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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If you read a lot of film blogs, you might have noticed a virus going around called Dentler Takes the Stairs. It’s all the brainchild of Matt Dentler, who is like the P.T. Barnum of the SXSW Film Festival, and who, by being the first person to program movies like Kissing on the Mouth and Dance Party, USA, has played a huge role in legitimizing this wave of no-budget American indie filmmaking over the past few years. Dentler conducted interviews with the major players in Hannah Takes the Stairs (the Joe Swanberg drama starring Greta Gerwig and filmmakers Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski, Kent Osbourne, Ry Russo-Young and Todd Rohal), and asked a number of us film bloggers to each broadcast one of these interviews on our blogs.

Matt asked me to carry the interview with Mark Duplass, and of course, I complied. I reviewed The Duplass Brothers’ The Puffy Chair, which Mark starred in and co-wrote, in 2005 after seeing the film both at SXSW and the Chicago International Film Festival. At the time I said this:

It’s amazing how [The Puffy Chair] nails the mealy-mouthed way people my age have of saying what we mean by dressing the same words, over and over again, in different kinds of inflection. Between Rhett and Josh, the word “dude” has a thousand meanings; Emily isn’t satisfied being referred to by any of them. Fleshing out that tension, between what is being said and what it obviously means, is where The Puffy Chair really succeeds.

After the jump, I turn it over to Matt and Mark, who talk about Hannah’s Atari-fueled set, Andrew Bujalski’s boxers, and what Duplass did to get the film’s mythic stairs cut out of the picture.
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Last night, I was reading a story on Twitch, and I noticed a banner ad trumpeting the DVD release of something called Valerie On the Stairs. My instant reaction was, “Uh-oh. That’s going to be really confusing, what with Hannah Takes The Stairs opening next week.” Upon further research, I discovered that Valerie was directed by Mick Garris, for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. In the interest of obliterating any further confusion, I made the following side-by-side comparison of the two films:

Valerie: About spooky goings-on at “a large apartment filled with unsuccessful writers where they can live rent-free until they make their first publication.”
Hannah: Director Joe Swanberg and his actors/co-writers shared an apartment for a month in Chicago while filming.

Hannah: “A sexy slacker tale.” — Gerald Peary
Valerie: “A sexually-charged tale of terror.” — Some guy on Wikipedia

Hannah: Not literally about stairs.
Valerie: Literally about stairs. Ghost stairs.

I assume you’ve figured out by now that this post is just another excuse to plug the upcoming New Talkies festival, which begins a week from tomorrow with the premiere of Hannah, and continues at the IFC Center through Labor Day weekend. My associated coverage will begin on SpoutBlog later this week. In the meantime, if you’re going to be in New York during the festival, you can and should buy tickets now via IFC’s website.

IFCFirstTake has posted the new, theatrical trailer for Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs on YouTube, and for your viewing pleasure, I’ve embedded it above. I think it does a bang-up job of sculpting Hannah’s rangy charms into something perfectly palatable for mass consumption.

If you’ve been living under a rock (and/or haven’t read this, this, this or this, or watched this or listened to this), Hannah (and Swanberg, and his crew of fabulously young, talented, beautiful collaborators) were the toast of SXSW 2007. The movie’s theatrical debut on August 22 will kick off the The New Talkies: Generation DIY, the two-week festival of new American indies at the IFC Center here in New York. After playing at IFC for a week, Hannah will be available on video-on-demand via IFC’s InTheaters program, and on August 28, Swanberg’s second film, LOL, will be released on DVD by Benten Films.

This whole chain of events is incredible exciting to those of us who have been watching people like Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski and Aaron Katz carve out their own niche over the past few years. I’m only going to be in town for the first week of The New Talkies (Telluride beckons), but mark your calendars, because I’m nevertheless planning heaps of coverage.

Via Eugene at indieWIRE comes this trailer for The New Talkies — ie: the “mumblecore” film festival set to take place later this month at the IFC Center here in NYC. I don’t know about you, but I definitely have my calendar blocked out to spend the better part of the week before Telluride at the series. I’ve seen all of the movies on the schedule with the exception of two (Frank Ross’ Hohokam and Kentucker Audley’s Team Picture), but I’m super-excited to revisit the films that I haven’t seen in a while in one long burst–it’s almost like a retrospective of the past three years of my festival-going life.Still, I wonder if this trailer doesn’t give the wrong impression. It’s definitely not going to be two-weeks worth of summer fun, all beautiful girls with rainbow slinkies and goofy boys with hand-held sparklers meeting under magic hour sky-scapes. There will be some of that, but all the beautiful people will be painfully inarticulate, their relationships will vacillate between tentative and tortured, and instead of happy endings, they’ll find bittersweet semi-resolutions. If this sounds more your speed anyway, you can find the full series schedule here, and if you can’t attend, keep your eye on SpoutBlog for my piles of coverage.

Please join me in thanking SXSW’s Matt Dentler for the above. Earlier today, Matt posted a video on his blog titled “How Mumblecore Saved My Life.” In it, a young, female filmmaker named Erin (peruse her full YouTube oeuvre here) explains at some length how films like Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation have restored her faith in independent cinema. If you’ve got seven minutes to kill, it’s great, but oh–there’s so much more.

Matt pinged me this afternoon to draw my attention to another of Erin’s videos, and this one shot to the top of my list of potential Clips of the Day. It’s Erin’s version of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl … rewritten as a tribute to one Lindsay Lohan. As you’re surely aware by now, Ms. Lohan was busted yet again this morning for driving with alcohol in her bloodstream and coke in her pants (for more details, go to TMZ and read their 60 or 70 updates from the bottom of the page to the top).

Allen Ginsberg is okay, but Erin’s poem is really, really genius. It begins: “I have seen the best actresses of my generation destroyed by madness–starving, hysterical, drunk, driving through Beverly Hills at dawn looking for a place to crash.” My favorite is verse is probably, “Who got busted in their thong from a night of parting with a belt of cocaine, headed to the Coffee Bean.” Either that, or “I am with you at Promises, where your condition has become serious and is reported on the internet!”

This clip was posted on on YouTube on June 7 and as of this writing has only been watched about 150 times. Won’t you join me in making Howl (For Lindsay Lohan) the internet phenomenon it deserves to be?