Pictureland

Ah, love is in the air.  While the exuberant, spinning, leaping, play-fighting, occasionally tripping heroine of Frances Ha remains UNDATEABLE! to the end, the film is in more ways than one way a love story.  There is the friendship between Frances Halliday (Greta Gerwig) and her friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner), a kind of enduring love affair that would seem to trump whatever romantic relationship either woman assays with men.  "Tell me the story of us," Frances asks Sophie as two sit close together one evening.  "Again?," Sophie asks.  Frances nods. More implicit but no less effusive is the obvious love of  director for star.  Noah Baumbach is these days the romantic partner of Greta Gerwig.  To watch Frances Ha is to have abundant proof just how infatuated Baumbach would seem to be.  He can hardly keep his camera off her. If you've seen Frances Ha , the couple's previous collaboration, Greenberg (although that film was co-w...

Ours is an age of unreality cloaked in apparent realism.  Television, of course, is saturated with reality shows, demonstrating, if nothing else, our estrangement from language and meaning.  Your housewives of Jersey, your small town security guards, even people who operate storage facilities.  I don't believe there have been any shows centered on the lives coma patients.  Yet. News broadcasts, both national and local, increasingly melding with those of entertainment, like some incestuous marriage destined to produce deranged kids, will sometimes let observers look in from a street-side window.  Or the broadcast itself will take us behind the scenes, perhaps bring its anchor out from behind the barrier  - its fourth wall if you will  - of the desk, or let a camera break free of it usual straight-on perspective and sweep around the studio (the narcissists at ESPN really enjoy this).  Television commercials will revel in their outtakes - som...