Nicole Holofcener – Thelma and Alice

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Writer & Director: Nicole Holofcener

If you’re thinking about moving to the suburbs but would like to be convinced otherwise, I recommend streaming The Land of Steady Habits immediately. With the exception of a divorcee played by Connie Britton, the characters in this movie are all low-key unhappy as they try to make the best of their affluence. Adapted from Ted Thompson’s novel by the same name, it follows the midlife crisis of Anders, a fifty-something guy who is attempting to forge a new life for himself after divorcing his wife and quitting his lucrative job. The film opens with the screenshot above: Anders trying to choose towels for his new single-guy condo. It’s a striking image that shows both the state of Anders emotional life (bewildered, overwhelmed) and the soul-numbing indecision brought on by big box stores. Maybe it also hints at the extraordinary class divide, where a small percentage of Americans have an endless array of meaningless choices while a huge percentage have no choice but to get by. Continue reading “Review: Land of Steady Habits” →

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Director: Marielle Heller
Writers: Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty

This has to be one of the best movies about writing that I’ve seen, one shows, in a realistic way, the difficulty of making a living as a writer, and the special cruelty of the New York publishing world. Based on Lee Israel’s memoir of the same title, it’s about a down-on-her-luck biographer (Melissa McCarthy) who turns to literary forgery as a way to pay her bills. Israel, who died in 2014, found plenty of work as a journalist and author in the 1970s and 80s, but had a dry spell after her biography of Estee Lauder was panned by critics and sold poorly. Can You Ever Forgive Me? takes place in the early 1990s, when Lee begins to forge letters by famous writers like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward to sell to collectors. Continue reading “Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me?” →