Mumblecore Takes a Thrashing
I suggest reading Amy Taubin’s skeptical take on the whole mumblecore movement over at Film Comment in which she pronounces it dead on arrival.
Tags: Film Comment, mumblecore
I suggest reading Amy Taubin’s skeptical take on the whole mumblecore movement over at Film Comment in which she pronounces it dead on arrival.
Tags: Film Comment, mumblecore
November 7, 2007 at 2:57 am
Thank God.
November 7, 2007 at 3:47 am
ok. point taken. and joe swanberg set himself up with that iraq comment. but when did a director have to tackle critical social issues just to make a movie? what’s wrong with writing what you know? he certainly didn’t waste a huge production budget on it.
November 7, 2007 at 7:34 am
I agree that you don’t have to make sweeping statements every time you pick up a camera, but you can’t do something totally half-ass, then hide behind a movement to help market your crappy video.
I loved this: “The director (I employ the term merely as a description of function)…”.
Joe Swanberg is lazy, in every aspect of filmmaking. Script? Nah. Too Hollywood. Production Design? I’ve got a gift card from Ikea for fifty dollars.
Hannah Takes the Stairs was excruciating. I’m just glad that someone has finally pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. Just another ridiculous child with no emotional intelligence, and no regard for one hundred-plus years of precedent.
November 7, 2007 at 4:05 pm
But (and I ask this as an earnest question) did the movement come first, or did his filmmaking style? The critics and “blogosphere” (ugh) started writing about how exciting these new, DIY techniques were — and then the onus was on Joe Swanberg to defend his films as all they were talked up to be. The dude just wanted to see some chicks naked.
November 11, 2007 at 6:45 am
Just sticking with Swanberg here, because I love Andrew Bujalski’s films, and believe that as a filmmaker, he’s a completely different animal. The rest I can take or leave.
I’d argue that Joe Swanberg was instrumental in not only establishing the “movement” (by acknowledging that his first feature was a direct response to “Funny Ha Ha”), but also by furiously engaging the critics and blogosphere in order to promote himself. After reading several interviews with him, as well as several breathless “reviews” of his work, I was salivating to see “Hannah Takes the Stairs.” I got suckered. I believed the hype- and most of it was straight out of Joe Swanberg’s mouth. So the onus is not on Swanberg to defend his films, but to make films that live up to the hype that he so shamelessly pours on them.
It’s easy to get an art student to take off her clothes for a video camera. It’s hard to make a stunning work of truth and beauty. Swanberg’s work offers neither.
The awkward tics and nervous verbal hesitation is there, but there is nothing underneath the surface.
It’s like Ray Carney says about Hollywood- they get the cars and haircuts right, but the emotions are all wrong.
And what about performance? Aesthetics?
I believe that lovers of cinema should be demanding more of its creators, especially those who are so quick to assume the mantle of the “voice of a generation” while simultaneously denying that the title means nothing to them.
November 11, 2007 at 6:46 am
I meant, …while simultaneously denying that the title means ANYTHING to them. Sorry.