Entries tagged “mumblecore”
Mumblecore mocks itself.
By Vadim Rizov on 10/05/2009
Filed under: Watchy
I guess one sign that you've really made it is when you can poke fun at yourself and it's not just an inside joke for your friends. With "Birthday Suit," a new three-minute short on "Funny or Die," mumblecore figurehead/sometime colleague Joe Swanberg achieves the latter, if only barely -- hanging at a 48% approval rating, "Birthday Suit" seems to be lost on some of the site's audience. In films like "Hannah Takes The Stairs" and "Alexander The Last," Swanberg's toyed with very plausible-looking sex scenes as a way of advancing narrative. The premise of "Birthday Suit" is that Swanberg... MORE »
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Sundance gets more annoying.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/02/2009
Filed under: Festivals
So Sundance woke up all sweaty and hungover a few days ago and apparently decided it was time to change its ways. The quirky Fox Searchlight acquisitions, the earnest Amerindie movies like "Sin Nombre" going nowhere slowly but self-righteously...something didn't feel right. Was this the same festival that gave us Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino? No. No it wasn't. It was fat and out of shape. It needed...mumblecore! Hence, as indieWIRE reports the first major act under new festival director John Cooper is the somewhat patronizing news that Sundance is adding a new section, to be called "Next," consisting of... MORE »
How to save indie film? Form bands, not labs.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/13/2009
Filed under: Controversy
Ted Hope, the major indie producer behind "Happiness," "American Splendor," "Adventureland" and many others, is a worrier -- he wants new distribution models and new ideas for independent film, and he wants them now. This week he's got a provocative guest post on his blog from Caitlin McCarthy, a screenwriter and inner-city public high school teacher with her own ideas about how to right the world. The post is titled "How to save indie film," and for McCarthy, the way to do that is to bring in what she refers to as "under-represented people" and "working class youth." She writes... MORE »
Joe Swanberg doesn't stop.
By Alison Willmore on 04/01/2009
Filed under: Festivals
I had a good half-hour talk with Joe Swanberg at SXSW, two days after the world premiere of his latest film "Alexander the Last" and a few days before my laptop hard drive failed, taking with it my audio files and transcripts. I'm slowly getting everything back, and while this interview isn't so timely anymore, I didn't want to let it go, either, since we covered a lot of interesting ground about how the way Joe shoots films is changing, and how he'd like to be, as impossible as it might seem, even more prolific. So here's a selection, with... MORE »
"I think my heart's big enough..."
By Alison Willmore on 03/24/2009
Filed under: WatchyFunny or Die gets all inside mumblecore baseball with this trailer for the nonexistent SXSW 2009 selection "The Dirty Garage," about, apparently, how a pair of childhood friends/brothers clean a garage and have lots of incoherent conversation, accompanied by one of their former flames. Swanberg co-conspirators Kent Osborne and Tipper Newton appear, as do fake quotes from Amy Taubin, Scott Foundas and Manohla Dargis. C'mon, though, an hour and 45 minutes? Realistically, this would run 75 minutes, tops, and that's with the help of an extra slow credit crawl.... MORE »
SXSW 2009: "Sorry, Thanks."
By Alison Willmore on 03/17/2009
Filed under: Reviews
Apologies for whipping out the m-word, but mumblecore always seemed to me to be defined by its choreography of conflict avoidance. Its characters are so vague about they want and what they think because what they definitely don't want is to lay those things out and risk disagreement, rejection or open hostility. They lack any obvious sharp edges, and so seem to be infected with terminal niceness, but to say that is to ignore all the passive aggression lurking underneath the surface of those meandering exchanges. A fine sign of how the mumble-crowd is coming of age is Dia Sokol's... MORE »
Sundance 2009: "You Wont Miss Me."
By Alison Willmore on 01/17/2009
Filed under: Festivals
"You Wont Miss Me" is all about Shelly Brown, a girl with the kind of problems plenty of 20-somethings dream of moving to New York for the express purpose of having: substance abuse, reckless hookups in her bedraggled Williamsburg apartment with shaggy boys who mistreat her, sudden fights with friends and strangers, an unseen actress mother who doesn't pay her enough attention, and no job beyond auditioning for roles herself. But the film, the second from Ry Russo-Young, isn't your average chronicle of dabblings in urban self-destruction, because Shelly, as she's begun to realize herself, can't turn down the volume.... MORE »
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