4 posts tagged “mumblecore”
Battle For Haditha (Nick Broomfield, 2007)
Hoo boy. Nick Broomfield's ironically titled docudrama about the 2005 Haditha killings follows that fateful day in the lives of the soldiers, the insurgents, and of course, the innocents who were slaughtered by US forces. And it's about as intense as it sounds like it would be. There are problems with the film, like a kind of pathological need to humanize, which leads to certain beats that feel a little rote (like the insurgents casually talking about how if only the US hadn't disbanded the army, they wouldn't be doing this, or the repetition of just how fried the US soldiers are). It's not a great film, but as head into year five of this clusterfuck, it's a necessary one.
The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)
The Mist isn't just bad. It's wrong. From Thomas Jane's earnest delivery of the line, "This is no ordinary mist," to the laughably overwrought ending, the movie could not be worse. Seriously. It's like Crash with giant CGI tentacle monsters. Also, if you're going to name your movie The Mist, and try to elicit fear from the uncertainty that comes from not being able to see more than a few feet in front of you, then you might want to hold off for longer than twenty minutes to show the giant CGI tentacle monster. Just a tip.
The Pleasure of Being Robbed (Joshua Safdie, 2008)
Goddammit, this movie is gorgeous. Think Bujalski meets Vivre Sa Vie. I can't believe I just wrote that. Ugh. Who am I? Maybe it's more accurately described as Quiet City's
evil twin. No, that's reductive. They are wholly different films.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that if you have a chance, please go. I love this movie.
Sleuth (Kenneth Branagh, 2007)
Three words. Gay train wreck.
The New Year Parade (Tom Quinn, 2008)
Divorce, Philly style! Set against the backdrop of the annual Mummers Parade, The New Year Parade chronicles the lives of a couple of South Philadelphia kids whose parents have separated. This is a really sweet movie, and it's homegrown, so they certainly got the Philadelphia accent right.
Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, 2007)
Doesn't a two-and-a-half hour documentary on the abortion wars of the 90s sound like a good time? What's that? It's also in black-and-white? And there are scenes in which doctors sift through bloody post-abortion detritus? HOLLA!
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
There's a lot to like about this movie, but man is it on-the-nose. We get it. We understand. When it's not hitting us over the head with Casey Affleck's mumbly hero-worship, it's a great movie that evokes the kind of sweaty slow burn of The Deer Hunter. But, as I said, it's all just a little too obvious.
I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)
Will Smith really gives his all to this pile. Seriously, he acts the fuck out of it. Unfortunately for him, the movie doesn't hold a candle to previous adaptation The Last Man on Earth... or The Omega Man for that matter. And that movie is terrible.
Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008)
Robert Downey Jr. is a casting coup, yes. And Jeff Bridges is hilarious, if only because his skull is allowed to come out and play. And Jon Favreau is a director who cares about the overuse of CGI (love those Elf practicals). So hooray. But even with all of that going for it, I had a hard time getting into the gadgety-metalhead porn of it all because I was distracted by the way it non-tackled the Iraq war. If only we all had a metal suit that could tell us who the hostiles were and who the civilians were. I get that it's a superhero movie, and that we can't expect a movie about a guy who constructs a super-suit to do anything but be "kick-ass" or to solve our Iraq problem (that's for the guy with the super ears). So let's just chalk it up to the fact that I can't enjoy anything anymore, and that'll be that. Kudos for trying to make a movie about the here and now, I guess (as opposed to say, Superman Returns). And let's face it, this is probably as good as a movie about Iron Man was going to be.
Oh year-end lists. You are a shitstorm of ego, elitism, and posturing. A shitstorm to which I have contributed the odd gust, make no mistake. But, year-end list, it is time to resist the urge to make you. I refuse to join in the cacophony of ill-informed and predictable checklists that serve no purpose besides taste-masturbation.
That said... if I were to make a year-end list... Quiet City would be on it... Right behind Zodiac... and just in front of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street...
No! I cannot resist! I must put numbers in front of the titles and catalog my unique opinion. It says things about me, about my unique identity. My top ten list defines me! No... no... everything is going to be alright. Be strong, strong like John McCain.
Search in every basket of sugar-puppies you can find; you won't find a sweeter, more beautiful artifact than Aaron Katz's Quiet City. In a cultural climate where Juno is allowed to sass its way towards indie cred with its mantle as this year's Little Miss Sunshine, the world is in desperate need of a reminder that the film world doesn't end with Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics.
In Quiet City, Jamie is stranded in New York after she's unable to meet up with the friend she's supposed to be visiting. The young gentleman she's asked for directions, Charlie, invites her to his apartment, and the two dance awkwardly around their obvious affection for one another for about 80 minutes. And that's about it, plot-wise.
Quiet City was made for very little money, and much of the dialogue is improvised. It's got that stuff going for it. But a film doesn't live on cred alone. And I hate to paint this one as some sort of reaction to mini-major co-opting of indie "quirk". Because that's my own personal hang-up, and could not be further from Quiet City's adorable mind.
Is this a film about disaffected rich white people? Yes. At a Brooklyn party following a friend's art opening, Charlie strikes up a conversation with a fellow Park Sloper, and they find that they're both just kind of drifting after having quit their jobs. Charlie suggests that if they could make money with this drifting, if they could pay their bills simply by being the slackers that they are, their problems would be solved. And at some point, Jamie will have to go back to Georgia, leaving Charlie in Brooklyn to deal with these things on his own. But maybe not. There is such a sense of community in all of these films (Joe Swanberg, who made LOL, appears in one of the film's major setpieces, which involves friends sitting around eating cole slaw), and at once a sense of shared upper-class ennui and communal optimism. It's like if Antonioni didn't make you want to kill yourself.
When it comes to these "mumblecore" things (that's the only time I'm using that word, soak it in), or at least the Bujalski films I've seen, I admit that I am a sucker. Their deviously unassuming performances, their complete disregard for the socio-political, their gloriously lo-fi atmosphere...
Oh Quiet City. You are lovely and amazing.
And another thing...
I am also a sucker for any piece of art that acknowledges the existence of Applebee's. Wait. Stay with me, here. In Quiet City, Jamie works at an Applebee's (and is subtly ridiculed for it by friends of friends). In Talladega Nights, the never unbranded Ricky Bobby gathers the family 'round the Applebee's table for famiy dinner. Even in NBC's Friday Night Lights (for which Applebee's is a corporate sponsor), the community often comes together to discuss the latest football game at The 'Bee's. And for me, that speaks so much more effectively to what it's like to live in America in 2008 than, say, those films that try to pretend like we're still living in a world of community diners and small town hospitality. Waitress comes to mind. I liked Waitress fine, but it's such a fantasy that I think a Centaur wouldn't have looked too out of place next to Andy Griffith. No, we live in a world of strip malls, chain restaurants, and Burlington Coat Factory, and it's another thing that Quiet City gets right.
Here is a quick round-up of movies I've seen in the past week or thereabouts. I am lazy, and so I'm cleaning the slate with this entry that's made up of little more than notes.
- No Country For Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007)
A lot funnier than I expected it to be.
Best dog chase in cinema history?
- Messiah Of Evil (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, 1973)
Zoned-out model and polyamorous bourgeoisie folk historian fight zombie plague in California beach town.
Two superlative zombie sequences surrounded by impenetrable lo-fi "mood".
That supermarket sequence may be one of the most terrifying and skillfully made pieces of cinema I've ever seen. Not kidding.
- Bee Movie (2007)
Like watching Seinfeld's stand-up being strangled by wannabe-Pixar plot machination.
- LOL (Joe Swanberg, 2006)
Made on video, it's trying to say things about how we communicate in this modern world. But the characters are just dicks. They're not made so by the fact that they're obsessed with their cell phones and e-mail accounts. They just are dicks. It's easy to see how this film, narcissistic and unpleasant, could turn people against the "movement", such as it is.
Not in the same league as Bujalski. I'm a huge Funny Ha Ha fan, but if I never hear the word "mumblecore" again in my life, it will be too soon.
- Dan In Real Life (Peter Hedges, 2007)
Garbage.
You know how sometimes you just sit in a movie and pray that it will take a sharp turn and start to tackle the emotional effects of spontaneous combustion? Or a meteor strike? Or how about just mass homicide? Whatever, as long as they all die. Sondre Lerche, what are you doing?
- I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang (Mervyn Leroy, 1932)
Ends exactly where it needs to end. Great ending, great final line. Terrifying.
I found this movie a lot more pleasurable than I think I was intended to. Well... I guess Mervyn Leroy probably wasn't intending it for some asshole in 2007. It's definitely a movie made to affect change in its time.
- Girl 27 (David Stenn, 2007)
Garbage. The blurb made it sound like it would be a documentary on some massive Hollywood conspiracy akin to the Black Dahlia murders. Alas, it is a masturbatory video diary by an "entertainment reporter" (that should be enough to send you running) in which he harasses a disturbed old woman about a rape that happened nearly eighty years ago. And what that means about things.
"Oooh Hollywood is a dangerous place for young idealistic actresses." Yes, we know, not only because that's a cliché, but also because you tell us three times in the first ten minutes. Jesus Christ is this movie heavy-handed.
And then we cut away to Judy Lewis, Clark Gable's illegitimate daughter by Loretta Young. And this is the most interesting part of the film, and it has nothing to do with anything (besides the tenuous "sexual mores in studio-controlled Hollywood" thing, but c'mon!).
Movie, I dub you a complete failure.
- O Lucky Man! (Lindsay Anderson, 1973)
Explained to me as a film about Malcolm McDowell's character in Anderson's If... (1968) through the filter of his character's experiences in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), and that's an astute assessment.
McDowell's Mick Travis, now a coffee salesman, wanders through English capitalism for three hours. I could write a book on this movie, but suffice it to say it's really great.
Has the feeling of a cinematic anti-capitalist manifesto, and that's always good fun.
Young, hot Helen Mirren!
Great songs by Alan Price!
- Ocean's 13 (Steven Soderbergh, 2007)
This is the best Ocean's movie of the three, and it's also the most unabashedly male-centric. I don't think that those are unrelated, as Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones felt pretty worthless in the first two films. Not their fault, but unencumbered by love interest obligations, 13 is allowed to take off. Here, all we get is Ellen Barkin, and she's a pretty unflattering portrait of womanhood by the end of it (just a piece of machinery to be manipulated, like the laser security system or the underground drill).
Like a TV show that's finally finding its footing after a passable pilot and a likable first season, Ocean's 13 moves with an unambitious assurance of purpose that allows it to be one of the funniest, most endearing movies of the year.
Flightplan
(Robert Schwentke, 2005)
Flightplan is the latest in a recent spat of what we'll call "envelope" films. These are not mysteries because a good mystery should exist in the journey to its solution. What these films do is present you with a question (in this case, where did Jodie Foster's daughter go?) and then hang out until they present you with the answer, as if from an envelope. I know that this is not a novel idea. Flightplan, like The Forgotten or The Village or a game of Clue (but not the movie Clue), settles into unearned complacency once it locks you in. You get on the plane, you want to know what the solution to the puzzle is, you wait. They know that you want to know. And so you're stuck. On a plane.
Once the envelope's contents are revealed, the movie is no longer interesting (as opposed to becoming more interesting, as Chinatown does (sorry for referring to Chinatown as an example of fine writing, that's so cliché, but you understand what I mean)).
It's not all bad, it's just all kind of uninteresting. Peter Sarsgaard is almost drained of his inherent watchability (which is substantial), and Jodie Foster is only passable as the mother who wants to know what has become of her daughter on their pan-Atlantic flight. Schwentke and his cinematographer, Florian Ballhaus (Ball-house?), create a suitably ominous atmosphere early on and they kind of beat it to death, but the moment at which Foster realizes that her daughter has disappeared plays like a fever dream. It's almost great. The filmmakers interestingly emphasize the openness of the plane instead of the claustrophobia, which defies expectation and...
I can feel myself struggling for things to say. I don't know why I'm trying so hard. To be fair, I was never bored. It's kind of like Phone Booth. You'll probably find it on TV one Saturday morning. You'll watch it. You'll go run your errands. Someone, years later, will ask if you saw that Jodie Foster airplane movie. You might say yes.
The Constant Gardener
(Fernando Meirelles, 2005)
Pretty good. I got no real complaints. What do you want from me? I'm sick.
Note: I realize that you want nothing from me. I will try to stop pretending that anyone has asked me to write movie reviews.
Funny Ha Ha
(Andrew Bujalski, 2003)
Funny Ha Ha is pretty hard to resist. Its tricks are so well-veiled in realism that it lulls you into a condescending viewership. "These people aren't actors!" "This mise-en-scene reflects nothing about the internal world!" Structurally, I suppose it does make Me And You And Everyone We Know look like a Jerry Bruckheimer production. But alas, it's all meticulous documentarian trickery that adds up to one of the best films I've seen in a long time.
And so the whole thing hinges on Kate Dollenmayer as Marnie, a recent college graduate who is, as she puts it, "wandering the Earth" with no well drawn plans or ambitions. I know what kind of movie that sounds like, but Funny Ha Ha has a lot more in common with Richard Linklater's experimental Slacker, the wanderfilm that supposedly heralded the early 90's indie movement, than it does with Reality Bites or Ghost World. Except for the fact that Slacker is unwatchable.
What makes Funny Ha Ha go is the casting that never feels like casting at all and the fact that the film's wandering and chaos are directly tied to Marnie. Whereas Slacker careens around Austin with different zany characters and feels a lot like a stunt ("let's redefine narrative!"), Funny Ha Ha is a film that uses that tossed-off feel for a specific and beautiful narrative purpose. We live in fleeting and imperceptible moments with Marnie and her acquaintances. We experience rejection after an awkward phone conversation, exhilaration for a new job, excitement about the idea of learning chess, and a decision to step away from people who represent everything Marnie's trying to put behind her.
The 16mm that's not trying to look like 35, the awful sound mix, the non-actors, it's all kind of what film ought to be. It probably works a little better for me because it allows me to romanticize post-college depression, and because I'm a guy and I can romanticize Kate Dollenmayer (and do), but all that's beside the point. You can place this review firmly in the "glowing" category.
Note: I respect Slacker. I would just never want to sit through it again.
Just Like Heaven
(Mark Waters, 2005)
To be fair, big old spoiler alert.
Things that can be learned from Just Like Heaven, in which Reese Witherspoon's anal spirit haunts her apartment's new tenant, depressed slob Mark Ruffalo:
- Being an intelligent and career-oriented young woman is as good as being dead. Actually, being dead is better. You don't have to worry about your makeup, which is carefully maintained in the hereafter.
- Mark Ruffalo, who was perfect in You Can Count On Me because he seemed like he'd just wandered in off the street, probably did just wander in off the street. He's actually just a computer program that can be plugged into romantic comedies like 13 Going On 30, Rumor Has It..., or Just Like Heaven in place of "30ish, charming in a disheveled sort of way."
- When Bill Frist and Rick Santorum interfered with the Terry Schiavo case and attempted to litigate away her right to die with dignity, it was not a disingenuous attempt to use a family's suffering to reinvigorate their conservative base. No it was, rather, a perfectly reasonable response to the carefully groomed ghost of Reese Witherspoon (or Ms. Schiavo or whoever) who spoke to them and only them, begging her family through Mark Ruffalo (or Tom DeLay or whoever) to ignore her earlier statements and keep her alive no matter what doctors or science have to say on the matter.
At best, the film is tremendously ignorant, and can we all agree that stupidity is a crime? But marginalizing Just Like Heaven like this is dangerous. If we assume that the film knows what it's doing, then this is not just a cute little romantic comedy. It's fundamentalist propaganda. The film is a large portion of America's psychology laid bare, and it is a big part of the problem. I wish that it was all beneath our contempt and that I could take comfort in the fact that it is ineptly assembled and laughless, but I can't; it was the number one movie in America for a time.
