Luke and Brie Are On a First Date, which world premiered in the Hamptons last weekend, is the debut feature by Chad Hartigan, a frequent collaborator of Aaron Katz, and there are definitely some superficial similarities between the two filmmakers’ work. Like Katz’sQuiet City, Luke and Brie follows two attractive young people (George Ducker and Meghan Webster) around a city as they break through awkward uncertainty to forge a tentative romantic connection, and with their dreamy, super-intimate videography, both films have a way of enveloping a viewer in the action (or what passes for action), ultimately serving as delivery vehicles for the kind of heightened realism that marks an unexpectedly life-changing night out. But Luke and Brie plays its drama much closer to the surface, and through a little bit of self-reflexivity, a film that’s virtually wall-to-wall conversation manages to avoid feeling too talky.
Hartigan, who is a Los Angeles-based box office analyst by day, said after the Hamptons screening that Luke and Brie, based structurally on his own first date with his current girlfriend, was shot in 5 days on a budget of $3000. The small scale of the project opens it up to an obvious criticism: surely, all of us could come up with a single night in our romantic lives that seems worthy of dramatization, and many of us could round up some friends and scrape together a few dollars and take a week off work to tell it. So what makes Luke and Brie special? Maybe nothing, and maybe that’s it — maybe it’s not interesting because it’s entering into unchartered territory, but because it takes us through universal, well-worn feelings and makes them feel new. With his camera often seeming to float over faces in extreme close-up, Hartigan’s micro-focus on the nerves, uncertainties, and ambiguities, the posturing and reflex self-medication and unexpected moments of honesty that fuel the night so nails the harrowing aspect of navigating modern romance — in which it’s always easier to do nothing than to do what one really wants — that he’s able to turn the film’s ultimate surrender to traditional romantic closure into something of a surprise.
I had a bit more to say about Luke and Brie on this week’s episode of FilmCouch. The trailer is above, and future screening information is here. The film is still on the festival circuit and does not have distribution.
Erik Skillman, the Criterion designer who recently regaled us with tales of his process putting together the box image for Berlin Alexanderplatz, has applied some of the same techniques to a portrait of Barack Obama. “I’m not sure I quite captured him (there’s a little hint of Reinhold in there that’s kind of strange), but for a 20-minute sketch it’s not half bad…” [via Cinetrix]
Mike Jones has already started blogging Berlin. We’ll be keeping an eye on Filmbrain, Twitch and of course Berlin-based David Hudson for updates over the next week or so.
Jette Kernion on the magic trick of Quiet City: “You can’t watch a man and woman who become fast friends like this without wondering whether they’ll hook up, which provides a small amount of suspense. But you get so caught up watching these people and their friends that the romantic potential hardly seems to matter most of the time.”
Kevin Kelly balks at Christina Ricci’s suggestion that there’s a “sad guy” thing in Speed Racer that will make the boys cry: “What’s a sad guy thing that’s not a sad girl thing? Does Speed lose his penis during one of the races and get told that he can’t have any Speed Juniors?”
Benten Films‘ second superbly-packaged DVD set (they previously released Joe Swanberg’s LOL) hits stores today. The set includes two films directed by Aaron Katz: Dance Party, USA, a kind of correction to Larry Clark’s KIDS, set in Portland and starring exquisitely natural local teens; and the Independent Spirit Award-nominated Quiet City, which I previously reviewed here. Both films are about a young boy and girl who venture out into urban spaces looking for an authentic experience. What sets them apart from traditional coming-of-age stories is, in part, the patience Katz shows in allowing his characters to take the time to settle into a tentative trust together. The films are both languid and totally economical; in terms of action, virtually nothing “happens,” and yet if there’s any fat to cut on either, I can’t find it.
In Dance Party, we follow Gus, a teenage lothario whose sexual exploits seem rooted in a need to have a kernel of truth on which to base the elaborate stories with which he regales his friend/protege Bill, to a Fourth of July house party. Within minutes, Gus has talked a previously unknown girl into bed, but when that’s over––Katz cuts straight from the initiation of the flirtation to Gus rolling off the anonymous female like a cold wave––he still needs someone to talk to.
I’m sure a press release will be forthcoming, and when I get it I’ll post it, but here’s what I deem to be the exciting news from this morning’s Independent Spirit Awards announcement, most of which involve friends and/or pet projects of Spout:
Aaron Katz’s Quiet Cityis nominated for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for $500,000. Also nominated in that category: Shotgun Stories and The Pool, two films I’ve heard great things about but have yet to see.
The Monastery, which was disqualified for Oscar consideration after it was broadcast against the filmmaker’s wishes on European television, got a Spirit nomination for Best Documentary.
Ronnie Bronstein (director of Frownland and star of Joe Swanberg’s upcoming Spout web series Butterknife) and Ramin Bahrani (director of Man Push Cart and Chop Shop) have both been nominated for the IFC/Acura Someone to Watch Award, which comes with a grant worth (I think) $20,000.
Craig Zobel and Julie Delpy were nominated for Best First Film, for Great World of Sound and 2 Days in Paris, respectively. Sound’s Kene Holliday was also nominated for Best Supporting Male.
Broken English, a film which was dismissed by many but which I really enjoyed, earned nominations for Best Actress (Parker Posey) and Best First Screenplay (Zoe Cassavetes).
Otherwise, the usual suspects are all there: lots of I’m Not There,Diving Bell, A Mighty Heart and Juno. More later.
UPDATE: See the full list of nominees after the jump. Surprises, omissions, excitements? Comment, please.
If Telluride does anything, it changes the experience of movie watching. The real gold of the program is not sneak peaks at the big Oscar contenders starting the fall festival run, but films pulled from the vault of history. On a sunny Sunday morning in the mountains, I walked into a theater of movie-lovers where a live orchestra tuned their instruments. We clapped as the orchestra was introduced, the lights went down, the screen lit up and they began to play.
People on Sunday, for Germany in 1929, was like Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese, and Lucas in their early 20’s getting together and saying, “Let’s have some fun making a movie.” (People is a silent film created by Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinneman, among others.) A meandering film about twenty-somethings–an actor, a dancer, a model, a mechanic–breaking from their mundane day jobs for some fun on a Sunday. It’s a celebration of leisure and the little moments that make life worth living (like an 88 year old version of Aaron Katz’ Quiet City Kevin reviewed in FilmCouch #35). I also have to share People contains the most seductive first kiss I’ve ever seen on film. No joke. …Read more
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:
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.
The Cinetrix went to Independents Week at the Harvard Film Archive, and came back raving about the dance scenes in three of the films that screened there. The films were Hannah Takes the Stairs, Quiet City, and a film I had not previously been aware of called Finally, Lillian and Dan, directed by a local filmmaker named Mike Gibisser. Here’s what The Cinetrix had to say:
[In] all three films there are spontaneous, visceral dance sequences that soar. Mike Gibisser’s real-life granny dances rapturously to a Jolie Holland tune; Hannah and roommate Rocco rock out as they work through Hannah’s romantic confusion; and Jamie, Charlie, Robin, and Kyle dreamily groove to an r&b track replaced by the diegetic music of Keegan DeWitt [rights issues]. These inarticulate idealists connect through the physical movement to music in a way that makes the cinetrix’s bricolage-lovin’ heart sing.
The ‘trix goes on to seek suggestions on great “musical moments in non-musicals.” I saw Hannah and Quiet City at SXSW in March, where they formed another non-musical dance scene trio with a film that did not screen at Independent’s Week, Ry Russo-Young’s Orphans. The dance scene in Orphans is a dizzying concoction of love, envy, double entendre, competition, ill-fitting party dresses, resentment and Absolut Citron. It’s not only my favorite of the three scenes, but it’s probably one of my favorite scenes in any American film of this decade.
I find it fascinating that naturalistic dance scenes are becoming as much of a hallmark of these Mumblecore films as improvised dialogue and hand-held video. Within the context of these relatively static narratives, the dances become as spectacular as a climactic car chase or series of explosion in a Hollywood movie.
I also recently watched Macao for the first time, a non-musical which has an amazing scene of Jane Russell singing “One For My Baby.” But that’s not really a dance scene, so I’ll save that discussion for another time.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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I’m sure a press release will be forthcoming, and when I get it I’ll post it, but here’s what I deem to be the exciting news from this morning’s Independent Spirit Awards announcement, most of which involve friends and/or pet projects of Spout:
Mumblecore on a hot plate. Karina gets tired of the spitfire debating over 
Stephen Holden’s New York Times review
