Do you guys enjoy hipster movies like these?

all these movies scream “look at how indie i am. all our characters are quirky / witty / artsy who read interesting books and foreign films, reside in Los Angeles / Brooklyn / New England and went to liberal arts colleges and have dysfunctional personal lives”

I’m not sure that I’d define “Movies by Noah Baumbach” as a genre unto itself.

Not all of them, no. But some of them are well-written/well-acted/funny/entertaining etc. Just like every other genre of film. Do you enjoy them?

Are you kidding? I’m so hipster that I insist on referring to movies in Cafe Society threads by typing their actual names in the roman alphabet, instead of just linking to YouTube clips of their trailers (which I consider so last year).

Just to show off my retro cool, I’ll point out that the OP’s three movies are, in order, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, and The Squid and the Whale.

I’ve never seen any of them, but if they’re mandatory hipster viewing, as the OP seems to think, then I may have to. Ah well.

I’m so hip I seriously considered not clicking on this thread. Then I realized that not clicking was so yesterday…so here I am!

I wouldn’t consider those hipster movies. They do have upper-middle-class urban characters, but that’s about it. I thought* Margot *was a terrific but hard to watch portrait of a raging narcissist, I didn’t like Greenberg at all, and I’ve been avoiding the other one for some (non-hipster) reason.

I would consider the whole genre of mumblecore to be hipster movies, and believe me I’d much rather paste in a YouTube link than type the word “mumblecore” ever again. (The whole lot of them are available on Netflix Instant Watch when last I checked.)

Well he’s not the only one. Other filmmakers who fit into this milieu like Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Miranda July, etc

nm

So what do you call these types of movies and people?

I mean, Sex and the City is about upper middle class urban characters but they’re completely different from these artsy characters / style

I have copies of all three on vinyl.

Can’t speak to the quality of the first two movies, but The Squid and the Whale was a damned good movie that had the added bonus of introducing me to the darkly humorous talents of Jesse Eisenberg. Extra super special bonus points for the sly, haunting addition of Bob Dorough’s “Figure 8” to the movie’s soundtrack, and for providing me, for the first time in ages, with the opportunity to hear Vitas Gerulaitis’s name bandied about.

Character-driven relationship dramas about upper/upper-middle class white intellectuals/eccentrics.

Hipster? Those movies don’t even have Zooey Deschanel, Ellen Page, Michael Cera or any Wilson brother! And they barely have any artists I’ve barely heard of (or listened to 20 years ago) on the soundtrack!

The term the OP is looking for is “indie film”. Movies like Juno, Rushmore, (500) Days of Summer, Away We Go, Dan in Real Life, Garden State, Sideways, Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist, Lost in Translation, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zaissou, The Girlfriend Experience, Tenure, Napoleon Dynamite, My Blueberry Nights, Smart People, Bottle Rocket, The Royal Tenenbaums, Sunshine Cleaning, Little Miss Sunshine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and so on all sort of follow a kind of formula:

The main character(s) are typically selfish, self-absorbed, idiotic jerks. Not in a mean, douchey way. More like an iresponsible, pathetic, clueless “it’s not fair that my lover is married with three kids” or “I don’t want to be forced into taking a six figure job at a top Manhattan law firm”. IOW, the plot is typically driven by the main characters inability to get their shit together in a way one normally expects of someone smart enough to make all the clever quips and one liners they spout througout the film.

They appear less jerkish and more sympathetic because the world around them is inhereted by people who are, if you knew them in real life, would actually be considered moronic douches, drug addicts, losers, zany weirdos and otherwise even more fucked up than the main characters.

The do well at Sundance. Often as a “comedy” even though they never seem actually funny.

They typically have an eclectic “indie” soundtrack. Like something you would find playing at Starbucks.

I wouldn’t call the characters “upper middle class”. They are more often than not artists, academics or misfits in whatever class they are portrayed as being from. The wealthy son who doesn’t want to take over the family business. The working class girl who is way smarter than her peers. The professor who falls in love with his rival. The down and out prom queen. The teacher who wants to write. The writer who wants to teach. The plot is driven by the fact that these characters are trying to find their way in a relatively mundane world where they don’t fit in.

The moral of the story is usually “just grow up and deal with it”.
Now if you’ll exceuse me, I need to change out of my skinny man-jeans and ironic t-shirt, take off my trucker hat, drink a PBR and ironically listen to some bands you are’t hipster enough to have ever heard of on my 8-track.

I haven’t seen the movies in the OP, but I really liked Rushmore, the Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic. I thought they were really funny. All by Wes Anderson, if people didn’t know. I haven’t seen the rest of his films. I don’t know if the ones I mentioned would really fall into the mumblecore category though. Does this make me a hipster?

There are indie films that aren’t hipster (though I’ll grant that most of the ones in your list are).

Indie just means that it was made independent of a big studio. It says nothing about the content. The Blair Witch Project was an Indie film, as are Thank You for Smoking and Pan’s Labyrinth.

Exactly. I was expecting some Zooey Deschanel a la Gigantic in the OP, but all I saw was just a couple of indie or arthouse-type films, nothing particularly “hipster.” I haven’t seen any of them, but The Squid and The Whale looks pretty good from the trailer.

Then the trailer tells lies.

YMMV, of course, but I despised TS&TW & all the characters in it except for the hapless girlfriend (who was hijacked to BLUE VELVET as a DATE MOVIE!!!) & they despised me.

I liked them until I read this thread and saw that some of you had heard of them.

Well, I would hate to be saddled with a label as mainstream as “indie” but yes, yes I do. I don’t want every movie in the world to be like Greenberg (why is Greta Gerwig still not a superstar?) or the latest Wes Anderson self-indulgent flick, but every once in a while it’s okay to enjoy them. It cleanses the palate.

so what exactly makes Zooey Deschanel a hipster?

what is the difference between indie and hipster?

Zooey and Wes Anderson seem like the same type of people - quirky, artsy, probably hang out with similar crowds and in the same neighborhoods in LA and NY, etc