A directing Allen, STILL not in New York.

Big talents, like everybody else, deserve a day off. And sure enough, in the illustrious Woody Allen canon, To Rome With Love is a very minor entry that should be accompanied by a sign that says “Gone fishing.”

Having forsaken New York (temporarily, I hope) for an uneven European tour that includes stops in London, Barcelona and Paris, Woody now sends home a pretty but vapid tourist postcard of Rome that is nothing more than stale bolognese coarsened by a compendium of numbingly familiar clichés. Just how stale is evident as a cheesy rendition of “Volare” overwhelms the opening credits. From there, his 44^th film as a director is a labored farce that makes few demands on the talents of its all-star cast and ends up as boring as it is preposterous.

To Rome With Love is a valentine to the Eternal City that fares weakly compared to last year’s epic milestone, the high-concept Midnight in Paris. No freshness or original insight is evident in the four disconnected short stories that comprise this cinematic pasta fazool. The original title was The Bop Decameron, but disparaging reviews at the Italian opening two months ago conveyed the strong message that Roman cineastes did not enjoy the send-up of Boccaccio’s medieval Decameron folk tales. A change to its current title ensued, which was a good thing as the quartet of dreary episodes depicted here has none of the same classic thrill as anything by Boccaccio. Nothing solid has been worked out with consistence. The whole movie has the look and feel (not to mention the phony dialogue) of an idea jotted on the back of a menu in the Piazza Navona before a sleepy afternoon siesta, and then filmed before the script was fine-tuned.

Chief among the disappointments is Woody himself, acting for the first time since Scoop in 2006, as a neurotic former New York opera conductor who arrives with his psychiatrist wife (a wasted Judy Davis) to inspect the fiancé of their daughter (the excellent Alison Pill), a dashing but opinionated political activist and right-wing Italian architect named Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) who picked her up the Fountain of Trevi. As a germ-fearing hypochondriac, Woody has a few happily twitchy moments of self-deprecation and nervous hysteria, but we’ve seen them before, in better movies. The best thing in this episode is his discovery of the groom’s father, an undertaker and promising opera star who can sing only in the shower. (Italian tenor Fabio Armiliato turns in one of the film’s most amusing performances.) Pushing him against his will into the spotlight, Woody sets up a shower stall on a concert stage and the mortician sings Pagliacci naked to great acclaim, entering and exiting in only a towel.

Story No. 2 is a mess involving a pair of newlyweds from the provinces (Alessandra Mastronardi and Alessandro Tiberi) who become separated from each other in a series of mix-ups that turn tedious when the husband is accidentally visited—while his wife is lost in the traffic without a cell phone—by a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) who gets the wrong hotel room and he’s forced to pass her off as his wife at a fancy reception where the classy guests turn out to be her best clients. Meanwhile, the naïve wife wanders onto a movie set where she is seduced by the star, who is much too old to be mistaken as an Italian sex symbol. Pointless and excruciating.

Worse still is the one about the dull office clerk (Roberto Benigni) who inexplicably finds himself stalked by the paparazzi and turned into a celebrity before his 24 hours in the spotlight is replaced by a newer flavor of instant stardom. It’s a comment on the Italian lust for artificial fame that is less wry and more cruel than it might have seemed on paper.

Rock bottom is the empty shell revolving around an architecture student (Jesse Eisenberg, from The Social Network) spending a year in Rome who finds himself in the middle of a threesome among his live-in girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) and her house guest, a superficial, self-involved actress (Ellen Page), supervised and sarcastically annotated by an obnoxious social commentator and invisible guardian angel played by Alec Baldwin. Nothing about this little vignette works on any level whatsoever. It just lies there like congealed, week-old lasagna. The whole movie is narrated by a traffic cop on the foot of the Spanish Steps who never provides any real cohesion in the narrative or relates the fragmented sketch material to the Eternal City that surrounds it. It’s a movie made by a tourist. For the real thing, see Fellini’s Roma.

Silly and strained to the breaking point, it’s a movie that probably played out better in Woody Allen’s head than it does on film. Although they unfold against a panoply of artifacts and ruins, the parts don’t add up to a consistently riveting whole, and some of them are rusty as old nails. The only thing that resonates is the gorgeous cinematography by Darius Khondji, capturing Rome in the golden light of summer with such rich, buttery splendor that you might want to book a flight immediately. To Rome with Love has moments of isolated charm, but it’s only moderately entertaining, it isn’t very funny, and it’s entirely too long.

It’s time to pack up the Vuitton and come home, Woody. Your inspiration is thin, you’re running out of euros, and you’re having a bad day.

rreed@observer.com

TO ROME WITH LOVE

Running Time 102 minutes

Written and Directed by Woody Allen

Starring Woody Allen, Penélope Cruz and Jesse Eisenberg

2/4

Greta Gerwig.

Though Greta Gerwig has outlived the heyday of "mumblecore"—a genre distinguished by low budgets and a rambling discursiveness—any movie she is in seems to become as much. While Lola Versus bears many hallmarks of a more traditional romantic comedy, the actress at its center consistently carries it beyond the bounds of its own ambitions.

Lola Versus is a quirky indie flick with dreams of being a big, broadly appealing romantic comedy—it’s not so different from last summer’s Friends With Benefits, a big, broadly appealing romantic comedy that wanted to be quirky. The titular Lola, played by Ms. Gerwig, gets dumped by her fiancé by the end of the opening credits. She then relies on her zany single friend for support as she tries to navigate the New York dating scene, expectably developing a crush on the male friend who’s been there all along. Put Mila Kunis or Emma Stone in Greta Gerwig’s role, and move the setting to a backdrop more cinematic than somewhere in crypto-Downtown Manhattan or North Brooklyn, and, voila, you have a movie that pulls in upward of $30 million on opening weekend.

And yet Ms. Gerwig’s pushes Lola Versus into riskier territory. For much of the movie, Lola is a fully realized character only insofar as she resembles the public persona of Greta Gerwig. Like Florence in Greenberg (our introduction to Ms. Gerwig’s off-beat style and grace), Lola moves listlessly, speaks with a flat affect, and looks at men less with lust or love and more with a why-not boredom. While the role is no stretch for Ms. Gerwig—she’s played it before, and plays it often—her presence in it changes the movie in a manner its writers (Daryl Wein, who also directed, and Zoe Lister-Jones) likely did not anticipate. The script indicates that Lola falls, hard, for her male best friend, Henry (played by Hamish Linklater); the performance indicates that Lola is curious what it would be like to sleep with Henry, in part as a means of destroying the social circle she and her ex share, and does so in a moment of weakness.

That’s not to say that Lola Versus is schizophrenic. The two Lolas—the script’s hopeless romantic and the one who appears on-screen, uncertainly clumping through life—actually complement one another in a portrait of a woman who has no idea what she wants. Ms. Gerwig’s performance is most effective in Lola’s interactions with her ex, Luke (Joel Kinnaman). She, understandably, harbors conflicting feelings for the man who ended her engagement. And thanks to Ms. Gerwig’s fundamental anomie, Lola seems to be deeply saddened when the script tells Ms. Gerwig to flaunt her character’s sex life to Luke—she mopes even when they end up back in bed together.

While Ms. Gerwig does it all so easily, she is alone when she takes her character around an unforeseen corner in the story, falling into mania (she steals from a liquor store, and storms the stage at a strip club) in a way that’s written as funny but plays as grotesque. Character is sacrificed to the notion of signifiers throughout. It’s cool to have a heroine who likes strip clubs and drinking and eats things she shouldn’t. It’s harder for that character to do something real.

And Lola Versus does play like a cool-kid version of an old romantic comedy: it begins with heartbreak and moves toward the heroine’s fulfillment. It gets all the old satisfying beats right; there’s a narrative reason, after all, why the protagonist needs a best friend/confessor, and why there need to be obstacles in the path to happiness. We haven’t come that far from My Best Friend’s Wedding and the like, and the best romantic comedies wring real emotion from obvious fakery. Perversely, the "realness" of Lola Versus is its greatest stumbling block. Realness is in quotes here as the writers and director clearly believe they’re portraying a young person’s reality by having Lola stride down a beach covered in garbage, or eat hot wings at the strip club, or have inane Styles-section-trend-piece conversations with her mother about freezing her eggs. Were everything in this movie that strives to portray the reality of a hip woman dialed down from 11, this movie would be able to give a better notion of who the enigmatic Lola character really is. The film could be what it aspires to be: a cool person’s romantic comedy. It’s not cool to try too hard, after all.

Ms. Gerwig is not a big enough star to headline the big-budget version of this movie; nor, really, would she fit in there. She is not an actress who has, yet, stretched herself to fit dramatically different milieus—until she ages out of the part, she’ll be playing cool single women with something broken inside. Certainly there are many performers who’ve stuck with one sort of role. The joy can be in the variation, the discernible but subtle shading. But Lola Versus, though eminently watchable, doesn’t ask Ms. Gerwig for shading so much as an entire emotional rainbow, racing through a range of ever-changing motivations occasioned by the script. This role bears all of the problems a Greta Gerwig character could face, wrapped up under 90 minutes. The actress nearly pulls it off—but, ultimately, Lola has too much against which to struggle.

Lola Versus

Running Time 87 minutes

Written by Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones

Directed by Daryl Wein

Starring Greta Gerwig, Joel Kinnaman and Hamish Linklater

Three out of four stars

So, which party had the best-dressed attendees?

Elizabeth Olsen, home gourmand

While it’s not particularly our forte, The Observer fasted on Monday. Mostly fasted, rather. It was a religious holiday of sorts, indeed more of a pilgrimage, for which we practiced the ancient art of self-denial. Relais & Chateaux’s Dîner des Grands Chefs was our evening’s sacrosanct destination, and we intended to arrive with a pilgrim-pure palate.

As we approached Gotham Hall’s regal colonnade, we were beginning to feel slightly faint. Swaying ever so slightly in our heels, we dashed upstairs, past the congested red carpet, for some sustenance, which, before we could object, came in the form of a flute of 1999 Cuvée Louise Pommery Champagne. We weren’t alone in our pre-sunset indulgence: after a lap around the room, we noticed 25 empty bottles of bubbly neatly (and proudly) displayed at the bar. But a few minutes later, the tally was trente-cinq. At that point, we stopped counting.
The room, a balcony above the former bank-floor at Gotham Hall, had a decidedly Parisian scent: tobacco, liberally, if not effectively, doused in floral perfume. It was heavenly.

As we walked around the space, an ever-so-slightly misplaced spotlight blinded us momentarily. Lost, sightless in this cocktail Zion! As our optic nerve relaxed, little shadows remained on our retina. Were we swimming in a black-tie vat of vintage Champagne? No, sadly not. We promptly accepted a beet-and-goat-cheese canapé to re-moor.

Among the bilingual crowd, Michael and Elyse Newhouse, Greta Gerwig, Debbie Bancroft, chef Daniel Boulud (in his double-breasted chef’s jacket) and various francophilic foodies congregated around the various bars.

We spotted model Coco Rocha from across the room, standing, statuesque, with her husband, James Conran. “I do!” Ms. Rocha exclaimed when we asked who reigned over the kitchen in their household. “I clean,” Mr. Conran admitted. “We just moved into a new house, and she’s like deathly afraid of turning the oven on. She would sacrifice me to the flame. I think she has a good life insurance policy on me,” he joked, with manifest adoration and a knowing nod in his wife’s direction. “The first thing I ever made was broiled salmon,” Ms. Rocha divulged, but admitted a deep-seated love of pierogis.

Elizabeth Olsen soon appeared wearing a floor-length dress in authoritative red. “It’s Valentino. They were really nice and let me borrow a dress for the night,” she said. The efflorescing actress confessed that she was a natural in the kitchen. “I love cooking. I’ve never taken classes,” she told The Observer. “I always make my own recipes, I never follow recipes. I’m literally collecting all the different tools in my kitchen: for every Christmas and every birthday I get a new tool, and it’s really exciting and satisfying.”

Her most recent additions? “I just got the two things I was really looking for, which was a mandolin and one of those blenders that also heats up and makes soup at the same time.”

An omnivore, Ms. Olsen professed her gastro creed. “I just think everyone needs to do everything in moderation and try a little bit of everything.” She gestured to a friend who had accompanied her for the evening. “She doesn’t eat pork because she thinks pigs are too cute.” To be sure, her friend was flush with porcine fondness. “I really want a teacup piggy. Like a 20-pounder,” she declared.

Following the already tottering crowd downstairs, The Observer felt we had been transported to some féerique woodland bower. Each table was garnished with a towering cherry blossom centerpiece, vines and ivy crawling throughout. Encircling the tables, 45 master chefs were already hard at work, preparing 15 individual menus for the eager group.

Just as we were finding our seat, we noticed Gillian Miniter at a neighboring table. Watching the chefs execute their craft, we asked Ms. Miniter if she was a capable cook herself. “You know, I have to be honest, I have not cooked in a long time, and I’ll tell you why,” she began. “I used to be a cook and I used to be into cooking, but I’m married to a man who’s not interested. So I would prepare a meal, and he would say, ‘Yeah, it was O.K., I’d rather go out.’ So, guess what, I make him a cup of tea like once a month, and it’s a big deal!” Our kind of cuisinier!

The theme of the meal was Springtime in New York, and The Observer could verily taste the seasonal motif throughout. After more champagne (bien sûr!) a lobster agrodolce was served, followed by pan-seared Maine scallops.

During a brief lull in the gastronomic action (sauciers were saucing, seafood was sautéing, and Champagne flutes were, as ever, chiming), we spoke with master chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. We were curious to know M. Vongerichten’s thoughts on foraging, a new gastro trend in which chefs gather their ingredients from the wild. “I love it!” he said of the movement. “I was tweeting about it this weekend,” he added, producing his cellphone from the folds of his chef’s coat to show us photos of the various flora he had collected. We tried to picture the towering god of gastronomy, back stooped, picking through shrubbery, but our imagination failed.

As we found our seat, veal filet with bitter caramel and endive tatin were being served. The evening was topped off with a selection of fine American cheese, chocolate mousse and a glass of Porto Rozès from 1947.
Profoundly satiated, The Observer finished our last heavenly glass of Champagne (the port lacked that divine pneumatic sparkle) and bid au revoir to our tablemates. Turning around just before we left the space, we couldn’t help but smile as waiters returned to fill the flutes of guests requiring one final dram of the golden draught.

This, and nothing else, is love, we thought as we walked out into the balmy night.

Carrie-MacLemore, Greta-Gerwig, and Megalyn-Echikunwoke in 'Damsels in Distress'

It would be easy to compare Whit Stillman’s latest feature, Damsels in Distress, to other flicks about the dangers of female friendship: It’s Heathers without high school, or Mean Girls at college. After all, the movie begins with young, brunette ingénue Lily (Analeigh Tipton) during her first day at Seven Oaks College, being swooped in on by a pack of three severely affected juniors who immediately offer her friendship. Greta Gerwig is the blonde queen bee, Violet, and her two cohorts include the British Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and the ditzy Heather (Carrie MacLemore). These three are seemingly on a mission of good: they run the school’s suicide-prevention center and spend most of their time “helping” the brothers of D.U., one of the school’s Roman (not Greek) fraternity houses.

 But, much in the style of Mr. Stillman’s other films (this most recent endeavor bearing the strongest resemblance to his maiden motion picture, Metropolitan), the magniloquent style of these young women is more sound and fury than actual substance. Violet, in particular, seems to be the worst of the bunch: her interest in the D.U. boys, particularly an oaf named Frank (Ryan Metcalf), seems to serve only her selfish purpose of proving that she is indeed smarter and more cultured than those she’s ostensibly trying to help. As she tells Lily, “The tendency, very widespread, to always seek someone ‘cooler’ than yourself is always a stretch … often a big stretch. Why not instead find someone who’s frankly inferior?”
 
This would make for an interesting film all by itself, with Violet as a villain of pedigree who needs to be brought down a peg or two. But Mr. Stillman doesn’t paint his characters in such broad caricatures: early on, we see that Violet is open to critiques from the new girl, actually thanking her for providing her with insight that her motives might not be altogether altruistic. And no, she’s not being facetious.
The movie transcends a run-of-the-mill chick flick—above even a Whit Stillman film. After a series of unfortunate incidents involving Frank and two new love interests for Lily—the French Cathar Xaviar (Hugo Becker) and “strategic operator” Charlie Walker (Adam Brody)—Violet’s pretentious posturing is revealed not as a sham persona, but part of a larger quirk in her own personality: a strange, obsessive-compulsive weirdo who doesn’t seek out the company of “doofi” (the correct plural of doofus, we learn) because she needs someone to feel superior to, but because those are the people with whom she feels the most kinship with.
 
Damsels in Distress is a sweet film putting on airs. It offers up an original view of all those “cool girls” in college with their great vocabularies and noses turned up, as well as the frat jocks who so often play the cruel foils to their more bookish counterparts. In Damsels, it is the nerds­—like the head of the student paper Rick DeWolfe (Zach Woods in a character turn from the whipping boy, Gabe, on The Office)—who are presented as the true cynics, while Violet, Frank and Charlie are the actual weirdos. A great role is made of D.U.’s bartender and frat brother Thor, whose goal in life is to be able to identify colors. It’s a throwaway gag that, in a lesser writer’s hands, might be played only for laughs, but Mr. Stillman uses it to underscore some of the more poignant moments about the dangers of precociousness.
“I thought you were the cool girls,” Lily says sadly as she ditches Violet and her posse near the end of the film. Lucky for Violet (and for the audience), that’s so far from the point of college—and life—that the new girl’s desire for normalcy actually makes her the meanest girl of them all.

DAMSELS IN DISTRESS
Running Time 99 minutes
Written and Directed by
Whit Stillman
Starring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody and Analeigh Tipton

4/4

'Battleship' star Rihanna (Getty Images)

The Hunger Games (Gary Ross) March 23

Your children have been refreshing Fandango daily to see if tickets are available yet for the movie based on Suzanne Collins’ kiddie novels—think of them as Twilight, except with actual murder instead of benign vampirism. Games promises a chaste love triangle and lots of angst for the tween set, but what’s in it for adults? Potentially, some solid acting. Jennifer Lawrence, last widely seen in her Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone role, hopefully turns in another subtle and edgy performance as a young woman fighting to survive, and she’s accompanied by some tried-and-true character actors, like Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, and Donald Sutherland.

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) March 30

The long-absent Terence Davies returns with an adaptation of a play by another Terence—the late Rattigan, who wrote about the subtle emotionality of the British upper crust. This work is no exception, featuring as it does Rachel Weisz (and where has she been?) as the wife of a judge who is engaging in a dangerous liaison with a pilot. The cast also includes Tom Hiddleston, who was in just about every movie last year, of brows high and low (War Horse, Midnight in Paris, and Thor), but we’re more excited about the return of Mr. Davies, whose last narrative film, the moody The House of Mirth, came out way back in 2000.

Titanic 3D (James Cameron) April 4

To paraphrase Céline Dion, “It’s here—there’s nothing we fear.” Just in time for the centenary anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic comes the rerelease of the multiple Oscar winner. It’s been converted into 3D, too—so it’ll feel like Kate Winslet is throwing her diamond necklace right at you! Surely director James Cameron hopes he’ll break his own record by getting this film back to the #1 all-time box-office spot, but we suspect that, nearly 15 years after Titanic’s release, we’ll be among the rather limited number of Kate-and-Jack die-hards who simply can’t ever let go.

Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman) April 6

Whit Stillman, who was hiding out with Terence Davies, is back too, with a drama that proves he’s still interested in what the kids are up to. The director who blew the lid off deb parties and disco dancing now examines a suicide-prevention mission undertaken by a WASPy queen bee whose idea of “It Gets Better” is introducing her classmates to tap dance. Sure, the notion of frolicsome young beauties put in “distress” by the men in their lives seems a bit fainting-couch-y, but, given that his previous films were all more or less period pieces, one exactly doesn’t go to Mr. Stillman for insights on the way we live now.

Darling Companion (Lawrence Kasdan) April 20

Every one of our favorites unites in a project that might be the Avengers of 1980s Oscar-ceremony attendees. Diane Keaton tries on a new Chico’s scarf-and-blazer combo as a woman who loves her dog a bit too much, and Kevin Kline is the husband who misplaces that dog. Throw Dianne Wiest and Sam Shepard into the mix, and you have a winner. We’re not sure why there’s so much hue and cry—it’s not like the dog is played by Uggie—but if there was ever an actress who seems like she’d be a little too into animals, it’d be Annie Hall herself!

The Five-Year Engagement (Nicholas Stoller) April 27

Jason Segel, tired of speaking to Muppets, has returned to romantic comedies about human beings. His Forgetting Sarah Marshall follow-up  costars Emily Blunt as a fiancée who has taken her sweet time making it to the altar—hey, it’s hard to plan a wedding! Between choosing a venue and bridesmaids’ dresses … Also featured are NBC Thursday-night comedians Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, the inescapable Mindy Kaling, and, for some reason, Oscar-nominated Aussie spitfire Jacki Weaver. We’re not sure why Mr. Segel keeps getting cast as a romantic lead—perhaps because he writes the parts for himself? (Aspiring actors who don’t resemble Channing Tatum, take note.)

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden) May 4

An all-star cast of Britain’s actors most likely to cluck “Well, I never!” trade their manor houses and cozy flats for India in this tale of white people encountering brown people. Characters played by Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, and Maggie Smith, among others, decide to retire to the subcontinent before realizing that “exotic” is an unalloyed positive only when applied to the term “dancer.” It is likely, though, that they will all learn, like, three lessons before dying—perhaps some of them taught by Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel!

The Avengers (Joss Whedon) May 4

The most anticipated film of the year among circles too young or too cool to remember Titanic unites Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and a bunch of less popular and less charismatic superheroes in a quest to save the world from threats of an unclear nature. Scarlett Johansson is the lady who kicks and punches, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are the slabby studs, and moody blue Mark Ruffalo is the Incredible Hulk. (You wouldn’t like to see Mark Ruffalo when he’s angry—he brews some Kombucha to cool down then talks passionately about hydrofracking!). Unlike this summer’s noirish Dark Knight reprise, this promises to be big and bright and dopey—just what we want as rainy winter changes to overheated spring.

The Dictator (Larry Charles) May 11

Sacha Baron Cohen is back in character; apparently Bruno didn’t sate his appetite for foisting upon audiences a goulash of an accent and nightmarishly draggy scenes of his imposing himself upon unsuspecting people. The Dictator has him playing the Qaddafi-esque ruler of the fictitious nation Wadiya, one who gets to do fun things like shoot his subjects onscreen and seduce Megan Fox. We’re pretty sure that for all the Americans who were unaware of the Arab Spring, this will be a bit too insider-y, but who knows—everyone loves to laugh at Mr. Cohen when he impersonates an ethnic.

Battleship (Peter Berg) May 18

Rihanna makes her acting debut in a film about robotic aliens sent to destroy Earth—and despite her singing voice, she plays one of the humans defending us! This adaptation of the numbered-grid board game promises to be anything but B-9, with a cast that also includes the ever-more-grizzled Liam Neeson, Friday Night Lights star Taylor Kitsch, and Brooklyn Decker, who just finished playing Ophelia at the Old Vic (just kidding, she’s a bikini model!). We hope this one is successful—not due to partisanship for any of its stars, but because the deadline headlines about “sunken Battleship” are just too predictable.

Whit Stillman, with pocket square.

Good news for New York's Urban Haute Bourgeoisie. Damsels in Distress, the first film from hometown hero Whit Stillman in over a decade, will make its debut at this year's Venice Film Festival. Among the heavy-hitter directors potentially screening their new works for the first time -- Steven Soderbergh, Roman Polanski and, for some reason, Madonna -- Mr. Stillman was given the coveted closing spot.

The new picture from the man who made the still-perfect Metropolitan centers around the goings-on at a cozy liberal arts school. With Violet Wister (Greta Gerwig!) as their ringleader, three female students take a transfer student under their wing and try to tame the boorish men of the school. Expect bulk servings of fine-tuned dialog, entitlement, and bone-dry wit.

The festival closes September 10.

The Observer ran into Mr. Stillman at a party last week, at the Boom Boom Room, for the premiere of Another Earth. He told us Damsels was getting tighter and tigher with each new edit. We became visibly excited.

If you can't make it out to Venice in September (the wide release date has not yet been announced) tide yourself over with another spin through The Last Days of Disco. And then, per Mr. Stillman's request, go get drinks at Petrossian afterwards.

Any profile on Ms. Gerwig appeals to The Observer as a reasonable thing to aggregate. The actress is very much of the moment. Ms. Gerwig has both cult cache (queen of the mumblecore movement) and big-in-2011 buzz (upcoming roles in Arthur with Russell Brand, and Whit Stillman's long-awaited comeback Damsels in Distress). 

Also, The Observer met Ms. Gerwig at an after party for No Strings Attached, in which she plays Natalie Portman's best friend. Ms. Gerwig arrived wearing a neat black skirt, black tights and a black coat, which she kept on even when safe in the warm confines of the Soho Grand Club Room (warm in more ways that one! -- the Club Room has the comforting wood-wrapped look and feel of an Ivy League secret society lounge). Guests picked at a light salad, hors d'oeuvres and cream-sauce ravioli. Ms. Gerwig was exceedingly nice to us. 

But the WWD profile's most notable quality, and the reason The Observer chose to aggregate it, is the self-aware way in which it subverts the profile formula.

It begins like this:

Interviews with hot, young actresses tend go something like this: starlet arrives wearing borrowed togs, artfully disheveled to look like hers; starlet offers the requisite sound bites on how lucky she feels between sips of Diet Coke; starlet teeters away on heels, leaving in her wake a cloud of sycophantic gushing and untouched food.

It takes Greta Gerwig — a hot, young actress, to go by just about every film critic and editor — all of 30 seconds to upend that time-tested script...

But the profile does, in fact, follow the standard protocol for a downtown starlet's profile -- it makes crutches of the grungy-chic choice of locale (Schiller's Liquor Bar), the selected food and drink (huevos rancheros and coffee with -- gasp! -- whole milk), and the outfit ("A cozy, salt-and-pepper Jil Sander cardigan and purple Theory miniskirt with tights").

At least it was self-aware about the limitations of profile writing. If only aggregators could be the same about aggregating.

Click for Scandal Report: Champagne Mania Makes for A Boozy Golden Globes

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

3 Eyeballs out of 4

When Noah Baumbach’s wonderful (and still totally underappreciated) The Squid and the Whale came out in 2006, it quickly sent a wide swath of New York’s male population spiraling into PTSD—they remembered all too well parental divorce and its resulting cockamamie 1980s custody rules (Tuesdays, Thursdays, alternating Saturdays), cheapskate and cheating parents and Park Slope back in its grimy days. With Mr. Baumbach’s latest, the melancholic, witty and ultimately quite touching Greenberg, we get a peek at what might have happened to some of those ’80s lost boys now grown up (in theory, anyway).

Ben Stiller plays the title character, Roger Greenberg, an early 40-something over-therapized neurotic, visiting L.A. from New York and staying at his younger and more successful brother’s (Chris Messina) empty house while the family heads on a family vacation to Vietnam. Greenberg’s just suffered some sort of breakdown, and seems totally adrift as he wanders the gigantic house and considers his former life, which included rock star aspirations, and his current, which involve a grocery list consisting only of ice-cream sandwiches and whiskey, and the short-term future goal of building a doghouse. Enter his brother’s assistant, the lovely Greta Gerwig, who plays Florence, a similarly lost soul in her 20s. Without any rom-com buildup or meet cute scenarios, these two collide—inevitably and awkwardly and really kind of awesomely.

Mr. Baumbach (who worked on the story with wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays a supporting role) has a knack for capturing real-life dialogue—particularly and hilariously how people tend not to listen to the person on the other side of the conversation—and touches on some real generational truths that should feel uncomfortably relatable to those in their 30s and 40s (one particular standout rant against the iPod-addicted 20-something generation is especially satisfying, ending with Greenberg’s summation: “I hope I die before I meet any of you in a job interview”).

Greenberg is a narcissist, a misanthrope and an annoying back-seat driver, with just enough ego and OCD that it should have been a terribly hard character to root for, except Mr. Stiller has managed to infuse his character with a mysteriously unshakable appeal (though I did wonder about what the film would have been like without such a well-known A-lister in the role; for example, if former Baumbach players Eric Stoltz, Josh Hamilton or Chris Eigeman had taken it on). But it’s one of my favorite Stiller performances, perhaps precisely because it is such a surprisingly nuanced turn. Also, it’s great to see a terrific Rhys Ifans finally overcome his gangly, goofball persona from Notting Hill and make the most of his supporting and very sympathetic role as Greenberg’s former best friend. But it’s Greta Gerwig everyone’s going to be freaking out about after they see this movie. One of those mumble-core actresses and writers in her own right (she starred in and co-wrote 2007’s Hannah Takes the Stairs), Ms. Gerwig makes her character feel achingly real (in addition to having looks that in one moment look awkward, and in the next moment screen-siren gorgeous).

As unlikely a pair as they might have started out, Florence—and Gerwig—is the perfect counterpart for Stiller’s Greenberg. For a movie that’s about embracing the life you never planned on, it’s ultimately optimistic about still being able to change the path you find yourself on.

svilkomerson@observer.com

Originally announced last May as Greenburg (with a "u"), with Mark Ruffalo and Amy Adams in mind to star, the film ran into some difficulties when Mr. Ruffalo was forced to bow out of consideration after the tragic death of his brother; Ms. Adams soon followed suit. The Wes Anderson-approved Ben Stiller replaced Mr. Ruffalo, and just yesterday, mumblecore stalwart Greta Gerwig signed on to replace Ms. Adams in the lead role. Additionally, our friends over at The Playlist (via Production Weekly's Twitter feed) report that Mr. Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, will make an appearance in the film as well.

Just from looking at the cast roster, our expectations for Greenberg are through the roof. As much as we would have loved to see Mark Ruffalo and Amy Adams (two of our favorites) in a Noah Baumbach film, the melding of these particular actors and talents seems both batshit insane and truly inspired. Between Mr. Baumbach, Mr. Stiller and Ms. Gerwig, there will be three decidedly different styles at work. Greenberg could be a Film Forum-member's wet dream; an amalgam of Mr. Baumbach, Mr. Anderson and Joe Swanberg with a dash of Mr. Stiller's absurdity. We can only hope that Mr. Baumbach hires Harris Savides to once again shoot all of his intense moments of dramatic strife and smart comedy. Our current cinematographer crush was responsible for Margot at the Wedding, a visual feast of dark and natural lighting that belied the actual movie. We imagine he'd be just the right type of guy to bring whatever Greenberg is supposed to be to life.