The Squid and The Whale

I finally saw The Squid and The Whale this weekend. It is very smart and funny, and captures New York, and adolescence, in the mid-1980s perfectly. Parts of it are hard to watch, as the kids fall apart and the parents use their children to get back at one another. It also has one of the more accurate--and squirm-inducing--portrayals of teen romance I have ever seen. Neilson's mother, Erica Abeel, interviewed the director, Noah Baumbach for indiewire.com. As a divorced New York-based writer with two kids, I think the subject of the movie made her a little uncomfortable, but she and Baumbach have a very interesting exchange about film, autobiography and how viewers' own experiences influence their reactions to a story.