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

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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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…

• Assessing the first IFC-produced chapter of Trapped in the Closet, I wrote that “From the first shot, it’s immediately apparent that Trapped’s production values have been elevated somewhat since Chapter 12 was released two years ago” and expresed concern that this and other noticeable changes “could have profound implications on Trapped’s signature, quasi-Brechtian manner of storytelling.” Then IFC TV’s general manager was like, “No you didn’t.”
• We played our part in hyping Hannah Takes the Stairs by posting Matt Dentler’s interview with one of Hannah’s many love interests, Mark Duplass.
• “Star-making is not just a hobby of the delusional rich, as it is in Sunset Boulevard; it’s not quite the cosmic structuring myth that it becomes in A Star is Born. It’s sexual fetish, and as such, it’s somehow simultaneously frivolous and primal.” With Anthology Film Archives paying tribute to Vincente Minnelli’s melodramas, I took a closer look at The Bad and the Beautiful.
• I wouldn’t die for Elvis, but I did pull together a list of links to help commemorate the 30th anniversary of his death.
• On the podcast, Kevin and Paul got their hearts broken by No End In Sight, and I wondered if celebrities should break up with their causes after watching The 11th Hour.
• “Screw the script–that voyeuristic long shot of Molly Ringwald on the stairs is how John Hughes became the voice of (highly commercial) teen alienation.” In the latest installment of The Micro Five, I take a look at dancing-in-the-library scene from The Breakfast Club, plus four other 80s musical interludes.
• I got the day’s second Xanadu reference out of Andrew Grant who, along with his Benten Films partner Aaron Hillis, dished pop cultural preferences for The Media Diet.

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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