There was a moment early in Lady Bird where I sat and thought to myself, \u201cThis? This is what we\u2019re getting all geeked up about?\u201d I was chuckling, because Lady Bird is a funny movie, and even within 10 minutes of the opening credits I could already tell that my feelings toward this movie were going to skew positive. But that is not what I was concerned about in that moment, not really. I was thinking about how people talked about this movie, which is currently pointed in the direction of us collectively agreeing Lady Bird is one of the best films of the year.<\/p>\n This is a stupid thing to worry about, but it totally dictates how we end up talking about movies, especially once the Oscars creep up and try to remind us that we quietly care about who wins. La La Land last year was a perfect example, a movie that generated so much positive word of mouth buzz that by the time it was released to the public in December, it seemed to be widely disliked by the people I know for reasons almost unrelated to the movie itself. People I know are not going to dislike Lady Bird, because everybody I know who has seen it was sitting next to me in my screening. They both loved it. But at some point somebody is going to stumble across this film on Netflix and think to themselves, \u201cThis? This is what we\u2019re getting all geeked up about?\u201d<\/p>\n Again, Lady Bird is not a bad movie. It is, in fact, a good movie with a lot of great moments that never really coalesces into an exceptional whole. The much talked about use of music is enjoyable, and between this and Neighbors 2 I\u2019m discovering Beanie Feldstein might be one of my favourite young actors. The cinematography was pleasant, and I enjoyed the relationship between Lady Bird and her mother. I do, however, wonder how I would have felt about this movie if I had first been able to see it two months ago.<\/p>\n For the past handful of years, I have spent my Septembers working for the Toronto International Film Festival, a gig that has traditionally come with privileged access to screenings of movies most of the public doesn\u2019t get to see until at least November. (Casually mentioning this fact has also become a staple of my writing.) Last year I was on the early wave of La La Land appreciation, and will forever be grateful for the screening my job allowed me to attend. I was similarly early to Arrival and Nocturnal Animals and Personal Shopper and (almost) Manchester By the Sea. This year, though, my ability to see screenings was removed, so I had to spend my day watching old John Frankenheimer movies at home before I went to work instead. This was not a tragedy.<\/p>\n I can easily imagine a world where I saw Lady Bird at TIFF and loved it, telling everybody I know that it was a great movie, one which they must all see posthaste. But then might have come the conversation at the kitchen table of a party, where they tell me it didn\u2019t really work for them for a reason I eventually classify as specious.<\/p>\n These are the things I worry about.<\/p>\n Another thought that crept into my mind during Lady Bird was how much it reminded me of a type of film that once seemed like it was everywhere. In the late nineties through the mid-2000s, after Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture (and Good Will Hunting won a screenwriting Oscar while also making boatloads of cash), \u201cindies can be profitable too!\u201d became a refrain that was probably all too well known to any middling screenwriter trying to make a tragicomedy about their own life.<\/p>\n Many of these movies, like Garden State or Thumbsucker or Eulogy or Winter Passing or whatever new release Jena Malone was in that week became almost immediately forgotten. Had I lived in a larger city I might have viewed them as more successful, as movies that screened in one theatre for two weeks, but by the time they came my way I saw them as straight to video releases. And I rented pretty much every one of them, because I was at a particularly consumption-heavy part of my life. Some of them were boring, and some of them I loved, which I would then try to push on other friends of mine (something that almost never ended in said friend coming back to me with a positive review).<\/p>\n I have no statistics to back this up, but I\u2019m certain the mid-2000s is the time in cinema history with the highest number of coming of age, teenage or just post-teenage tales. Twenty years after the heyday of John Hughes, aspiring filmmakers wanted to make their version of Hughes movies, and some of the people who were on the first wave of Hughes fans had become old enough to be the money people behind greenlighting a film. Add in the timing of being in a post-Good Will Hunting world where low-ish budget movies from homegrown talent could become grand successes*, and you have the lab for screenwriters to sit around and write mopey scripts with self-deprecating humour about their mopey youthful existence. These were people who had been birthed by a creative moment, who then used the combination of all the various past experiences and products to create a work of them looking back at their own past.<\/p>\n *Plus a still-booming video store market \u2013 the most financially successful year in the history of the video store was 2004 \u2013 giving distributors an even cheaper, backup option for release should they decide the eventual film was not right for the multiplex, and a secondary market for the movie\u2019s post-multiplex life.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"lb1\"](\"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/lb1.jpg\")
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