Now, I don’t have anything against Coppola and Baumbach: on their respective commentaries and extra materials they both seem like sincere and down-to-earth guys with whom one might have worthy conversations. Indeed, from what little I know about them or Anderson, it seems that the collaborations are born of genuine enjoyment of each others’ company and conversation. Both of them are also probably victims of having set my expectations too high with their studied filmmaking, and they're no doubt talented enough to make better movies. But their respective debut films appear to be knock-offs of Anderson movies that, because they’re genuinely autobiographical, end up being schlocky and self-indulgent, even as they’re technically quite accomplished.

The Squid and the Whale is deeply sad and shockingly painful to watch. Two writers get divorced, make terribly selfish decisions, and screw up their children (one of whom is a version of Baumbach's younger self) by warring over their affection and filling their heads with psycho-babble. The movie takes great pains to recreate 1986 Brooklyn and does so quite convincingly--one can see the consequences of two decades’ worth of confusion and selfishness converge quite vividly. It reminded me of something an acquaintance, who is my age, said at a party recently: “The 80s--that’s when the world went to shit, right?” Baumbach tries to recapture his parents' flaws and his own mistaken attempts to deal with them, I suspect, but the pains he takes to achieve stringent realism don't pay off in his script or characters as they do in his art direction. In reproducing certain people's errors, he makes the movie more about history than drama. The point of the climactic scene, in which the protagonist-self confronts a frightening reality, should have been a premise of the movie, not its conclusion.

CQ is lighter fare, though it tries to have more serious moments. The movie is filled with references and homages to New Wave cinema, and it recreates 1969-70 Paris and Rome when Roman Coppola's more famous father was in Europe learning about film from the New Wave guys. But the main character is really supposed to be the son himself (think of what his sister did in Lost in Translation). That young student lives with his French stewardess girlfriend in Paris, and works on editing a kitchy 60s science-fiction film. He isn't happy with this seemingly cool situation, so he's making a more “honest and uncompromised" black-and-white movie about himself on the side. Essentially, CQ is a first film about the making of two first films, and it suffers from the fear that Coppola puts in the mouth of his protagonist-self's girlfriend: “It’s borr-ing.” But the best parts of the movie--which made it worth watching--are the extras on the DVD, where we see the real Coppola try to make his real movie. Roman, Sofia, and their mother each made a short about the making of CQ, in which the backstage interviews and goofing-off are more interesting than the feature itself for being the more real. There's also another unintentionally hilarious making-of documentary by a bitter young French filmmaker, who tells us that he “was hired” to do another about this American “returning to the old country" in search of he-knows-not-what. The Frenchie's film then lapses into a couple techno music montages that only make CQ seem better by comparison.

The sharpest moment for me came in Roman's mother's short. His cousin and actor Jason Schwartzman says at one point that Roman has dressed himself up as Fellini. (“Next time,” Schwartzman says, “you should do Lucas,” who was F. F. Coppola’s partner in youthful filmmaking.) But this is not the Fellini of 8 ½ or La Dolce Vita, both of which get nods in the movie--if anything it’s more akin to Fellini of Giulietta degli Spiriti, in which the filmmaker makes his real-life wife play herself as a dowdy old woman and tells her to leave his cheating ass. (In the movie she does; in real life she stuck around and died five months after he did in 1993, vindicating her wisdom and showing up his over-indulgence.) But the comparison doesn't go that far: instead of being perhaps too self-examining, as Fellini ended up being, Coppola depends too much on reference and technique to come up with much to say about himself, his father, or filmmaking. The climactic scene ends up being just a tip from an old director/father figure to Coppola's alter-ego about getting one's actors to perform just for the director. Too seduced by all that he knows about technique and history, Coppola forgets to make the story worth much of anything, so his movie ends up being largely pretty pictures taken on old cameras.

These are both movies about fathers, their flaws, and their impact on their children, subjects shared with Anderson’s last three movies. Baumbach’s dad is an emotionally manipulative solipsist, and the movie is about Baumbach’s teenage self coming to realize this fact. Coppola surrounds a version of himself with the sights, locations, and music of his father’s early career, which he’s heard about in stories and observed as a child. But Anderson’s father characters are more worthy of the screen, and his imagined worlds are more real than their pastiches from reality.