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?
Agnes Varnum has an interesting post at Re:Sources about blogs and bias. There’s this old chestnut about bloggers, that because our voices are distinct and our biases are supposedly transparent, our audiences can trust us more than a mainstream outlet. But Agnes notes that internet outlets are susceptible to some of the same bias issues as corporate media. Specifically, the editorial at larger sites is often beholden to the interests of their advertisers, and the all-attention-is-good-attention competitive business model can lead to a tabloid mindset, wherein “some days, they might have to just bend the truth to make it juicier.”
Implying that the impartiality of the Gawker blogs should be taken as less than a given, Agnes drops a reference to a review of Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs by Emily Gould (who, coincidentally, abruptly announced her resignation from Gawker last Friday).
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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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