1. "All Talk?": Amy Taubin croons a requiem for mumblecore in Film Comment.
["Of Swanberg’s three movies, the first, Kissing on the Mouth, at least has a bit of energy, albeit of the “Look, Ma, I’m doing it” kind. “Doing it” is the operative phrase since all three movies are such fountains of lad-magazine culture that the DVDs might work as Maxim inserts. Swanberg has explained that he was moved to make Kissing as a rejoinder to what he felt was the buttoned-up quality of Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha. And indeed, his greatest talent is for getting attractive, seemingly intelligent women to drop their clothes and evince sexual interest in an array of slobby guys who suffer from severely arrested emotional development. Swanberg is the DIY Judd Apatow. (Please do not let me see that line quoted on a DVD cover.) One might feel for the guys if they weren’t such insulated concoctions of guilt and self-aggrandizement. The director (I employ the term merely as a description of function) has cited his own particularly loutish onscreen persona as a sign that his movies are “critical” of male behavior. This supposed critical position is largely canceled out by the fact that the lout has become, by his own terms, a success (a photograph in Rolling Stone, women ever ready to get naked for his camera)."]
2. "Streaming from Brandeis University": Errol Morris and Werner Herzog in conversation. (Hattip to Kevin Seaman.)
["I would say completely wrong."]
3. "Three nights of a dreamer": David Bordwell's belated (but very welcome) contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon, on José Luis Guerin's wonderful In the City of Sylvia.
["The close-up blogathon launched by Matt Zoller Seitz is over, but it contains enough specimens and analyses for a hefty book. It also inspired Jim Emerson to devote a cine-lyric to the close-up. I missed the deadline, so I suppose that this constitutes my sideways contribution to Matt’s enterprise. Sideways, because a full-blown analysis of In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia; Dans la ville de Sylvie) would be a breach of decorum. Most people haven’t heard of this new film by José Luis Guerin, let alone seen it. I saw it at the Vancouver festival in September, and it will make its way through the festival circuit over the coming months and should show up on cable or DVD thereafter. But apart from calling attention to it as a remarkable film, I want to look at one of its most absorbing sequences and suggest some of its originality."]
4. "Rebecca De Mornay Reportedly Arrested": First John Monad, now Cissy Yost. The JFC cast don't do well with spirits.
["Rebecca De Mornay was arrested the night before Halloween for investigation of driving under the influence of alcohol, People magazine reported Tuesday."]
5. "Holy cow! Cliff-diving bovine lands on minivan": Um... splat!?
["A cow plunged from a 200-foot cliff onto the hood of a minivan on a highway in central Washington state, according to police. The car's occupants, Charles and Linda Everson, were not hurt in Sunday's accident, but the cow was euthanized at the scene. "If the cow had fallen a split second later, the animal would have landed right in their laps," said Jeff Middleton, criminal deputy of the Chelan County Sheriff's Department. "]
Quote of the Day: Don Marquis
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): From Charles Burnett's The Horse (1973)
Clip of the Day: The Incredible Grooming Sneezing Canine
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Links for the Day (November 7th, 2007)
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13 comments:
Amy Taubin's piece is strange. There's something about it that says, "buyer's remorse." She championed two leading lights in the so-called movement (Andrew Bujalski and Aaron Katz, both interesting, still-developing filmmakers) and slams Swanberg, who's the most aesthetically adventurous director of the three, and the one whose work is most directly connected to the culture, such as it is, of young, white, middle-class college grads. I like Bujalski's movies a lot, but they're very chaste, and so disconnected from the media-saturated life of actual twentysomethings that they might as well be taking place in an earlier era -- which might be one of the reasons Taubin prefers them; that and Bujalski's decision to shoot on squarish 16mm and blow it up at the same aspect ratio, a retro affectation that's catnip to particular critics. Katz's "Dance Party USA" is very good, "Quiet City" even better, and he's far more aesthetically adventurous than Bujalski, who by his own admission is a dialogue and performance type of director.
As far as the female nudity issue, the selective outrage there is pretty funny. If the propensity to photograph attractive young women sans clothes were a crime grave enough to negate any other virtues a filmmaker might have, there would be no point in discussing Robert Altman, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg or about a zillion other notable directors. (And she's not being fair there, either; male asses and genitals show up far more often in Swanberg's scuzzy romantic comedies than in most of the more supposedly respectable "indie" movies that play the Angelika or the Landmark Sunshine.)
A side issue, but perhaps related: the spectacle of people who spend most of their waking lives writing about movies for a living, in New York City and at film festivals, having selective knee-jerk reactions to "indie solopsism" is getting rather tired. (It's only a problem for the critic if they don't like the movie, apparently.) The sorts of supposedly disconnected and trivial people Taubin has evidently grown tired of seeing onscreen (and behind movie cameras) are the same people who sit alongside her at screenings, go to film festivals and support Film Comment. None of the people who fit that description like to think of themselves as fitting that description, because as anyone who's gone to college will tell you, the bourgeoisie is bland evil incarnate, the enemy of civilization, complacent and smug and worthless. Godard, Woody Allen, Francois Truffaut and Whit Stillman shouldn't have made so many movies about them, because dude, they suck.
The jury's still out on whether these films will amount to anything other than evidence of a particular mindset during a particular era in America. But for that reason, I think the mumblecore brand (the word "movement" seems a bit much) is inherently fascinating. It mirrors the mentality of the country (not just young people, but veteran critics like Taubin) more closely than many of us would like to admit. We go to a lot of movies, some of them "challenging" or "non-mainstream" (lots of scare quotes in this post, I know, but I'm in a skeptical mood) and we check the daily headlines for news about Iraq, health care, the economy and so forth, and maybe if we dislike the Bush administration, we attend a rally once a year or send a check to some cause. But that's hard, because we have to squeeze it in between commutes, school activities (if we have kids), nights out with friends or significant others, and of course that damned job thing, if we're lucky enough to have one, and trips to Starbucks and Old Navy and Office Max (and thrift shops and dive bars, to prove we haven't totally sold out). We care, but except for a non-representative handful of devoted activists, we don't care enough to upend our lives and actually sacrifice and do something. Bush had Americans dead to rights when he pretty much told us after 9/11 that the best way to support the war effort was to grieve quietly and go shopping.
Swanberg seems more aware of these sad/true facts, and more subtly critical of them, than Taubin is ready to admit. "LOL" is coldly anthropological in its humor, not at all approving in its portrait of young people (and by extension a whole culture of several generations) who have allowed technology to modify, even dictate, identity, and to subsume and dilute purity of feeling. And Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs" -- a collaborative effort between several DIY filmmakers -- incorporates these same points in a far less overt fashion, from the boss at the production office/web site passive-aggressively dressing down his employees, then muttering that he has to go now and check his blog (ouch) to the conversation between Hannah and a would-be boyfriend who gives her a progress report on the Iraq documentary he's trying to finish. (We're given to understand that everyone they know is making an Iraq documentary. Again, ouch.)
The most comprehensive reply to Taubin's piece can be found in Kenji Fujishima's series of articles on Godard and Tarantino, which, among other things, posited that Tarantino, like it or not, is the Godard of this generation, reflective of the time and place that produced him, and the audiences that respond to his movies. The first installment is here. See also Zachary Wigon's piece on LOL.
It's perfectly legitimate to blast the mumblecore directors for being insular or disconnected, or a bunch of navel-gazers, but I think one should also answer the question, "Compared to whom?" These are films of integrity, often about trivial, myopic, unformed people; you may wish they were about other types of people, or that they had a different aesthetic or type of energy or message, or that the directors would put the camera on a frickin' tripod once in a blue moon for old time's sake, but you can't say they're avoiding reality. These directors make movies about the sorts of people who are very likely to subscribe to Film Comment.
Yes, some variety would be nice -- around awards-baiting time in the fall, especially, it gets tiresome seeing the problems of the world filtered through the lens of the suburbanized white upper to upper-middle class college graduate. But that happens to be the prism possessed by most of the people who participate in, indeed run, the movie industry at all levels -- including the indie/underground level. That's a serious problem, but it's not one that DIY filmmakers are morally obligated to address by making searing dramas about Iraq or ethnic polyglot narratives with "Sesame Street"-type messages of tolerance. More science fiction would be nice, though.
There's an interesting comments thread about this piece over at Green Cine Daily, if anyone's interested -- mostly negative toward the movies for being too white and insular. Read editor David Hudson's comments in the main text -- he's got some interesting things to say, and he also gets into the nudity issue.
I agree: there should be better science fiction movies these days. Or perhaps new genres entirely.
I haven't seen any of these "mumblecore" movies because I live in Kansas City.
"...which, among other things, posited that Tarantino, like it or not, is the Godard of this generation..."
Which is to say that in another decade or so Tarantino will be as dated and irrelevant as Godard became. Works for me...
Right, cuz, uh, nobody likes either of those dudes' work. They must be, wudayacallit, artless hacks.
No, Godard isn't an artless hack. He's just the world's most renowned amateur. And by being an amateur at a specific moment in the medium's progression -- by appearing as the antithesis of polished product -- his film's were considered great art.
But there's a reason why, even though his name still appears on lists of the 10 greatest directors, none of his films do. Because the ideas he implemented were more interesting than any of his films as wholes. His filmmaking is incredibly sophomoric and immature (i.e.: why college students and academics like him, and, it should be noted, even Tarantino has said he loved Godard when he was young, but the movies haven't aged well for him...) -- constantly stopping everything to call attention to the medium itself, rather than to put his observations and ideas into service as fully developed wholes, like say, Kubrick.
And, furthermore, as his films were so very much about the times in which they were made, that's why they've become completely dated. They weren't designed to last. Unless they're to be studied purely as artifacts from their eras.
I agree with you anon, with the exception of Contempt and One Plus One, I've tried and failed to get through any other Godard movies, mostly because I feel like I'm being lectured and/or harangued (One Plus One has enough of that to last a lifetime). Last week I tried to watch Tout Va Bien, and besides finally figuring out where Wes Anderson got the whole dollhouse-set-dolly-shot thing, I found it interminable and only of interest to those who still don't see the humor in Guy Debord and his gullible minions.
And unless QT puts away the bong, his movies are only going to get less relevant, and this is coming from someone who thinks Death Proof is some kind of masterpiece.
I got the feeling from reading the piece that Taubin didn't even watch LOL.
Anonymous, I know what you're trying to say, and on some level I agree with you... But please stop stating your opinions as if they're actually FACT. they're only your opinions. You don't have to think up some elaborate theoretical rationale for us to take them seriously. just say 'em! otherwise you come across as a complete whatehaveyou...
Calling Godard sophomoric and immature is like callign Robert Johnson or Ray Charles undisciplined and unschooled. It is absolutely correct, and good luck with that.
Calling Godard dated and irrelevant in an off-topic post in a thread about mumblecore speaks for itself.
As for Amy Taubin's column, I for my part try not to confuse the marketing with the movies. "The Puffy Chair" to me has very little in common with "Funny Ha Ha" or "Mutual Appreciation." I like the idea of these movies doing well on DVD, so I try not to complain.
The Godard comments were dead-on and legitimized by earlier remarks relating to a Tarantino/Godard comparison and whether the mumblecore films, which are clique-based and of and about their times, will date.
To compare a French intellectual filmmaker without any true commercial success like Godard to Ray Charles, a black American blues/soul singer with decades of commercial success, is not only off-topic but wildly off-target.
My second comment still stands.
"A theory based on the qualities of an object, will prevent its being unfolded according to its objects; and he who arranges topics in reference to their causes, will cease to value them according to their results." - Landor.
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