Does The Squid and the Whale reveal the pretentiousness of Park Slope? Writer Jake Moody in his piece A Movie, A Mirror, in Sunday’s City Section thinks so.

EARLY in "The Squid and the Whale," Noah Baumbach’s semiautobiographical film about divorce among the literati, the teenage Walt Berkman is seen sitting alone in a high-school classroom when a potential girlfriend strikes up a conversation: "You live in Park Slope, right?" The answer is complicated – his parents live apart and have joint custody – and anyway, the exchange is over just seconds later, grinding to a halt when Walt dismisses the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel "This Side of Paradise," which he has not read, as "a minor work." Audiences laughed at Walt for, among other things, his pretentiousness and his quickness to echo the pretentiousness of his father, Bernard, a pompous writer and professor who passes similar judgment on Dickens’s "Tale of Two Cities." Chase Madar, a 34-year-old lawyer, translator and critic who has lived in Park Slope for three years and is one of the film’s many fans, laughed along with them. But he also cringed, if only a little. Along with the laughter, he confessed, "I felt totally incriminated." READ MORE IN THE NY TIMES.