Noah Baumbach

To live in Barbie Land is to be a perfect being in a perfect place. Unless you have a full-on existential crisis. Or you`re a Ken.

Margot and her son Claude decide to visit her sister Pauline after she announces that she is marrying less-than-impressive Malcolm. A slice of family life: sisters, husbands, children, history, secrets, jealousies. Margot and her teen son, Claude, travel from Manhattan to her family's Long Island home, occupied by sister Pauline, Pauline's daughter, and Malcolm, the slacker Pauline will marry outdoors that week under a tree neighbors want removed. Backbiting marks family discussion, particularly between the sisters and in Margot's cutting remarks to Claude. Pauline tells Margot a secret that Margot promptly tells Claude. Margot dislikes Malcolm and undermines him. She also has marital problems and a lover nearby. People are cruel, inside and outside their families. Is there a refuge for Margot or for Pauline? —<jhailey@hotmail.com> Margot and Pauline, two of four siblings, have been estranged for years, largely because of their fundamental differences. Margot, a successful Manhattan-based writer, is judgmental yet neurotic. She believes anyone stupid is clinically retarded or autistic. She has written about their family, including Pauline and their abusive father, as therapy, although she does not admit publicly that her stories are autobiographical. Pauline, a divorced college professor with a preteen daughter named Ingrid, is a free spirit who largely goes where life takes her, which is nowhere. Despite that estrangement, Pauline invites Margot and her family to her wedding at Margot and Pauline's childhood Long Island home where Pauline now lives with her fiancé, Malcolm. Margot, in turn, accepts, also despite she not approving of Malcolm either on principle or on first sight, he who dabbles in many different areas, none of which earns him any money. Margot and her preteen son Claude arrive a few days in advance of the wedding, while the rest of their family, including Margot's husband Jim, plan to arrive the day of. Margot's unyielding ways have had a negative affect on Claude, although he needs the emotional connection to his mother. Pauline learns that while in the area Margot plans on doing some work, she who is collaborating on a screenplay with local writer, Dick Koosman, whose twenty year old daughter Maisie is friends with Pauline and Malcolm. As such, Pauline can't help feel that Margot accepted the wedding invitation solely because of that work. Margot and Pauline feel the need to be close to each other emotionally, which manifests itself in each telling the other issues about their personal life which they have not divulged to anyone else. These revelations and what they do with the information may either bring them closer together or tear them apart even further as those revelations also affect their relationships with others in the same way. —Huggo Margot (Kidman) is a successful writer, and decides to attend her estranged sister Pauline's (Leigh) wedding. On arrival she takes an immediate dislike to Malcolm (Black), Pauline's hopeless and unemployed fiancé. With her unnerving and brutal honesty, Margot stirs up trouble and plants the seed of doubt in her sister's mind about the union.

Follows two young boys dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980s. In 1986, In Brooklyn, New York, the dysfunctional family of pseudo intellectuals composed by the university professor Bernard and the prominent writer Joan split. Bernard is a selfish, cheap and jealous decadent writer that rationalizes every attitude in his family and life and does not accept "philistines" - people that do not read books or watch movies, while the unfaithful Joan is growing as a writer and has no problems with "philistines". Their sons, the teenager Walt and the boy Frank, feel the separation and take side: Walt stays with Bernard, and Frank with Joan, and both are affected with abnormal behaviors. Frank drinks booze and smears with sperm the books in the library and a locker in the dress room of his school. The messed-up and insecure Walt uses Roger Water's song "Hey You" in a festival as if it was of his own, and breaks up with his girlfriend Sophie. Meanwhile Joan has an affair with Frank's tennis teacher Ivan and Bernard with his student Lili. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil It's the mid 1980's. Bernard and Joan Berkman and their two sons, mid-teen Walt Berkman and adolescent Frank Berkman, are a liberal minded family living in Brooklyn. Bernard is an opinionated, condescending and competitive man who works as an English professor. His past glories as a published writer have given way to teaching, but not without a fight. Joan, who didn't start writing until after they got married, has had more recent writing acclaim, her writing success which is one of the many strains in their marriage, which led to Joan having past indiscretions. As such, they announce to Walt and Frank that they are separating after seventeen years of marriage, that Bernard has taken another apartment five subway stops away, and that Bernard and Joan will have joint and equal time custody of the two boys. The boys don't much like this situation, not so much because of their parents' break-up, but because they more closely resemble and thus associate with one parent, and would rather live with that parent to the exclusion of the other: Walt with Bernard, and Frank with Joan. In addition to and in part because of the upheaval in the boys' lives, the boys are facing their own issues. Walt plagiarizes some material - in his mind, that work being something he would have been able to write - and pushes away his girlfriend Sophie solely because he thinks he can do better. Frank is testing his sexual being, leaving a bit of his manhood in public locations. All the while, the boys have to maintain their relationships with both parents, who themselves are embarking on new relationships, Bernard with one of his students named Lili, and Joan with Frank's tennis coach Ivan. —Huggo With excruciating honesty, Noah Baumbach's acclaimed third feature which marked a turn toward an increasingly personal style--chronicles the experiences of two young brothers growing up in 1980s Park Slope, Brooklyn, as they navigate the jagged contours of the divorce of their parents, both writers. —yusufpiskin Writer and director Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for this acclaimed film that captures the inner workings of a family in crisis in 1986 Brooklyn. Academic and author Bernard (Daniels, in a Golden Globe-nominated performance) and his restless wife, Joan (Linney), an up-and-coming writer, have given up on their marriage. Their two sons, Walt (Eisenberg), 16, and Frank (Kline), 12, are left to grapple with their confusing and conflicted feelings.

A bunch of guys hang around their college for months after graduation, continuing a life much like the one before graduation. After college graduation, Grover's girlfriend Jane tells him that she's moving to Prague to study writing. Grover declines to accompany her, deciding instead to move in with several friends who, like him, can't quite work up the drive to escape their university's pull. Nobody wants to make any big decisions that would radically alter his life, yet none want to end up like Chet, the professional student who tends bar and is in his tenth year of university studies. —James Meek <james@oz.net> Grover, Max, Otis, and Skippy, all 22-year-old friends, have just graduated from college. Otis is headed for graduate school in Milwaukee, and the three others should be starting their real post-school lives, but even if they had any plans, they're all having difficulty leaving the comfort of their friendship in this artificial environment of school, so they might just end up like their older acquaintance Chet, who believes that his career is at a student in this college; for the last decade he has been refusing to graduate and bartending at the townie hangout to pay for his life. Their next year to the September of the following calendar year is told. The previous year in aspiring writer Grover's life is also shown in flashback in relation to fellow English major Jane; the two had been been planning to live together as a couple after graduation. —Huggo