Looking for something new and interesting to watch, we saw this listed in the On Demand section. It’s description started out with “A hilarious comedy.” Either someone has changed the description of “hilarious comedy” while we weren’t looking, or the person meant to write “routine mumblecore” and their fingers slipped.
Recent college graduate (film studies major!) Aura (director and screenwriter Lena Dunham) moves back to her successful artist Mom’s NYC loft. Mom and genius 17-year-old sister Nadine (Mom and Nadine are actually Dunham’s real-life mother and sister) react to her arrival with emotions on the spectrum from complete indifference to annoyance.
Aura meets two men–the only male characters in the story–and both are complete and utter narcissistic douchebags. Surprised? She has an utterly desperate and pathetic sexual encounter with one of them in a roll of galvanized metal in the street. Aura gets a minimum wage job, complains that she’s going through “a real hard time” and basically nothing happens for 100 minutes.
At the end Mom decides to warm up slightly to Aura and lets her come to bed with her as Aura reverts to the emotional level of a 6-year-old.
Long ago given up on waiting for anything amusing whatever to happen, here’s the last scene. Mom complains that her alarm clock is ticking too loudly (someone still uses a wind up alarm clock?). Aura gets out of bed and moves it too the kitchen.
“I can still hear it,” Mom says. Aura replies, “But it’s not as loud, is it?” But I guess the point is that at least Mom is recognizing Aura’s existence, so that’s something.
Cut to credits.
There. I’ve saved you an hour and 40 minutes. If you’re still compelled to see it, be my guest. Maybe if I were 20 years old, it would be interesting. But I ain’t.
The thing that bothers me is the “hilarious comedy” billing, and that Aura enters “a world of sex and drugs” on her return to NYC. Again, it must have been Some Other movie.
