Three videos of note on the Facebook page (you may have to sign in and become a fan to see it) for Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax: two intros for Bujalski’s work made for Canadian TV, one starring Shawn Sides as Elvira and the other featuring Alex Karpovsky as Dracula. In both, bats flutter by on strings, as Bujalski himself looks on, silent but bemused. “Tonight I have a thirst,” Elvira drawls. “A thirst for a spine-tinglingly cold taste of American independent cinema!”

This is doing it right.

And then there’s this, also embedded above. I saw this on YouTube and thought it was a joke, like that thing with Kent Osborne in the garage, but apparently it’s an actual ad for a film series on Channel 4 in the UK. The ad features young attractive people standing in front of graffitied walls (very first season Real World), earnestly informing us that there’s a type of movie in which “there are no buldings blown to hell in slow motion, and you know what? That’s okay, because these films are about people!” The kicker: “There’s something going on here.” Cut to slow-talking redhead girl: “And that something, is a little something called mumblecore.” She then looks at the camera with one of those “this is just between you and me” smiles that are most often seen on television in the promotion of feminine hygeine products.

This is doing it wrong.

Beeswax opens at Film Forum on August 7 and expands to several other cities shortly after that. I like it.

indieWIRE reports that Cinema Guild will distribute Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax. The film, which I reviewed at SXSW, is Bulajski’s third feature; its predecesors, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation, were self-released after the former won an Independent Spirit Award and the later completed a successful festival run. Word on the street is that the new film will open in New York later this summer, after its run at BAMcinemaFEST.

Cinema Guild has been quite busy of late, actvely acquiring old fashioned art films in danger of falling through the ever-widening gap between festival acclaim and traditional theatrical release. A couple of weeks ago, they announced a deal on Clair Denis‘ 35 Shots of Rhum; a few weeks before that, they launched a home video label through which they plan to release a number of titles formerly owned by the shuttered New Yorker Films.

In the corner by the entrance of the Film/Interactive Conference show floor at SXSW, there’s a glass cube containing a Charlie Rose-esque set (big, round table, black backdrop) and two TV cameras. Here, journalist/blogger/hack-type guests of the festival are invited to interview filmmaker/artist/talent-type guests of the festival, live to tape for later dissemination on the web. This is called StudioSX.

This year at SXSW, I went to see Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax at the Paramount, and ran out of the theater just as the Q & A was starting because I had been scheduled to conduct a StudioSX interview with a filmmaker less than an hour later. But then I got a call from a StudioSX producer, saying the filmmaker I had been scheduled to speak to had missed his flight to Austin and wasn’t going to be able to make it. What films had I seen? he asked. Who would I like to interview instead. I immediately blurted out, “Beeswax! Andrew Bujalski!” — not just because the film was fresh in my head, but also because it was the rare movie that left me with actual questions, that defied my smug, know-it-all tendency to have its mysteries completely worked out by the line I had to lineup for the next screening.

Long story … uh .. still probably longer than it needs to be, the StudioSX people called Bujalski’s people, and within an hour he was rushed off stage at the Paramount and was sitting across from me in Charlie Rose Bizarroworld. We talked for 10 minutes, about scripting for an unscripted feel, about why a film called Beeswax has nothing literally to do with bees, and about his slowly evolving relationship to celluloid. It was taped, and you can now watch it here.

Kevin Lee’s vigorous defense of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax — surprisingly divisive when it premiered at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival –– included a thematic interpretation of the film’s title. He wrote that Beeswax, a picture which has nothing directly to do with either bees or wax, was titled as such as “a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.” It’s right to shine a light on Beeswax as a film about a community’s interconnectedness — and probable that the nuances of that specific community, Austin, might feel like flat, mundane Americana to an eye hoping for a retread of the classically cool “disaffected rocker in black and white” vibe of Mutual Appreciation. But the title also seems like something of a multi-layered reference to the film’s ambitious leap ahead of Bujalski’s previous filmography. Having built a following based on two finely calibrated odes to linguistic imprecision, Bujalski’s third film moves away from messy, non-committal “mumbling”, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation uninterrogated. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot) comedy steeped in colloquial American English, the title Beeswax feels less like a metaphor for anything bees do in public, than a veiled reference to private lives - as in, “mind your own beeswax.”

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Sorry, Thanks is the directorial debut of Dia Sokol, the producer of films by Andrew Bujalski, Alex Karpovsky and Joe Swanberg; it stars Bujalski and a cast of largely non-actors; it was shot by Matthias Grunsky, the cinematographer of both Mutual Appreciation and Nights and Weekends. The sum total of these names and titles point in a certain trajectory of recent American film, one which need not be named by name to anyone who recognizes these references.

But Sorry, Thanks equally reminds of the indie films of the 90s, the kind of low budget but fully realized ensemble films that, if you didn’t see at Sundance, you’ve seen hundreds of times on the Sundance channel, the kind that slowly and cumulatively but surely turned character actors like Sam Rockwell and Catherine Keener into something like stars. Sorry, Thanks, a uniquely moral film but also a very funny one, offers the same kind of platform for the talents of Bujalski (here playing a real character, one even further afield from the on-screen persona developed across his own first two features than the dickish office manager in last year’s Goliath), and, even more so, Wiley Wiggins. Wiggins, in his first leading role in eight years, gives a minor miracle of a comic performance as Max, a 30-ish fuck-up who’s so deep within his own dysfunction that he can hardly see it.

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On the other end of the phone line, first time feature director though veteran film and television producer Dia Sokol admits that she’s more than a bit nervous for this interview about her naturalistic “anti-chemistry, unromantic comedy” debut Sorry, Thanks. “This never used to happen to me. As a producer, I’d listen to directors fumble their way through describing their films, and I’ve always jumped in and been the person to sell it, to be articulate about it, and now I totally get it,” she says. “When it’s your film, you’re totally inarticulate about it; it comes from inside of you, so you have no perspective.”

Starring a mixed cast of professional and non-professional actors and shot by a skeleton crew in San Francisco’s endearingly eccentric Mission District, Sorry, Thanks follows two adrift lonesomes Max (Wiley Wiggins) and Kira (Kenya Miles), neither of whom, even after a shared one-night stand, can begin to reconcile their thoughts on romantic relationships. As Max chases Kira, detaching himself along the way from longtime girlfriend Sara (Ia Hernandez), and attempts to immune himself to the criticism of his best bud Mason (Andrew Bujalski), Kira explores an uninspiring dating scene that only very quietly pinpoints the sadness of her recent break-up.

Despite its bittersweet, introspection-inducing lining, Sorry, Thanks is at its core incredibly funny, even at times painfully funny. Foibles are so at the surface, sarcasm so easily blended with childlike wonder that it’s simple to just enjoy the film without questioning every character intention and situation repercussion. It’s easy, namely, to root for Max and Kira even as they stumble into moral quagmires, and that’s where Sokol, in only the most articulate of manners, begins discussing her work.

[In the film’s production notes] you pose the question, “Can we still love these characters even when they are doing things wrong?” For me that answer with this film was, “Yes.” Yet I don’t fully know why it is that I still have that faith even as I watch these characters fall into situations that are morally gray. So, this idea of the moral quandary, I was hoping that we could start our talk there.

I started my career working for Errol Morris, and that informed a lot of my skepticism about the idea of redemption. So, when I talked to [co-writer and producer Lauren Veloski] about starting to write this, I said, “I really want to make a film that’s about redemption.” (laughs) When I look at this film now and think about that, to me it’s a reminder, “Oh yeah, and I don’t believe in redemption.” I believe in it as a concept, but I don’t know that I believe in it as an actuality. I don’t think the world works that way, and I’m incredibly ambivalent about films that act like you can make up for your bad actions. So, in some ways, I wanted the film to be about, “When you break something, is it really broken?”

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It sounds like the setup to a tasteless joke: a Peruvian woman keeps a potato in her vagina to guard her chastity. It’s the premise to the Golden Bear Best Picture winner at this year’s Berlinale, Claudia Llosa’s La Teta Asustada aka The Milk of Sorrow. The biggest joke of all may be that this strange, vivid portrait of a village girl’s induction into the mysteries of adulthood has more poetic moments to match its audacious ideas than just about any of its competition.

This year’s Competition field was cluttered with global issues movies whose collective overreaching far exceeded their grasp. The worst culprit was Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams as a comfortably numb Manhattan yuppie couple with the world’s most symbolic refrigerator, packed as it is with provisions neglected in favor of home-delivered organic pizza. Bernal, on a biz trip to Thailand, tries to save a prostitute from her plight, while Williams stews at home as their daughter spurns her for their soulful Filipino nanny (trend takers note: Pinoy is the new Black). The two threads are eventually connected by one of the most insulting plot twists conceivable, one which left the press screening bathing with boos. Cheers greeted another shallow take on saving third-world hookers, Annette K. Olsen’s Little Soldier, possibly because it had a more ironic take on the subject (the hooker-saver this time being an Iraq War Veteran, not so subtly symbolizing first-world sanctimony). Of the many Competition takes on global ills, the most interesting one was also the most commercial: Tom Tykwer’s The International, whose failings as an action crowd-pleaser (ineffectual protagonists and complicated plot twists) are also what make it an honest though deadly cynical take on the elusive tyranny of international banking.

Among this company, The Milk of Sorrow deserves its prize, because its ideas are not an end in themselves, but a starting point for a lucid image stream full of both the grit of poverty and the poetry of personal perception. Think Carlos Reygadas with more historical grounding and a distinctly feminine subjectivity (the title references the psychological effects of war crimes inflicted on Peruvian women during the Shining Path campaigns). Even better, and possibly the best film I saw at the festival, was, like Llosa’s, a female director’s second feature: Maren Ade’s Everyone Else.  Sort of a contemporary hipster update to Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, it follows the disintegration of a couple’s relationship during an idyllic excursion to the Italian countryside. The film captures the strange, joyful moments that can only be shared between lovers, then chronicles a series of pin-sized but painful betrayals that inflict near-fatal damage to that fragile intimacy. Fortunately, the film’s numerous jewels of observation contained in small scenes weren’t lost on the Jury, which bestowed the Best Actress Golden Bear to Birgit Minichmayr, Germany’s free-spirited answer to Renee Zellweger. The film’s success marks another victory for the New Berlin School, a label that’s been attached to low-budget indie filmmakers like Ade and their modest but precisely executed examinations of contemporary German life.

The American indie scene was represented in Competition by the likes of Owen Moverman’s The Messenger (which nabbed the Best Screenplay Golden Bear) and Mitchell Lichtenstein’s quizzical Happy Tears; elsewhere, the festival’s more adventurous Forum section yielded a couple of standouts. Some of the most remarkable camerawork of the festival was found in The Exploding Girl by Bradley Rust Grey (married to So Yong Kim, whose Treeless Mountain premiered last year in Toronto but was another Forum highlight). Inspired by Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumiere, Grey uses telephoto long takes to achieve an incredible sense of private experience between his young, emotionally unsettled protagonists, even in the midst of noisy Manhattan street scenes. Then there’s Andrew Bujalski’s third feature, Beeswax, which somehow inspired no small measure of ire, matched with equal degrees of admiration. Shane Danielsen at indieWIRE walked out of the film after less than an hour, yet somehow generated four paragraphs detailing how Bujalski “says nothing of even the slightest interest, displays no care or forethought in its conception, and positively revels in its slipshod amateurishness.” Others have invoked the standard comparisons to Rohmer, Cassavetes, etc. in Bujalski’s defense.

One thing that’s apparent with Beeswax is that Bujalski has graduated from the phase of requiring comparison to established auteurs. By now he has established his own distinctive sensibility, where stumblingly funny conversations amidst the bric-a-brac interiors of people’s homes barely conceal a fundamental sense of fear. This fear is embodied in wheelchair-bound Tilly Hatcher (one of the most authentic and multi-dimensional portrayals of disability in cinema history) as she struggles to run her thrift store with help from her flaky twin sister and pseudo-boyfriend.  Like everything else presented in the film, Bujalski doesn’t dwell on the fact of Hatcher’s disability but lets it inform the theme of interdependency that’s at the heart of this comic drama. The film’s quirky title is a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.  While this year’s Berlinale was overloaded with breast-beating efforts to show the interconnectedness of the world population, this film truly delivered on that promise.

The festival may have yielded a bumper crop of disappointments (Sally Potter’s Rage and Rebecca Miller’s Private Lives of Pippa Lee were two other films that received no small degree of spite), but the embarrassing number of journalists that have written the festival off as a disaster betray their own profession. There were plenty of films scattered between the different sections and sidebars to make for a worthwhile experience, which is the job of the film writer to discover and share. Here are several more films worth keeping an eye out for should they come your way:

By Comparison - Harun Farocki’s hour-long, nearly wordless study of how bricks are made around the world has more tactile cinematic artistry and insight into globalization than the entire competition lineup.

About Elly (dir. Asghar Farhadi)

The Fish Child (dir. Lucia Puenzo)

Deep in the Valley (dir. Atsushi Funahashi)

Mental (dir. Kazuhiro Soda) – playing Feb. 22 at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight.

Bluebeard (dir. Catherine Breillat)

Yang Yang (dir. Cheng Yu-Cheh)

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (dir. Manoel de Oliveira)

Land of Scarecrows (dir. Roh Gyong-tae)

Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film (dir. Oksana Bulgakowa)

6. I predict the death of mumblecore movies by 2011. Independent films will once again boast strong scripts and, as such, will reach a broader audience. This is probably as good a time as any to reiterate to critics who invoke the name of John Cassavetes in their reviews of so-called mumblecore fare: John’s only improvised film was Shadows. Suck it.

Indie film distribution stalwart-turned-director Jeff Lipsky has written a two-part, ten item list of reasons he’s “bullish on the state of indie” film for Ted Hope’s blog Truly Free Film. There’s no denying that Lipsky has seniority in this realm, even if the introduction to the piece, presumably written by Hope, strains credibility by refering toLipsky’s recent Sundance premiere Once More With Feeling as a “hit” (John Anderson’s declaration that the film “would be a natural for cable, if the execution weren’t so distractingly strange” was one of the kinder notices). But much of Lipsky’s numbered so-called optimism comes off as cranky old man-ism.

Whether he’s celebrating setbacks in digital projection via questionable cause-and-effect logic (”Fewer digital screens…will mean fewer bad digital movies”), dismissing “download, PPV, and VOD numbers” as “paltry” without offering examples or comparisons, or making broad generalizations about the production methods of emerging filmmakers, as in the quote above (we’ll presume critics of Andrew Bujalski, Barry Jenkins, and any other “mumblecore”-associated writer/director who works off a screenplay are excused from “sucking it”), the whole post is anti new-technology, anti-experimentation, pro-traditionalism. It’s as if Lipsky’s ultimate reason to be bullish is something along the lines of, “all this shit you crazy kids keep throwing at the wall ain’t sticking, and that makes me feel good personally.”

The lineup for the 2009 SXSW Film Festival is now out, and pasted in full after the jump. First skim highlights:

• Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax, which will world premiere in a matter of days in Berlin.
• Sorry, Thanks, directed by Dia Sokol (producer of Mutual Appreciation and Nights and Weekends), and starring Wiley Wiggins and Bujalski.
• New features by both Joe Swanberg (Alexander the Last, starring Jess Weixler, Justin Rice and Barlow Jacobs) and Kris Swanberg (It Was Great, But I Was Ready To Come Home, screening in Narrative Competition).
• Objectified, a new documentary by Helvetica director Gary Hustwit.
• True Adolescents, about an “Aging indie rocker” who “takes two teen boys on an ill-fated hiking trip.” Starring Mark Duplass and Melissa Leo.
• Creative Nonfiction, a narrative feature by Lena Dunham starring Eleonore Hendricks (The Pleasure of Being Robbed).
• St. Nick, directed by David Lowery, who reviewed Robbed for us at SXSW last year.
• Some of our favorite films from Sundance 2009, including Moon, Humpday, and You Won’t Miss Me.
• Toronto favorites Goodbye Solo, The Hurt Locker and Three Blind Mice.
• Early contender for Best Title & Synopsis, Sight Unseen: Make Out With Violence, described as “A rock musical wherein the living love the dead and break into silence instead of song.”

I’ll be at SXSW once again this year, so if there’s anything on the lineup you’re particularly looking forward to that you’d like to see coverage of, let me know if the comments.

We’ll also be doing pre-SXSW coverage again this year, so if you’re a filmmaker showing work at SXSW this year, and you’d be interested in being featured in one of our SXSW previews and/or can send us a screener, do get in touch by sending an email to karina AT spout DOT com. If you can send us a screener before the festival, you definitely improve your chance of getting covered.  If you do send a screener and we don’t like the movie, we won’t write about it at all until after the premiere (and unless it’s problematic to the point where we think a negative review would spark an interesting discussion, chances are we probably won’t write about it at all). But, like some films we screened before the festival last year (see Medicine For Melancholy, My Effortless Brillance and Yeast), if we fall in love with your movie, chances are we will never shut up about it.

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• Are you ready for Children of Men: The TV Series? John Brownlee isn’t! Alfonso Cuaron’s film is “genre-defying masterpiece, exactly as long as it needs to be, every shot and line perfect,” he writes at Sci-Fi Scanner. “So obviously it requires weekly extrapolation to dilute the effect.”
• “It dawned on me as I was getting started that there is an important piece of information that many of you younger Pajibans may not be aware of. It saddens me to think this might be the case, and thus this review is given another purpose: to perhaps educate y’all. Because you see, here’s the thing: Eddie Murphy used to be funny.” Dustin Rowles watches 48 Hours with a hangover.
• Tee hee. Critic of Creationism/science blogger PZ Myers was banned from a screening of Ben Stein’s anti-Darwin propaganda film Expelled, but was told his guests could attend. One of Myers’ guests? Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, whose arguments the film basically exists to refute. Via Boing Boing.
• Andrew Bujalski has moved to Austin. He doesn’t know when his next movie will be finished.

Here’s an excerpt from a comment by Variety writer Peter Debruge, left on a SXSW dispatch by Aaron Hillis on Glenn Kenny’s blog:

Pretty soon, it all reduces to semantics, but the label benefits those it describes in that it connects films that, on an individual basis, would be too small to register on most people’s radar. Would Hannah Takes the Stairs or Quiet City or Mutual Appreciation have warranted a NY Times piece on their own? (Then again, is the NYT even the right forum to discuss such films, which seem to do just fine with the more selective audience of the blogosphere?)

Debruge is here giving us an object lesson in why most applications of The M Word are really, really frustrating: the genre label becomes a polite form of thinly masking the condescending assumption that none of these films can stand on their own without it. Mutual Appreciation is not a film that needs a movement as a prerequisite, especially one which mostly coalesced after its premiere. As resolutely analog as it is, it also hardly fits in with Debruge’s wider argument that “important thing is that digital cameras, home editing software and the internet have enabled a new wave of filmmakers, many of whom have become very close friends, sharing equipment, ideas, cast and crew.”

This statement is not totally false, but at the risk of sounding like a cranky Marxist, it seems like he’s really talking about the means/tools of production. Goliath and Hannah Takes The Stairs might share an actor and certain technical commonalities, but I can’t imagine two films being more different in their sensibilities. By Debruge’s rationale, The Ten Commandments and The Tingler were part of the same “movement,” because both were shot on film cameras, both were released in movie theaters, both were produced by gimmicky showmen, and both productions employed Vincent Price.

Actually, now that I think about it, The Ten Commandments and The Tingler are basically the same movie. Never mind!

From what I hear, everyone is talking about Goliath, a film by the Zellner Brothers that premieres at Sundance this evening. But after watching the trailer, I have to wonder what has people so excited. Sure, I think it looks cheap and funny in a Me and You and Everyone We Know sort of way — which isn’t a gripe, as Miranda July’s film was my favorite at the festival back in 2005 — but it also looks like something homemade and bound for YouTube, and I’m not the only person on the internet to say so. Fortunately, the film has support from the right people. On the Goliath Facebook page, SXSW producer Matt Dentler commented that it’s “an awesome, awesome movie. Truly.”

But Sundance is very different from Austin, and just because the Zellner Brothers have a loyal following back home doesn’t mean they’ll succeed in Park City. Then again, after excitedly watching Me and You three years ago, I never thought it was going to catch on with other people at Sundance let alone be a huge hit in the real world. Of course, the Zellners have already been to Sundance — every year since 2005, in fact. It could all change this year, though, with their first feature, the simple synopsis of which is as follows: “In the wake of a divorce, a man desperately searches for the one relic of the broken marriage- his pet cat ‘Goliath’, who has gone missing.”

So, I can’t wait to hear what festivalgoers think of the film after tonight’s premiere (or even from readers who view the trailer and wish they could be there). For those of you not in Park City, you’ll have to settle for this sorta funny clip. And maybe eventually the film’s website (Goliathismissing.com) won’t be down — damn that Sundance buzz for causing the bandwith to be exceeded — and we can investigate further what is so attractive about this little movie. Is it just the association with filmmaker Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation), who appears in the film? Is it just the popularity of the Zellner’s three shorts that have shown at Sundance in the past? I guess I could just go and find those films on the interweb and see …

Goliath premieres at the Prospector Square Theater tonight at 8:30 PM. It also screens at the Library tomorrow morning and Saturday morning and then in Salt Lake City on Saturday night.

• Your Christmas weekend time suck is here, in the form of indieWIRE’s massive 2007 Critics Poll. There Will Be Blood takes top honors, but as usual, the real fun lies in investigating the individual ballots and spotting the idiosyncrasies. Behold Andrew Bujalski’s single vote for Best Supporting Actor! Marvel at the critic who gave almost equal love to Ken Jacobs and Blades of Glory! But before you do, decide whether you’re thrilled or infuriated to see Southland Tales land ten full places ahead of Atonement (I’m the former. I think.)
• Speaking of There Will Be Blood, critics poll participant Filmbrain has posted some “sketches, fragments, and other half-baked ideas” about what he declares is “easily the best film of the year.” His key contention: it’s a love letter to Stanley Kubrick.
• Tomorrow is Burbanked’s second blogoversy, and he’s celebrating with a ten day party.
• Finally, here’s another time suck, if you need a break from all that critic pollery: Marisa Tomei joins Natalie Portman in the ranks of unwitting screencap porn stars. NSFW, via The WoW Report.

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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