Hey, Ginsberg Libby and IFC Films — I have to fly to NYC on Frances Ha‘s LA press day (Tuesday, 4.30) so maybe I could informally hook up on Monday afternoon or evening (4.29) with Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig for a quick chat at the Chateau Marmont or wherever they’ll be staying? Obviously they’ll be here the day before the junket. Big supporter of the film since Telluride. It opens on 5.17, or right smack dab in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival.

Frances Ha is “a much faster, sharper and more high-end Girls without the male-hate factor,” I wrote last September. “There’s a difference between a highly sophisticated ‘film’ and a rich, well-written, highly respectable HBO series, and Frances Ha is evidence of that. It has a buoyant Brooklynesque spirit, principally embodied in Greta Gerwig‘s open, vulnerable lead performance. It captures the under-30 thing with exactitude and panache and heart.

“And it’s probably the most beautifully photographed black-and-white film of the 21st Century (cheers to dp Sam Levy). I’m not exaggerating. Frances Ha was captured with a modest digital camera, and it looks an awful lot like Gordon Willis‘s legendary b & w lensing in Manhattan. Really. I honestly found it more transporting than the cinematography in Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon.”

Incidentally: I don’t remember ever thinking that 27 was “old,” but I do remember one time when I was 19 or 20 and meeting a guy at a party who was 31 or 32 and thinking to myself that he was around the bend age-wise and close to being over the hill, certainly as far as hanging out with 20somethings and trying to pick up girls was concerned.