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

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.

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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 Stairs review 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:

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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.

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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.

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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…

The New Talkies festival is barely underway (as I type this, the first screening of Hannah Takes the Stairs is scheduled to begin in about 2 minutes), and already forces more powerful than you or I are contemplating a mumblecore backlash. I’m still trying to actually write about the movies before heading out to IFC’s Hannah premiere party (which, if Twitter is to be believed, is shaping up to be the event of the season for people like me who rarely leave the house), but while I’m busy with that, here’s a round up of the circulating wariness. I’m sure I’ll have more concrete thoughts on the health of the meme over the course of the next week.

• Stu has a long makings-of-the-movement piece over at The Reeler, including the now-obligatory “don’t call it a movement” quote from Andrew Bujalski. “I feel like the things that these films all have in common are the least interesting things about them. It’s the differences that make them interesting. You read the synopses — ‘These are films made cheaply about young white people talking to each other.’ And of course it sounds excruciating. And there are plenty of films that fit that description that are excruciating. The things that make the films good are not that.” Also: Joe Swanberg worries about a post-Pulp Fiction-esque wave of imitators.
• Anthony Kaufman says we’re killing Mumblecore by talking about it. “If these films are hyped, they may be doomed. One of the joys of stumbling upon a charming or sophisticated or funny low-budget ‘mumblecore’ film is just that, stumbling upon it, whether given to you on DVD by a friend or the filmmaker himself or walking into one of them unknowingly at a film festival.” Still, he has his own entry into the hype ring: a Mumblecore video primer.
• In a semi-positive review of Hannah in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz says we’ve already killed Mumblecore by hyping the filmmakers to the point where they’re now able to get real jobs. “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.” The implication is that, right at the breakthrough moment, right when the masses are maybe starting to care, the filmmakers are moving on to studio work and leaving their audience behind. But Kaufman says Seitz is just thinking of himself: “If Seitz is right, and Hannah already marks the movement’s premature passing into obsolescence, it may only be because he wants it to stay something that he caught at a film festival and is not reviewing for The New York Times.”

Welcome to MumbleWeek!

If you read a lot of film blogs, you might have noticed a virus going around called Dentler Takes the Stairs. It’s all the brainchild of Matt Dentler, who is like the P.T. Barnum of the SXSW Film Festival, and who, by being the first person to program movies like Kissing on the Mouth and Dance Party, USA, has played a huge role in legitimizing this wave of no-budget American indie filmmaking over the past few years. Dentler conducted interviews with the major players in Hannah Takes the Stairs (the Joe Swanberg drama starring Greta Gerwig and filmmakers Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski, Kent Osbourne, Ry Russo-Young and Todd Rohal), and asked a number of us film bloggers to each broadcast one of these interviews on our blogs.

Matt asked me to carry the interview with Mark Duplass, and of course, I complied. I reviewed The Duplass Brothers’ The Puffy Chair, which Mark starred in and co-wrote, in 2005 after seeing the film both at SXSW and the Chicago International Film Festival. At the time I said this:

It’s amazing how [The Puffy Chair] nails the mealy-mouthed way people my age have of saying what we mean by dressing the same words, over and over again, in different kinds of inflection. Between Rhett and Josh, the word “dude” has a thousand meanings; Emily isn’t satisfied being referred to by any of them. Fleshing out that tension, between what is being said and what it obviously means, is where The Puffy Chair really succeeds.

After the jump, I turn it over to Matt and Mark, who talk about Hannah’s Atari-fueled set, Andrew Bujalski’s boxers, and what Duplass did to get the film’s mythic stairs cut out of the picture.
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Last night, I was reading a story on Twitch, and I noticed a banner ad trumpeting the DVD release of something called Valerie On the Stairs. My instant reaction was, “Uh-oh. That’s going to be really confusing, what with Hannah Takes The Stairs opening next week.” Upon further research, I discovered that Valerie was directed by Mick Garris, for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series. In the interest of obliterating any further confusion, I made the following side-by-side comparison of the two films:

Valerie: About spooky goings-on at “a large apartment filled with unsuccessful writers where they can live rent-free until they make their first publication.”
Hannah: Director Joe Swanberg and his actors/co-writers shared an apartment for a month in Chicago while filming.

Hannah: “A sexy slacker tale.” — Gerald Peary
Valerie: “A sexually-charged tale of terror.” — Some guy on Wikipedia

Hannah: Not literally about stairs.
Valerie: Literally about stairs. Ghost stairs.

I assume you’ve figured out by now that this post is just another excuse to plug the upcoming New Talkies festival, which begins a week from tomorrow with the premiere of Hannah, and continues at the IFC Center through Labor Day weekend. My associated coverage will begin on SpoutBlog later this week. In the meantime, if you’re going to be in New York during the festival, you can and should buy tickets now via IFC’s website.

Via Eugene at indieWIRE comes this trailer for The New Talkies — ie: the “mumblecore” film festival set to take place later this month at the IFC Center here in NYC. I don’t know about you, but I definitely have my calendar blocked out to spend the better part of the week before Telluride at the series. I’ve seen all of the movies on the schedule with the exception of two (Frank Ross’ Hohokam and Kentucker Audley’s Team Picture), but I’m super-excited to revisit the films that I haven’t seen in a while in one long burst–it’s almost like a retrospective of the past three years of my festival-going life.Still, I wonder if this trailer doesn’t give the wrong impression. It’s definitely not going to be two-weeks worth of summer fun, all beautiful girls with rainbow slinkies and goofy boys with hand-held sparklers meeting under magic hour sky-scapes. There will be some of that, but all the beautiful people will be painfully inarticulate, their relationships will vacillate between tentative and tortured, and instead of happy endings, they’ll find bittersweet semi-resolutions. If this sounds more your speed anyway, you can find the full series schedule here, and if you can’t attend, keep your eye on SpoutBlog for my piles of coverage.