrong, when Josh realises that Jamie's values and worldview don't match up with his own.

This is an enjoyable and consistently funny film which does make some pertinent points about ageing.  Josh and Cornelia are approaching their mid-forties and so are a long way from being elderly (full disclosure I am currently 41) but they are facing the specter of old age there are things that they want to do in their lives that they realise they have to do sooner rather than later, or risk never being able to do them at all.  Also they are stuck in a rut, Josh has been working in the same film for ten years, and still doesn't know what it's about.  Both he and Cornelia feel alienated from their best friends, who are new parents.  They are drawn to Jamie and Darby because of their creativity, energy, and their enthusiasm particularly for retro pop culture.  However, Josh soon comes to realise that Jamie is full of pretence and artifice, and is also very manipulative.  However the film makes it clear that Jamie and Darby are part of a changing world, and Josh and Cornelia are not condemned or really mocked for embracing a youthful lifestyle, in fact it proves a mostly positive experience.  Ben Stiller is funny and engaging in the lead, and Adam Driver gets a lot of mileage form his cool hipster persona.  Naomi Watts and Amanda Seyfried are largely sidelined though.  Noah Baumbach has usurped Woody Allen as the king of New York comedy-dramas, mixing heart and humour in nearly equal doses.   This isn't his best work but it is still worth checking out.

Amanda Seyfried, Adam Driver, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in While We're Young 

The Cable Guy

Year of Release:  1996
Director:  Ben Stiller
Screenplay:  Lou Holtz, Jr.
Starring:  Jim Carrey, Matthew Broderick, Leslie Mann,
Running Time:  95 minutes
Genre:  comedy, thriller

Steve Kovacs (Broderick) has been kicked out by his girlfriend, Robyn (Mann), and moves into an apartment.  When he gets his cable installed, the cable guy, Chip Douglas (Carrey), turns out to be deeply strange, eccentric and overly friendly.  When Steve, out of a sense of obligation and guilt, agrees to hang out with Chip, he finds him creepy and aggressive.  Steve decides to break off the "friendship", but Chip will not take no for an answer.

When this film was released, back in 1996, Jim Carrey was probably the biggest comedy star around, coming off the back of massive hits like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1993), The Mask (1994) and Dumb and Dumber (1995) which were all based on his brand of cartoonish, rubber-faced physical comedy.  While in previous films, Carrey's persona was often abrasive, aggressive, and irritating, he was always essentially the hero, here he is definitely a villain.  His manic persona feels at odd with the essentially naturalistic world around him here, particularly the quiet performance of Matthew Broderick, there is a sense of real danger from Chip, he feels like an alien with only a vague idea of how to act as human.  The film was released to largely negative reviews and was widely regarded as a failure, although it has becomes something of a cult film now.  While the film is funny and does have an edge to it, it's not edgy enough to be truly dark.  There are a couple of future stars appearing in small roles, such as Jack Black and Owen Wilson, and director Ben Stiller appears as a suspected murderer on a high profile trial which is seen on news bulletins throughout the film.

Jim Carrey is The Cable Guy