Something big happened this week, and Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo — an unassuming, nonthreatening, ultimately uplifting indie drama with no stars and, one would think, no immediate hook for press coverage other than its merits ––  was at the center of it. Solo, which opens today in New York and L.A., motivated A. O. Scott and Richard Brody, two grown-up film critics for venerable New York publications (the New York Times and the New Yorker, respectively), neither of whom are known for engaging in public battle with the online rabble, to get into a blog fight.

It started when Scott published a long story (5 pages online) in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on an emergent genre he called Neo-Neo Realism, which he says unites festival favorites such as Ballast, Wendy and Lucy and Treeless Mountain with the works of Bahrani, as films concerning “fictional characters most often played by nonactors from similar backgrounds… [who are] familiar on a basic human level even if their particular predicaments are not. And if the kind of movie they inhabit is not entirely new — the common ancestor that established their species identity is a well-known Italian bicycle thief — their unassuming arrival on a few screens nonetheless seems vital, urgent and timely.” In other words: a number of filmmakers are making art films about the daily lives of poor people, and also the economy is bad. Coincidence? Scott thinks not.

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