Kevin Lee’s vigorous defense of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax in reaction to its reception 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 without interrogation. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot by regular DP Matthias Grunsky) 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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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.

I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy, in which a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare serves as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be.

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T

his review was originally published in February. Two Lovers is out on DVD this week.

Rarely has movie love been handled with both the dreamy indulgence and the cynicism that James Grey pulls off in Two Lovers. It’s a pity that the film, which premiered nine months ago at Cannes and is now rolling out on VOD and in theaters via Magnolia, has been pegged in time as the allegedly final film of star Joaquin Phoenix. In this meditation on class passing and infinite adolescence, set mainly in Brighton Beach with a few giddy sojourns to Manhattan, Grey creates a mood pocket, as it were, that’s distinctly out of time. Working off a series of contrasts that’s very true to its New York setting, Two Lovers is implicitly concerned with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines; if that motion temporarily offers the potential for an erasal of personal history, our ultimate stations in life can’t be escaped.

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Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

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Of the seven features I watched in full whilst at the 2009 CineVegas Film Festival, it seemed that the bravest endeavors, those that took the greatest stabs into the unknown both formally and conceptually, were actually shot on film. If this isn’t notable enough in a space increasingly dominated by digital photography (and, all too often, an aesthetic indifference that fails to push beyond the ease of use of the tools), the fact that films like Impolex, Modus Operandi and Redland are all the first features of men either barely or not quite the age of 30 is astounding. While other young filmmakers exploit ever-changing technology to shrink production budgets and experiment with non-theatrical models of distribution, Alex Ross Perry, Frankie Latina and Asiel Norton have made uncompromising films that defy contemporary technological trends and notions of financial convenience.

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Jean Luc-Godard may be unique amongst similarly iconic post-War European filmmakers in that it seems like we rarely go six months without one of his lost or little-known works getting revived or rediscovered, but its rare even for him for two such works to re-enter the spotlight in the same week. BAM’s presentation on Monday night of the little-seen One P.M., a film started by and, finally, starring Godard, was not billed as an event meant to capitalize on today’s street release of the little talked-about Une Femme Mariee, but it does inspire one to look for ways to talk about both in the same breath. There is not much overlap here, but at the very least, both films play on Godard’s interest in and persistent exploration of the tension between reality and its creation. Some notes:

1. One P.M.: Actual vs. Synthesized Anarchy

That One P.M puts Jean Luc-Godard on screen as a central focus should maybe not be the revelation that it is; after all, as we’ve discussed before, his best-known work is so deeply reflective of his personal life, and sometimes vice versa, that traditional distinctions between on-screen and off lose much of their ordinary meaning. But DA Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock’s film — began as a Godard-instigated collaboration called One A.M (or One American Movie), taken over and edited by the direct cinema legends when the French filmmaker abandoned the project and renamed it One P.M. (or One Pennebaker Movie, or One Parallel Movie) — presents a different Godard. Glimpsed here, in what amounts to documentary footage, trying to wring a hybrid of truth and fiction out of subjects both unsuspecting (a twenty-something female Wall Street lawyer) and very suspicious (Eldridge Cleaver), Godard embodies a caricature of the European art filmmaker come to America to con us into giving up our truth.

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Azazel Jacobs‘ Momma’s Man, which premiered at Sundance in 2008 and was rescued from the ashes of ThinkFilm by Kino for a theatrical release last summer — is finally out on DVD today. The package features a pretty impressive slate of extras, including Momma’s Family, described as a 42 minute “featurette on the clash realities that takes place in Momma’s Azazel Jacobs returns to the set of the film and can’t leave”; Capitalism: Child Labor, a 2006 short by Azazel’s father (and Momma’s co-star) Ken Jacobs; plus deleted scenes and an audio conversation with the Jacobs family.

Kino’s site has buying information; you can also check out my review of Momma’s Man, our interview with Azazel from Sundance, and some further thoughts on his three features.

I’ve been in New York for a grand total of about two weeks in the last month and a half, so I missed most of the press screenings for New Directors/New Films, the annual co-production of MoMA and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, which opened last night. We’ll be publishing a recap of the full festival from Brandon Harris tomorrow, but I wanted to drop some notes on the one film for which I did have a chance to attend a press screening, Harmony & Me.

Written and directed by Bob Byington (his RSO: Registered Sex Offender premiered at SXSW last year and then played around the country on the Range Life tour) and edited by Frank V. Ross (Hohokam, Present Company), the film was shot in Austin and features a number of faces that will be familiar to devotees of SXSW cinema and its descendants: Justin Rice as Harmony, a “loser” who we meet mid-heartbreak at the hands of a brunette succubus (Kristen Tucker); Alex Karpovsky as a friend whose verbal abuse of his sweetly nerdy wife is played for uncomfortable laughs — and serves as a reminder to Harmony that relationships are inevitably sad and cruel as often as they’re legitimately romantic; Pat Healy as the dickish boss at Harmony’s cubicle job; Allison Latta as an outlandishly outgoing neighbor who sets her sights, against his wishes, on our retiring hero.

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As filmmakers, Mark and Jay Duplass make naturalistic, character-based comedies that use laughs almost as a part of a bait-and-switch to distract from how far they’re burrowing under the skin. The acting style that makes this method work, embodied by Mark’s starring performance in The Puffy Chair, has been a natural fit for films with similar methods, if different aims; as an actor, it makes sense that Duplass would pop up in lo-fi, highly improvised films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Humpday. Craig Johnson’s True Adolescents is an example of how that type of closely-observed, behavioral comedy can be wrangled into a comparatively conventional, crowd-pleasing indie film of higher-gloss variety. The result may not be mind-blowingly insightful or particularly creatively inspired, but it’s faced-paced and fun, and it’ll definitely play to the Alamo Drafthouse’s queso and beer crowd — and, if marketed right, to the wider world.

Sam, Duplass’ proudly smoking, designer headphone-sporting 34 year-old hipster, plays a show with his band Effort (get it?) and shortly after is rendered homeless when dumped by his exotically hot girlfriend. With nowhere to go and nothing in the bank, Sam calls on his Aunt Sharon (Melissa Leo), a post-hippie single mom struggling connect with her 14 year-old son Oliver. When Oliver’s dad fails to show up for a planned weekend in the woods at the last minute, as a show of gratitude to Sharon, Sam and ends up taking Oliver and his best friend Jake on a camping trip. Prickly male bonding, misunderstandings, and eventual mutual recognition ensues.

Duplass is essentially doing a broader version of a character we’ve seen him play before, the former (Humpday) or current (Hannah, Puffy) slacker fighting off some form of adult responsibility as hard as he possibly can without actually having to do much of anything. He’s really good at playing that guy, but he’s getting too old to play that guy, and that’s part of True Adolescents’ foundational joke. The actor has visibly aged since Puffy, and on some level it might be interesting to see him play another incarnation of commitment-phobe slack-ass in another four years. Unlike Paul Rudd, whose baby face belies the fact that he’ll turn 40 this year, if Duplass continues to do the same thing in progressively larger-scale, more accessible films, the performance will actually feel different, more tragic.

I digress into consideration A Consideration of the Career of One Mark Duplass, because True Adolescents doesn’t give one much else to say. It unabashedly prioritizes the natural punchlines of its premise over anything deeper or weirder, it loses considerable steam about half way through when a plot contrivance mandates a search through the woods, and the film’s major crisis is resolved as neatly as you surely expected it would be (another crisis is, disappointingly, not resolved at all — the film teases at a more literal definition of bromance than usually seen, but then lets that thread float away). But it’s hard to fault it for not hitting heights that it doesn’t seem to be aiming for. I’m writing about it not because it’s a such a success or such a failure creatively, but because I think people will genuinely enjoy it. In recent years, there’s been a vast gulf at SXSW between the tiny films critics and bloggers love and champion throughout the year (as in, virtually every other film Mark Duplass has been involved with) and the big movies that studios introduce to the audience in Austin which then become certifiable hits (as in, Knocked Up, or last year’s SXSW opening night film and eventual sleeper blockbuster 21). In scale and intention, True Adolescents feels squarely in the middle of those poles. I’m interested to see what its future brings, if it ends up drifting to one camp or another, or if it actually manages to bring the disparate fates together.

It would take a certain amount of energy and emotional strength to produce a full consideration of David Denby’s piece in today’s New Yorker, which swiftly traces the lineage of the last seven years of American micro-independent film up to and including Joe Swanberg’s upcoming SXSW and IFC VOD debut, Alexander the Last. I currently feel that this variety of strength and quantity of energy are resources that I cannot access, and if I could, I’m not sure the best target to point them at would be a piece that has already been declared late to the party by two reliable sources.  However, in case it seems imperative to take up this task at some point in the future, here are the vague bases I would try to touch in such a consideration:

• Prior to this, David Denby has produced two notable works in the past six months (in this case, we’ll take “notable” to be equivalent to “provoking of blog posts and/or mocking on The Daily Show“; if there is another definition of the word here on Planet Earth in 2009, I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it). Most recently, there was Snark, a polemical book in which the film critic argues that “snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter,” and goes on to cite with no apparent humour intended the nine elements that make snark so dangerous.  A short time after Snark was published, Denby wrote off The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — a film which might rightly be considered to embody the bloated sincerity that finely calibrated snark so successfully deflates –– with the witty rejoinder, “who cares?” Denby then went on to point out, clearly without “bad feeling”, that “many people in Hollywood endlessly have ‘work’ done to put off aging, and here’s a movie that begins with a wizened baby and ends with physical perfection, a progression that may encapsulate both the nightmares and the dreams of half the Academy.” …Read more

Call it the Rorschach theory of criticism: some movies function best as mirrors, inspiring writing that says more about the writer than the film. Watchmaker Films’ fabulous new DVD release of Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match, the 1978 DIY feature which famously inspired Robert Redford to launch the Sundance Institute, which would eventually take over the Utah/U.S. Film Festival where he saw it play, includes an unusually artful documentary by Pennell’s brother/composer and nephew, an interview with the filmmaker, a soundtrack CD and an extensive package of writings on the film from the likes of Paul Cullum, Emmanuel Levy, and SXSW founder Lewis Black.

Two reviews by Roger Ebert are reprinted: the critic’s original three-star assessment from the Chicago Sun-Times, dated April 9, 1980; and a reevaluation pegged to the film’s 2007 restoration. Upping his rating by an additional star, Ebert focuses much of his second Shootin’ piece on Pennell’s alcoholism (the filmmaker essentially drank himself to death shortly before turning 50 in 2002) and the ways in which it can be seen to inform every frame of his first feature. Ebert remembers seeing Shootin’ for the first time at Telluride in 1980: “I went for a walk on the mountain-side with Eagle and mentioned that he had made a film about alcoholism. He said that had never occurred to him, though he thought I was right.” If this lengthy CHICAGO magazine profile on the critic is to be believed, that conversation took place just a year after Ebert entered treatment to deal with his own drinking problem.

It’s possible that this is just that time of year and I have SXSW on the brain, but when I watched The Whole Shootin’ Match a few days ago, more than seeing the film as a love/hate letter to the bottle, more than spotting its shared DNA with various films by Richard Linklater and Andrew Bujalski (and, to a lesser extent, Wes Anderson and Gus Van Sant), I saw it as a catalyst for a conversation about Austin’s evolving film cultural history.

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The news that Greta Gerwig will star opposite Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach’s upcoming Focus Features-financed Greenberg would seem to represent just the latest landmark in an evolution.

As polemicists rush to reject mumblecore as an ill-defined concept and Joe Swanberg as an auteur, Noah Baumbach is borrowing both the Nights and Weekends director as a cameraman and Swanberg’s frequent ingenue as a star. Even Steven Soderbergh is adopting the production methods with which Swanberg has become associated –– shooting fast and cheap on digital, using acquaintances of the production in lieu of actors and asking them to improvise based on an outline, etc. Swanberg invented none of it, but neither did Soderbergh, and when you consider Bubble as a kind of experiment in exotica, the latter has never gone as far in a quest for contemporary naturalism as he does in The Girlfriend Experience. There’s something, at the very least, undeniably interesting about the fact that both filmmakers will release films in 2009 made roughly the same way.

As a result, the m-word might cease to exist as a stand-alone concept –– and I think no one would be happier about that than some of the filmmakers who bristle at being lumped into a movement just because they made a movie about 25 year-olds shot on video –– but its stars and spirit are being assimilated into mainstream indie film. Are boundaries finally breakind down between Indiewood and, uh, DIYwood? Was this inevitable, or are we surprised?

Ray Pride points to a trailer for 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, a DVD from Plexifilm featuring 13 of Warhol’s 16mm, single-shot portraits of his superstars and Factory drop-ins (including Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Nico), set to original songs composed by ex-Luna/Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham and his wife/bassist Britta Phillips. Plexifilm says it’s the “first ever authorized DVD release of films by Andy Warhol,” and in addition to the basic DVD, they’re also offering a $250 limited edition package, featuring “a deluxe gatefold LP-style package with an exclusive poster and booklet,” as well as an archival print from a frame from your choice of one of the screentests. Or you can just watch the pretty trailer over and over for free.