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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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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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?

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.”

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 which uses a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare 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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• Jay and Mark Duplass are abandoning the mumblecore movement for Hollywood. And not only will they work with a bigger budget, they’ve also acquired an Apatow-appropriate cast featuring John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei. The untitled comedy (formerly called Safety Man) will have us believe that Tomei actually birthed Hill and still looks as good as she does.
• Let the Mamma Mia! copycats come forward: New Line has bought the rights to the Off-Broadway musical Rock of Ages, which features a ton of 1980s rock anthems from bands like Journey, Twisted Sister, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, Styx and Mr. Big (see the full list of musical numbers here). Despite the title, though, there’s apparently no Def Leppard. Start growing your mullet now and we’ll see you on opening night for some heavy metal sing-a-long goodness.
• While Hollywood is abuzz with news of one female director being canned from a franchise, Fox 2000 has signed on another female director to take over a franchise. Of course, it’s only Betty Thomas and the movie she’s been hired for is Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel (yes, that’s the real title), so it’s still not that exciting a step for womankind.
• Brad Pitt will star in The Lost City of Z, a true story in which he’ll play Col. Percy Fawcett, an explorer who allegedly served as the inspiration for both Indiana Jones and Kent Allard (aka The Shadow). James Gray is directing.
• We still have to wait almost a year before seeing Benicio Del Toro as The Wolfman, since Universal pushed back the horror remake from April to November. Also, Ridley Scott’s Nottingham is delayed until 2010.

Team Picture has been referred to as the last in the Benten DVD boys’ trifecta of Mumblecore releases (numbers one and two were LOL and the Aaron Katz two-for, Quiet City and Dance Party, USA). It’s a fitting way to cap the distributor’s institutional affiliation with this movie moment, which inspired more words from journalists than were probably articulated across all of the films’ running times combined. Surfacing right at the peak of the M-word hype, Team Picture may be the picture that was bot most helped and most hurt by its association with that generic name.

As the legend goes, after director Kentucker Audley (who is the same person as Team Picture star Andrew Nenninger) had his short Bright Sunny South play at Sundance in 2006, he fell in with Joe Swanberg. Soon Team Picture, a barely-feature-length feature, shot in Memphis for $1500, was booked at last summers’ mythic mumblecore double-header at the IFC Center and the Harvard Film Archives. Team Picture thus got to premiere in New York alongside some of the most covered genuinely independent films of the last decade, without having to put in time on the festival circuit first.

That was the good news. Unfortunately, that platform had its disappointments. Most of the press on the events brushed over Picture in order to concentrate on the Swanberg supergroup collaboration Hannah Takes the Stairs, and future festival play was out of the question because, for most premiere-obsessed programmers, a movie that had already premiered in New York was old news. In that sense, regardless of the film’s pedigree by association, Benten’s release of Team Picture is directly in line with their stated mission to give second life to “overlooked gems that deserve greater recognition.”

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Since the conversation about internet and day-and-date distribution really started to heat up in 2005, the alternatives to theatrical distribution have seemed to only multiply and evolve, while the general perception of public exhibition has remained about the same: filmmakers like it, but in terms of bottom line, it’s only useful as an extended commercial for ancillaries such as DVD. But is that perception changing? Two related quotes of note popped up in the feeds this morning.

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FINALLY, LILLIAN AND DAN Trailer

Finally, Lillian and Dan comes to CineVegas almost a full year after its first and only significant public screening, as part of the M-word heavy Summer 2007 Independents Week series at Harvard Film Archives. It’s a find, a definite cousin of the work being made in the Bronstein household––as with Frownland, the mumbling here is so stylized and disturbed that it’s like a precision bomb against the twee subtelties explored by other contemporary filmmakers––it’s more like Tourettescore. But there’s also a tenderness here, and lofty aesthetic ambitions underpinned with authentic melancholy. It’s a heartbreaker.

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