* During While We’re Young, “Josh” the filmmaker keeps repeating that his work is “really just about America,” the effect being then inevitably aggrandizing of the larger whole.
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Wow, the person who reviewed While We’re Young for the New Yorker actually managed to pen the entire blurb without once mentioning that the movie features, and none too sparsely, Adam Horovitz, that’s right, Ad-Rock of the Big Apple’s own Beastie Boys. I have to admit, that is a staggering achievement in thick-headedness to rival any and all. While We’re Young is now my second favorite movie all time to Clerks — it’s a little similar to The Royal Tenenbaums (besides taking place in N.Y.) — the dialogues are extensive and patient, and also both believable and surreal. It’s a film that is actually about a film, and which indulges both thoroughly and humorously in filmic studies in ways that are hiply informative but also conversational, but more than anything it’s about the generation gap currently at hand having to do with the identity crisis of 40-somethings — the young aping the old, the old aping the young (I actually didn’t even get the joke that CD’s were supposed to be “old” when Ad-Rock was looking for the dust jacket to his Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) — and even for the eventual antagonist, the film imbues respectability by granting him autonomous human elements. Ineptitude and subterfuge, bad luck and bad intentions, meet at the center of the human comedy, and much can be drawn from the film in the way of cultural focus beacons and witty dialogue, if the viewer that is can see past his or her own projection of self, and fear of missing anything.