Welcome to the Butterknife blog! This will be a combination production journal/random thought catcher. We are shooting the second half of the season in December, and I will post plenty of pictures and thoughts from the set of the show, but for now I’m excited to present the trailer, featuring scenes from the episodes we’ve already completed.

Butterknife is my idea of a “genre” project. Obviously we’re doing something really different with our private-eye, but we’re still tapping into some of the conventions and hopefully adding a memorable new character to the long list of great on-screen investigators.

We’re very grateful to spout.com for sponsoring the show and making it available for free to everyone. The first episode will premiere in January, so make sure you sign up for email alerts. You won’t want to miss it.

-Joe Swanberg

There’s a lot to say about Amy Taubin’s takedown of mumblecore, which recently appeared online as a preview to the November/December issue of Film Comment. Unfortunately, I’m traveling this week and don’t have much time to devote to it; fortunately, David Hudson and Matt Dentler (himself the target of some of Taubin’s wrath) have picked up the slack. Go read their posts for a coherent view; then, click through the jump for some thoughts I scrawled late last night at the Denver airport. If this meme has any staying power, I’ll revisit it when I’m back in New York.

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Mumblecore on a hot plate. Karina gets tired of the spitfire debating over Hannah Takes the Stairs and the rest of the mumblecore movies playing at IFC Center this week. Paul and Kevin review LOL (on DVD this week) and Quiet City for all non-new yorkers.

FilmCouch #35

 

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Hannah takes the Stairs, Quiet City, LOL

After I wrote that post last week on the films of Kentucker Audley and Frank V. Ross, I got a nice email from Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, gently reminding me that although I had lumped the female protagonist of the film in with the relatively cosmopolitan characters of some the other mumblecore films, in fact “Jamie as played by Erin Fisher in Quiet City is not an urban dweller, but rather only visiting that world. She is in fact employed at a franchise restaurant (Applebees) in Atlanta.”

Now that I’ve seen Quiet City for a second time, I feel like a total idiot for missing that fact the first time around. It may seem like a minor distinction, but the question of Jamie’s occupation sparks the only moment of negative energy in an otherwise extremely uncynical film, concerned primarily with drawing beauty from the mundane.

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Online Videos by Veoh.com

• Bob at Forward to Yesterday recently braved an evening at an alcohol-free Indian casino in order to try out for the all-movie version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and at my request, he blogged about it. “So, how do I assess my chances? Not great, just based on my numbers, my lousy handwriting/lackluster questionnaire answers and my lack of extreme chipperosity.”
• Scarecrow Video has compiled a gallery of Klaus Kinski paintings from posters and video boxes. Kinski will not be denied: “Stare into Kinski’s eyes. I dare you! You will get lost in his obsession; you will feel how tortured he is. Rational behavior has been replaced by a primal drive.” Via The House Next Door.
• Henry Jenkins, co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, offers up anecdotes from the first week of the semester. “Senior House welcomes new students by dropping thousands of bouncy balls from the roof of our building while “Go Ask Alice” blares from the sound system and strobe lights flash in their faces. It can be a vaguely out of body experience but it captures the unexpected quality of life in this dorm.”
• Tom Hall has an excellent analysis of Anthony Kaufman’s Village Voice piece on the impact of day-and-date releasing amongst New York’s small handful of art theaters, through which he steals my boyfriend’s (admittedly private) fantasy of building an Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. “[T]alk about under-screened and a license to print money; If someone partnered with The Brooklyn Brewery and built an Alamo-style art-house in Williamsburg (go ahead, do a search for 11211 on your favorite on-line ticketing website) and Park Slope, they’d be putting screens where the audience for these films now reside.”
• I’m on this week’s episode of ReelerTV, talking about Frank V. Ross and Kentucker Audley. It’s embedded above.

Stephen Holden’s New York Times review of Quiet City is extremely favorable towards the film, and extremely skeptical of what he calls “the movie genre labeled mumblecore … a filmmaking sensibility, filtered through Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes and distantly related to punk, with the spirit of defiance replaced by resignation to the art of diminished expectations.”

This would seem to stand in sharp contrast to Matt Zoller Seitz’ Hannah Takes the Stairs review of a week ago, which was lukewarm on the film itself (”snappy but unadventurous,” he called it), but generally enthusiastic about its place within an exciting wave of American independent film. Still, both critics say the party’s over. Seitz blames Hollywood for luring these artists away:

Hannah plays like an incidental swan song, a signpost marking the point when mumblecore became a nostalgic label rather than a present-tense cultural force, and its most acclaimed practitioners moved on to bigger things. Mr. Swanberg’s third movie is a graduation photo in motion: D.I.Y., class of ’07.

Holden, apparently less invested than part-time filmmaker Seitz in championing grassroots filmmaking on principle, blames the movies:

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Years from now, when the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans (Leonardo DiCaprio warned us, and still we didn’t listen!), and when alien anthropologists come to sift through the ruins of Earth to learn about late-homo sapien culture, I can only hope they come across a pristine copy of Benten Films‘ LOL DVD and have the aptitude to understand what they’re looking at.

Of all of the movies lumped into the Mumblecore bucket, LOL comes the closest to making an accurate diagnosis of a certain contemporary real-life character type (the literal gadget fetishist?) that, if seen elsewhere in culture, has nowhere else been properly condemned. The aliens may not understand why these young humanoid males spend so much time at their circa-2006 wired workstations, but if they can find an English-to-Alien translator, David Hudson’s liner-notes essay should put it all into context.

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Aaron Katz is the director of Dance Party USA and Quiet City, both of which are screening as part of The New Talkies festival at the IFC Center. The former plays Tuesday and Wednesday; Quiet City opens on Wednesday for a week-long run. Both films will be released by Benten Films as a two-disc DVD set in January 2008. I love the intersection of high and low in this interview: Aaron talks about Antonioni in the same breath as Can’t Hardly Wait, and puts Ornette Colman on the same list as Mario Kart. He also discusses the pros and cons of the Mumblecore label, and offers up some intriguing details about his next project. All that, and much more, is waiting for you on the other side of the jump.

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Surveying the Mumblecore-manic media coverage of the last week or so, three features are in danger of slipping through the cracks. Totally coincidentally, these are the three films of the fest that I’m currently most interested in. At the risk of sounding like a Swanbergian heroine, my crushes on individual films and filmmakers come and go in manic waves, and right now, I’m crushing heavily on Team Picture (directed by Kentucker Audley, who appears to be the same person as the film’s star, Andrew Nehringer), and Frank V. Ross’ Hohokam and Quietly on By. These are the least-known films on the schedule for sure, although all three have made appearances at Harvard Film Archive’s Independents Week. Seen as a unit, the three films point in an exciting new direction: towards the suburbs.

As has been widely noted, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs, Quiet City and Mutual Appreciation are, unabashedly, about white, largely post-collegiate urban youth. In LOL, Kissing on the Mouth and Quiet City, no one seems to really have to work; elsewhere occupations are ancillary to relationships and artistic pursuits. In Hannah Takes the Stairs, Hannah is an intern and her roommate, Rocco, is unemployed. They can’t afford air conditioning, but someone (Daddy?) is paying for the city apartment and the beer. Class is a deliberate non-issue in a lot of these films, for the same reason that it’s deliberately not mentioned in most of Woody Allen’s movies that aren’t murder mysteries: when your characters don’t have to struggle to satisfy basic needs, they have a lot of time leftover to screw and be screwed.

And most of that screwing takes place in cities. Hannah and her first boyfriend recline on a beach under towering Chicago skyscrapers; Hannah and her third boyfriend discuss their “chronic dissatisfaction” to the sounds of buses and sirens and neighbors outside the window. Bujalski’s films take place in hipster villages reminiscent of Slacker Austin; the Brooklyn Alan wanders in Mutual Appreciation is virtually the same territory traversed on the G train in Quiet City. Both Brooklyns are occupied by artists, musicians, and the carefully-coiffed knockouts who love them.

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More news from the front lines of The New Talkies coming soon, but here’s a tidbit for the capitalists: Chris Wells, who starred in and co-wrote LOL and who now works at the IFC Center, told me before the 6:05 PM screening of Hannah Takes the Stairs that in the film’s first three shows, it had already made enough money to cover the budget of Joe Swanberg’s first film, Kissing on the Mouth. I caught up with Chris again later in the evening, at which point he told me that not only had the 8:00 PM Hannah show sold out, but Swanberg’s third film had, in its first day of release, grossed more the budgets of his first two features combined. If you know anything about Joe, you know that we’re not talking about millions of dollars here, but I still think it’s impressive evidence that the DIY model doesn’t have to be an economic disaster.

More mumblemania to come…

The New Talkies festival is barely underway (as I type this, the first screening of Hannah Takes the Stairs is scheduled to begin in about 2 minutes), and already forces more powerful than you or I are contemplating a mumblecore backlash. I’m still trying to actually write about the movies before heading out to IFC’s Hannah premiere party (which, if Twitter is to be believed, is shaping up to be the event of the season for people like me who rarely leave the house), but while I’m busy with that, here’s a round up of the circulating wariness. I’m sure I’ll have more concrete thoughts on the health of the meme over the course of the next week.

• Stu has a long makings-of-the-movement piece over at The Reeler, including the now-obligatory “don’t call it a movement” quote from Andrew Bujalski. “I feel like the things that these films all have in common are the least interesting things about them. It’s the differences that make them interesting. You read the synopses — ‘These are films made cheaply about young white people talking to each other.’ And of course it sounds excruciating. And there are plenty of films that fit that description that are excruciating. The things that make the films good are not that.” Also: Joe Swanberg worries about a post-Pulp Fiction-esque wave of imitators.
• Anthony Kaufman says we’re killing Mumblecore by talking about it. “If these films are hyped, they may be doomed. One of the joys of stumbling upon a charming or sophisticated or funny low-budget ‘mumblecore’ film is just that, stumbling upon it, whether given to you on DVD by a friend or the filmmaker himself or walking into one of them unknowingly at a film festival.” Still, he has his own entry into the hype ring: a Mumblecore video primer.
• In a semi-positive review of Hannah in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz says we’ve already killed Mumblecore by hyping the filmmakers to the point where they’re now able to get real jobs. “Hannah plays like an incidental swan song, a signpost marking the point when mumblecore became a nostalgic label rather than a present-tense cultural force, and its most acclaimed practitioners moved on to bigger things.” The implication is that, right at the breakthrough moment, right when the masses are maybe starting to care, the filmmakers are moving on to studio work and leaving their audience behind. But Kaufman says Seitz is just thinking of himself: “If Seitz is right, and Hannah already marks the movement’s premature passing into obsolescence, it may only be because he wants it to stay something that he caught at a film festival and is not reviewing for The New York Times.”

Welcome to MumbleWeek!

Did you know that a profile of Andrew Bujalski appeared in ESQUIRE a couple of months ago? And did you know that that profile was written by Chuck Klosterman? I certainly didn’t, not until I saw this link at Fimoculous today, with a dig at the NY Times for being late to the party (if they’re late to the very concept of Mumblecore, then I should get extra super double credit for being early … right?) Anyway, the article came out while I was still locked in the dark embrace of corporate America, so I’m giving myself a pass.

What’s most interesting to me is how much has changed since this story appeared in May (or, actually, since Klosterman wrote it, which was probably in April, as Bujalski apparently leaves their meeting to go file his taxes). For one thing, in a footnote (!), Klosterman tells us that Bujalski is considering shooting his third film over the summer in either Austin or Boston. Boston, it would seem, at that point had the upper hand, as Klosterman writes: “One of the complications with shooting in Austin is the heat: During filming, all air conditioners need to be turned off, lest they interfere with the audio. This is a problem I had never even considered.” That film wrapped two weeks ago. In Austin.

And then there’s this semantic debate waiting to happen: “For a time, Bujalski sardonically embraced the term ‘mumblecore’ to describe his filmmaking style, but it did not catch on.” Oh, to relive those innocent days of May 2007, before ‘mumblecore‘ caught on!

I’m just being catty now, aren’t I? Okay, I’ll stop.

This week on The Media Diet, we check in with Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis. Grant is the brain behind Filmbrain; Hillis is a freelance critic and reporter whose work can be found at Premiere, The Village Voice and his personal blog, Cinephiliac. Together, they’ve just launched Benten Films, a boutique DVD distribution company aimed at drawing attention to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.” Benten’s first release, Joe Swanberg’s LOL, will hit stores on August 28 (more on that closer to the date). They’re also planning to release two films by Aaron Katz, Dance Party USA and Quiet City, sometime after both screen at The New Talkies festival in New York, which begins next week.

SPOUT: We start each installment of The Media Diet with the old desert island question: you’re packing your suitcase for life-long seclusion on a tropical island that happens to have a full entertainment system. What records, books, movies, video games, websites, etc do you bring with?
AARON: I’m a media whore, so this stream of consciousness might change in an hour: I’m watching Playtime, Once Upon a Time in the West, 2001, Wings of Desire, Suspiria, Penn & Teller Get Killed, and the collected works of Herzog, Buñuel, Altman, Godard, and the Marx Brothers. I’m listening to Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Zappa, James Kochalka Superstar, and the four actresses covering Blue Hearts songs in Linda Linda Linda. Also, if my island has internet and video games, who needs books? (Kidding!)
ANDREW: I’ll try to keep this sensible, i.e., what I could reasonably carry in my backpack. The only book I’d need (the only book anybody needs for that matter) is William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, for it says everything there is to say about the human condition. I’d like to have every note recorded by John Coltrane, some Nick Drake, Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, and that Scarlett Johansson album of Tom Waits covers. (No, I haven’t heard it, but, come on…) Films, of course, are tough—give me complete box sets of Godard, Allen, Cassavetes and Imamura. Throw in The Big Lebowski, Lawrence of Arabia, and Xanadu and I’m set.

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