Hannah Takes the Back-Handed Praise

By Karina Longworth posted 4 months ago

Hannah Takes the Stairs comes out on DVD today (see bloggy debate over the package’s generic rom-com design at FILMMAKER and Cinematical), which means that my Google Alert for “mumblecore” has been on fire for a number of days. In the grand scheme of things, this is a small release, and most publications reviewing it as a part of a Tuesday new release round-up don’t have much space to give. But IFC’s website (sister to the company that released the film theatrically) gives critic Michael Atkinson 500 words––and though he ultimately gets around to a positive review of this movie, he devotes the first 230 words or so to explaining why mumblecore is shit.

“Is it even a movement?” Atkinson grumbles. “Is anyone outside of the ticket buyers at a handful of smallish American film festivals passionate about these movies, and if not, why are they getting so much press?” Surely, Atkinson knows that the mumble-hate contingent has tread and re-tread this terrirory many times over––after all, Amy Taubin (no fan of Joe Swanberg, but a supporter of other filmmakers who have been lumped into the genre, including Andrew Bujalski and Aaron Katz), declared the “movement” dead a full five months ago.

Why is it still necessary to qualify praise of a specific mumblecore-associated film by defaming the M-word itself, to the point where a critic actually devotes more space of a DVD review to explaining why those other films are bad than he devotes to explaining why this film is good? When will individual films and filmmakers be able to shrug off this baggage––and by writing about it at all, am I part of the problem?

4 Comments

Indies

amy-taubin, greta-gerwig, hannah-takes-the-stairs, joe swanberg, michael atkinson, mumblecore

Add your comments

wells said 4 months ago
Re: that last question — yes. The more meta-commentary about mumblecore that exists, the longer these reductive groupings will continue. Disccusion of ‘mumblecore’ only legitimizes it as a cultural force. This is what I tried to raise in a GreenCine comments months back. Let’s stop talking about the ‘movement’ — and the labeling of the movement — and get back to the films themselves.
wells said 4 months ago
Uh, *discussion.*
Karsten said 4 months ago
Disc-cusion might actually be a great new word. But what does it mean?
Adam said 4 months ago
Disc-cusion is an umbrella term referring to how some film critics hate any cultural artifact stored in disc form (SACD, DVD, Laserdisc, 7″). Disc-recusion is when these critics refuse to watch/listen to something that’s stored on a disc, while disc-accusion refers to a critic’s claim that the disc, as a concept and object, is the nemesis of reasoned thinking and culture.

Disc-accusionists have their genesis in the tenth century BC, when the flat earth / spherical earth debate began. It is claimed that Axos, the spokesman for a spherical earth and the most learned of all philosophers, was beheaded when flat earth spokesman Lepidopterus, in a tantrum, threw a sharpened metal disc through the air.