Agnes Varnum points to a preview clip on New York Magazine’s website, from the upcoming third season of Joe Swanberg’s Nerve.com series, Young American Bodies. In a very inside-baseball bit of humor, the clip features Swanberg himself literally in bed with film festival programmer Holly Herrick. Both appear in various states of undress, so don’t watch it at work. And if you’re a Swanberg fan, keep your eyes on SpoutBlog, as we’ll have a surprise from Joe here within the next 24 hours.
Scott Macaulay passes on news that “mumblecore” was short-listed for the Oxford American Dictionary’s designation of Word of the Year. Defined by Oxford as “an independent film movement featuring low-budget production, non-professional actors, and largely improvised dialogue,” the M-word fell to “locavore”, a food movement which “encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food.”
Mumblecore fell in fairly notable company: other runners-up include “upcycling” (”the transformation of waste materials into something more useful or valuable”), “bacn” (”email notifications, such as news alerts and social networking updates, that are considered more desirable than unwanted ’spam’), “tase” (as in, “Don’t tase me, bro!”), and what seems like it should have been Word of the Year back in 2003, “cougar” (”an older woman who romantically pursues younger men”).
An anonymous commenter at FILMMAKER wonders, “Isn’t mumblecore already, technically, upcycling?” But isn’t it more akin to the concept behind “locavore” — films made within a small community that have had (whether you love or hate them) a wider impact?
The 15 year-old version of Karina is jumping up and down at the news that Brad Laner of Medicine is composing the score for Beautiful Noise. I swear I’ve written about this film before, but I can’t find a previous post on Spout about it, so here’s the rundown: directed by Eric Green, Noise is a documentary about shoegaze, the British flash-in-the-pan trend that, or a couple of years in the late 80s, sort of united stoney, droney bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush and Jesus and Mary Chain, before a press backlash made uttering the very name of the trend anathema.
(If that syndrome sounds familiar, check out the Wikipedia sections on both the shoegaze movement and its backlash, which attribute the genre’s collapse to a single Melody Maker story which referred to the genre as “The Scene Which Celebrates Itself.” After that story, shoegazers “became perceived by critics as over-privileged, self-indulgent and middle-class.” Ho-hum.)
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.
Yet another gem from the Silent Movie’s stellar fall schedule that I somehow forgot to mention: The New Naturalists, with Saturdays in December devoted to a handful of works from “America’s new-fly-on-the-wall auteurs.” The Puffy Chair, Mutual Appreciation, Frownland and Old Joy and will be joined by Jennifer Shainin and Randy Walker’s Apart From That. All that, and not an M-word in sight.
From the “Yes, I do occasionally leave my house” file: tomorrow I’m looking forward to seeing Trigger Man, which is screening at the Pioneer Theater, which is screening for one week as part of their Fourth Annual Month of Horror, Terror, and General Mayhem. Someone, at some point described Trigger Man to me as “Mumblehorror”; it’s also been spun as “a low-budget twist on a Michelangelo Antonioni film” and “Old Joy with guns.” If just one of those descriptors proves accurate, I’ll be happy. Check out the crappy-quality (but still sufficiently creepy) trailer, embedded above.
Mumblecore on a hot plate. Karina gets tired of the spitfire debating over Hannah Takes the Stairsand 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.
After I wrote that post last week on the films of Kentucker Audley and Frank V. Ross, I got a nice email from Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, gently reminding me that although I had lumped the female protagonist of the film in with the relatively cosmopolitan characters of some the other mumblecore films, in fact “Jamie as played by Erin Fisher in Quiet City is not an urban dweller, but rather only visiting that world. She is in fact employed at a franchise restaurant (Applebees) in Atlanta.”
Now that I’ve seen Quiet City for a second time, I feel like a total idiot for missing that fact the first time around. It may seem like a minor distinction, but the question of Jamie’s occupation sparks the only moment of negative energy in an otherwise extremely uncynical film, concerned primarily with drawing beauty from the mundane.
Stephen Holden’s New York Times review of Quiet City is extremely favorable towards the film, and extremely skeptical of what he calls “the movie genre labeled mumblecore … a filmmaking sensibility, filtered through Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes and distantly related to punk, with the spirit of defiance replaced by resignation to the art of diminished expectations.”
This would seem to stand in sharp contrast to Matt Zoller Seitz’ Hannah Takes the Stairsreview of a week ago, which was lukewarm on the film itself (”snappy but unadventurous,” he called it), but generally enthusiastic about its place within an exciting wave of American independent film. Still, both critics say the party’s over. Seitz blames Hollywood for luring these artists away:
Hannah plays like an incidental swan song, a signpost marking the point when mumblecore became a nostalgic label rather than a present-tense cultural force, and its most acclaimed practitioners moved on to bigger things. Mr. Swanberg’s third movie is a graduation photo in motion: D.I.Y., class of ’07.
Holden, apparently less invested than part-time filmmaker Seitz in championing grassroots filmmaking on principle, blames the movies:
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.
I confessed my secret dream to write about Eyes Wide Shut for a living.
On this week’s episode of FilmCouch, we talked about Trapped in the Closet (which ended), Superbad, and a punk rock high school flick that you can watch on YouTube.
Aaron Katz is the director of Dance Party USA and Quiet City, both of which are screening as part of The New Talkies festival at the IFC Center. The former plays Tuesday and Wednesday; Quiet City opens on Wednesday for a week-long run. Both films will be released by Benten Films as a two-disc DVD set in January 2008. I love the intersection of high and low in this interview: Aaron talks about Antonioni in the same breath as Can’t Hardly Wait, and puts Ornette Colman on the same list as Mario Kart. He also discusses the pros and cons of the Mumblecore label, and offers up some intriguing details about his next project. All that, and much more, is waiting for you on the other side of the jump.
Surveying the Mumblecore-manic media coverage of the last week or so, three features are in danger of slipping through the cracks. Totally coincidentally, these are the three films of the fest that I’m currently most interested in. At the risk of sounding like a Swanbergian heroine, my crushes on individual films and filmmakers come and go in manic waves, and right now, I’m crushing heavily on Team Picture (directed by Kentucker Audley, who appears to be the same person as the film’s star, Andrew Nehringer), and Frank V. Ross’ Hohokam and Quietly on By. These are the least-known films on the schedule for sure, although all three have made appearances at Harvard Film Archive’s Independents Week. Seen as a unit, the three films point in an exciting new direction: towards the suburbs.
As has been widely noted, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs, Quiet City and Mutual Appreciation are, unabashedly, about white, largely post-collegiate urban youth. In LOL, Kissing on the Mouth and Quiet City, no one seems to really have to work; elsewhere occupations are ancillary to relationships and artistic pursuits. In Hannah Takes the Stairs, Hannah is an intern and her roommate, Rocco, is unemployed. They can’t afford air conditioning, but someone (Daddy?) is paying for the city apartment and the beer. Class is a deliberate non-issue in a lot of these films, for the same reason that it’s deliberately not mentioned in most of Woody Allen’s movies that aren’t murder mysteries: when your characters don’t have to struggle to satisfy basic needs, they have a lot of time leftover to screw and be screwed.
And most of that screwing takes place in cities. Hannah and her first boyfriend recline on a beach under towering Chicago skyscrapers; Hannah and her third boyfriend discuss their “chronic dissatisfaction” to the sounds of buses and sirens and neighbors outside the window. Bujalski’s films take place in hipster villages reminiscent of Slacker Austin; the Brooklyn Alan wanders in Mutual Appreciation is virtually the same territory traversed on the G train in Quiet City. Both Brooklyns are occupied by artists, musicians, and the carefully-coiffed knockouts who love them.
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.
Scott Macaulay passes on news that “mumblecore” was short-listed for the Oxford American Dictionary’s designation of Word of the Year. Defined by Oxford as “an independent film movement featuring low-budget production, non-professional actors, and largely improvised dialogue,” the M-word fell to “locavore”, a food movement which “encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food.”
Yet another gem from the Silent Movie’s 
Mumblecore on a hot plate. Karina gets tired of the spitfire debating over 
Stephen Holden’s New York Times review
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 
Way back on Monday, we introduced our entry in the 
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 
