list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Funny Ha Ha on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Funny_Ha_Ha/229746/default.aspx Title: Funny Ha Ha
Year: 2003
Director: Andrew Bujalski
Plot: American independent filmmaker Andrew Bujalski makes his feature debut as a writer/director with the microbudgeted Funny Ha Ha. Shot on-location in Boston on 16 mm film, the movie is predominately cast with unprofessional actors engaging in realistic discourse. Main character Marnie is played by first-time actress Kate Dollenmayer, a student at CalArts who previously worked on Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Marnie goes about her everyday life with a conflicted love for her friend Alex (Christian Rudder) and a dispassionate attitude toward her job as a temp office worker. While at work she meets the nervous Mitchell, played by the director. Funny Ha Ha was shown at the 2003 IFP Los Angeles Film Festival. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 8
Number of Lists: 9
Number of blog posts: 5
Number of discussion threads: 1
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:54:00 GMTFunny Ha Ha2003Andrew BujalskiAmerican independent filmmaker Andrew Bujalski makes his feature debut as a writer/director with the microbudgeted Funny Ha Ha. Shot on-location in Boston on 16 mm film, the movie is predominately cast with unprofessional actors engaging in realistic discourse. Main character Marnie is played by first-time actress Kate Dollenmayer, a student at CalArts who previously worked on <a href="/players/P____99850/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Richard Linklater</a>'s <a href=/films/184356/default.aspx style='text-decoration:underline'>Waking Life</a>. Marnie goes about her everyday life with a conflicted love for her friend Alex (Christian Rudder) and a dispassionate attitude toward her job as a temp office worker. While at work she meets the nervous Mitchell, played by the director. Funny Ha Ha was shown at the 2003 IFP Los Angeles Film Festival. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide8Taggedy Taggged (6-10)9513http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/t64908zb24v.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Funny_Ha_Ha/229746/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/joem18b/archive/2008/11/19/37428.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 11/19/2008 1:54:00 AM
Body: First paragraph of a review that I posted last year:"If I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore."My assigned movie, "Funny Ha Ha," would be perhaps the first film in the mumblecore genre. Did I read something somewhere about how frequently, for some mysterious reason, the first in a genre is also the best? Homer, Milton, and Cervantes were mentioned. Could this be true of FHH? Is it the purest, as well as the first, mumblecore expression of newly-adult American modern life on the hoof, before the mumblecore melodrama of Mutual Appreciation or the variations on a theme in "LOL" or the psychological depth of The Puffy Chair? A question to keep in mind as I watch.Haven't heard much from the mumblecore community lately. What's the buzz? What's the buzz around saying what's the buzz? Stephen Holden called Baghead a mumblecore movie - comedy/horror mumblecore? Are movies like In Search of a Midnight Kiss moving mumblecore into some new merged genre? Was Old Joy really mumblecore, as it's often listed; some genre morphing might have already taken place in that one. Andrew Bujalski, who wrote, directed, and starred in FHH, hasn't made a feature film in years; he's done some acting but not made any movies. Kate Dollenmayer, who plays Marnie, the lead in FHH, appeared in Bujalski's next film and then disappeared behind the camera. There's an album with her name on it; otherwise, she's light on the google.FHH caught me in one of my watching-the-last-half-of-the-movie-first phases. I've recently finished Rules of the Game and War, Inc. that way. Watching those two films backwards helped them, in my estimation. I'm guessing in advance that watching "Funny Ha Ha," starting at the 45-minute mark, will not harm my enjoyment of the film and may help it. But we'll see.Fooey! Now I've slipped up and taken a peek at the first few paragraphs of A.O. Scott's FHH review in the NYT, wherein he tells us that the film is about a young woman's fruitless search for a little love and meaning in her life. Why did I read that? So now why should I bother dropping into the middle of the movie, already knowing that? The adventure and mystery are ruined. Feh. But I'll do it anyway. So. There Marnie is, passed out in a car. Now she stays with a girlfriend and her girlfriend goes on a job interview. Oops, Marnie is the girlfriend, not the drunk in the car. Confusion. Good. That's how I like it to be. No harm done reading a little A.O. Scott. Meanwhile, the theme of the movie is made clear in minutes, middle start or not, once I've got Marnie in my sights. Perhaps my initial excitement was a little attenuated, but now I'm involved, so onward!Marnie is wearing a T-shirt from a Newton grammar school. Newton is an upscale community in the Boston suburbs. Always made me think of fig newtons, not Isaac. I seem to remember a mall there, back in the 60s, out on Commonwealth Avenue. Bujalski was born in Boston. A good place to locate a movie about the just-graduated and I speak as one who swam in that social sea after college for a couple of years. Youth, out of school at last. FHH is the pure unvarnished article. The essence of mumblecore. Absolute minimum script, or so it appears onscreen. The meta experience identical to the dramatic experience; that is, there are two layers working here, carrying the same message: (a) level one, the young woman moving along through her first adult life structure while (b) level two, the actors live their lives for us by acting onscreen, so that, for this viewer at least, the element in FHH most profoundly moving is the sight of these twentysomethings struggling with their craft, new adult members of society, now with the responsibility of paying rent and negotiating car insurance (no small task in Massachusetts!), with the need to discover meaning in the challenges that they face and in their responses to those challenges. Not the characters, you understand, but the actors themselves. A reviewer comments "The semi-improvised performances seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters," but the point is that these performances highlight the actors not as the characters they portray but as individuals working - that is, acting. Or am I just being fooled into thinking that I'm seeing the actors, not the characters, because of Bujalski's style? But no. I know nothing about the actors; perhaps they have something in common with their characters, perhaps not. There is a signature cadence in untrained improvisation, with its small pauses not heard in everyday conversation, neither conversation between those who know each other nor that between strangers, tiny pauses born of the actor's interior monolog, pauses which replace the verbal overlaps and gaps found in everyday talk. So that as we watch, the actors think about their lines, or the direction just provided offscreen, or the act of acting, anything but the less conscious social drivers propelling the rest of us day-to-day in casual conversation. Each actor steps into the frame with an ineffable sense of innocence, usually with an embarrassed grin, and speaks, and we understand that here onscreen are living reminders of already-came-of-age, struggling with dialog as an instantiated metaphor for the whole all-of-it struggle involved in becoming an adult. I find this evocative in the extreme, a spiritual supermagnet pulling me back to that same time in my own life, with all the memories, nostalgia, speculations, and regrets attendant to it - a time in my own life when I'm more than ripe for that to happen. Could I, would I, do better a second time around? That question forms the emotional core of the movie for my demographic; the same thing happens when we watch our own children in their twenties. Where else can you get that in cinema? Not in The Incredible Hulk, that's for sure.The Boojer, by the way, saves the juiciest scenes in the movie for himself - an excruciating dinner and a later sort-of-extended-date with Marni. Cultural extra credit: compare and contrast the boy/girl dinners in FHH and I Think I Love My Wife.At the end of the second half, I return to reviewland and find:A.O. Scott: "What gives this film its quiet pathos is not so much the relative bleakness of Marnie's circumstances but the modesty of her expectations. At one point, she makes a to-do list, and its lack of ambition - spend more time outdoors, make friends with Jackie, learn to play chess - is both funny and sad."Carina Chocano: "Mainly, Marnie is staying afloat and trying to connect with others who are equally lost."Seems like I've seen a lot of this kind of hangdog vibe around the FHH reviews - negatives about mood and lifestyle - and I am not down with that (although I otherwise agree with the NYT and LA Times FHH review content). Perhaps having reached the top of the mountain makes it hard for Scott and Chocano to see those younger who are still way back down in the foothills. Marnie and her friends in FHH are newly-minted adults living life in that broad, spacious, undefined socioeconomicsphere found in first-world countries, a landscape where middle-class children find themselves free to roam, after emerging from college, if they happen to be situated in the middle of the startingout spectrum: neither at one end on the turf of the cinematically-ever-popular male slackers so often seen onscreen, nor the other end on that of the striving medical-school, law-school, and computer-geek proto-professionals; that is, Marnie and her friends are living the unfocused life that many of us lived in our twenties. I speak as one who stumbled off the college campus for the last time to find myself, at the age of 23, living alone in Boston, working at a job I wasn't interested in, and looking for love after refusing to commit to marriage and being dropped by my intended, who switched to her Plan B awfully quickly, it seemed to me. The quiet pathos for my demographic didn't happen then, it's happening to us now, in our dotage, on the viewer's side of the screen. Where is the pathos in Marnie's freshness and energy and in the potential of youth, for Marnie and her friends with an open and unknowable and limitless future stretching ahead of them, or in the knowledge that Kate Dollenmayer herself has moved on into that future, or in Bujalski's vision? Marnie's to-do list in no way lacks ambition; is in no way funny or sad. The act of making that list metaphorizes the ambition of the young; the contents of the list highlight the innocence of youth; it's a list drawn up by someone with all the time in the world and, interestingly, it is a list quite similar to such a one as made up by someone at the other end of life, without much time remaining.So I asked my daughter about this quiet-pathos thing, her being 23 and a recent graduate and living in Boston, all the same as Marnie; her reply: "As far as waitressing goes, I feel embarrassed about it at times, but I've actually made some valuable connections and now have places to stay and help finding employment if I want to go to South Carolina, Maui, Australia, or Columbia (have business cards/notes/emails from all of these people). Plus I make ok money, work with nice people, take home free food (ok, thats not completely kosher but its not like I get a salary or even hourly pay that amounts to anything after taxes). Plus, Im learning to speak Haitian Creole while simultaneously turning enemies into friends (the cooks didnt like me at first bc they assumed I was racist and told me so, but when I asked to learn their language they are suddenly happy to see me each day). So from my lowly job Im gaining: communication skills, agility training, extreme multi-tasking experience, networking opportunities, and employee benefits (that's the free food). Sounds almost ambitious when phrased correctly. This isnt to say I dont doubt what Im doing because I do, every day, multiple times a day. I get asked time and again by my bosses, co-workers and customers "why are you here if you have a degree from an Ivy League school??" One person even went so far as to say I was being selfish because letting my parents spend all that money to send me to a good school only to "disregard" my qualifications by working in a chain restaurant was just like throwing all that tuition money in the trash. Obviously obtaining "street smarts" and trying to experience different ways of life before choosing the "purpose-driven" one is something only misfits and failures do... So what am I trying to say here? Maybe im just trying to rationalize my own current existence when in reality it is just as ambitionless and lost as Marnie's. But maybe if the reviewers got off their NY Times and La Times high horses and really thought about what it means to EXPERIENCE and LIVE life, they might see things a wee bit differently. Or maybe not. Am I giggly all the time? as my friend Lynnea would say: "HELLS no!" But I dont think Ill look back on this period of my life and see it as a time of just "staying afloat" (my high school years on the other hand...)."One more take on the pathos meme, quickly, before getting on with the movie: Marnie celebrates her birthday quietly. Proactive note to lugubrious reviewers: this also is not pathos. What the heck did I do on my birthdays back in Boston? Who knows? I do remember being in a laundromat at North Station on Christmas Eve one year. It was snowing. Neither the Bruins nor the Celtics were in town, so The Garden was deserted except for me and an old woman. I went back to my room and drank. I still remember that, so I guess it means something to me, but I didn't feel pathetic at the time. I felt lonely but pretty good.Ginormous. I've had that word in my head. I'm thinking that if I write it down here, maybe it will go away.And so on to the first half of FHH.Oh my God. Bujalski saddles Marnie with an unrequited-love jones, up front. Booge, how could you? What were you thinking? This is something a novice twenty-something filmmaker would do. Oh, right. But this is why watching War, Inc. backwards helped the movie so much; the process cut out loads of unnecessary plot points till it was too late to matter. In the same way, I was able to watch the downslope of FHH without these moulting feathers of love annoying me. Hmm. Now Marnie liplocks some dude at the twenty-eight minute mark. I would never have predicted that. Oh, no, and then she osculates again three minutes later with her married-dude friend. I'm so glad I'm coming to this at the end and not at the beginning. Why? Because in the second half she's staring into the future without seeing beyond the walls of her room, locked in her head while her anger percolates unfelt somewhere down there lower in her body - after the drinking and smooching fail her - but I understood that, in the second half of the movie, without the presumptive romance-o-motivation of the first.No. I'm overreacting. Belay that last paragraph. I've been Hollywoodpavlovianized. This is not Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the last minute of Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail. This is random lowkey young adult semijoyless evolutionary smootching, pebbles in a pond that cause no ripples. Marnie pretends that it didn't happen, isn't happening, and I'll do the same. Romance is a big deal for these kids, perhaps the biggest deal. My twenties were mostly a history of bad dates. Easy to put off career issues to the next decade while getting the living part right. So Booge perforce makes use of that, but not so much that we can't shrug when the lips meet, and then move on. But still, this series of fraught encounters with men, I don't know; quit beating the drum, Booge. This does remind me, though, that I watched the original Forsythe Saga backward. As with Marnie and Alex in the second half of FHH, something heavy had obviously gone on between Irene and Soames, and Fleur's life was constantly perturbed by it, but it seemed more romantic to me to not know what that something was, not to know what had happened - seemed more romantic than watching the first half and seeing whatever it was that happened actually happen. Thesis: nostalgia coupled with imagination is always stronger than dramatic invention, probably because lived experience, including the actual act of imagination, is more visceral than skoptophilia and its milder brethren.New-Age side note: Coincidence #1: Earlier in this screed I wrote a sentence using the word "evolutionary" and then I started FHH up again and watched the last ten minutes of the movie, which I hadn't seen yet (minutes 35 to 45) and Marnie says to Alex or Alex says to Marnie, "You're the most evolved person I know." Coincidence #2: Later that day, I went to Blockbuster to return Get Smart (I'm rating it "j" on a scale of 1 to q) and while there I picked up The Last Request, which somebody somewhere liked a little bit, and while I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I liked Get Smart and I said, Anne Hathaway is no Barbara Feldon, and when I got home and started The Last Request, there Barbara was, in a starring role. The odds of plucking up a Barbara Feldon movie at random? Antiginormous. Coincidence #3: Marnie's shirt has the number 18 on its back. I'm 18b. My daughter, I learned THE SAME DAY, is living in apartment #18 in her building on Concord St. Consult your Jung! These coincidental whorls in the universal fabric happened ON THE SAME DAY as Obama's election and mean that FHH is connected to the core zeitgeist of the planet. You read it here first.Propositions: (1) The first half of a movie is usually better than the second half when the movie is watched in normal order. (2) Watching the second half of a movie first often improves the movie. Sometimes, watching the second half is sufficient in itself. (3) Thus, perhaps whichever half you watch first is the best.I had to ask Wilson, who assigned this movie to me, what the last two spoken lines of the last scene were. They seemed crucial in defining the mood of the movie, but mumblecore being named mumblecore for a reason, I couldn't make out what Alex and Marnie said to each other. Fortunately, Wilson could. And those two lines bear out my contention, or so I think, that Bujalski is a deeply optimistic guy and FHH is, in the end, a celebration, not a paean. In that final scene, Marnie shows some anger, a desire to move out into the world, and a rejection of the feckless Alex. Good for her and good for a society and economy (knock on wood) where youth is able to rattle around a little. I watched a mumblecore movie made by Joe Swanberg a while back, in which the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless; Bujalski throws down some marbles in Marnie's path, but his affection for her never lets her fall hard enough to break anything.This film that launched a genre reminds us that being young and being old are two entirely different things. (Bujalski turned 30 this year.)
]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:54:00 GMTjoem18bjoem18b Blog11/19/2008 1:54:00 AMFirst paragraph of a review that I posted last year:"If I'm in the mood for a Western, I want horses. If I'm in the mood for explosions, I go to a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie. In either case, I don't want, say, Max Von Sydow playing chess with Death in some black-and-white hovel on the rocky shores of Sturnnveggloven. In the same way, if I'm in the mood to watch echo-boomer twenty-somethings filming their friends hanging out with each other in small apartments and on the urban stoop and in the homes and basements of their parents and grandparents, none of whom will ever appear onscreen, then for those of you who haven't seen one such film before, this would be mumblecore."My assigned movie, "Funny Ha Ha," would be perhaps the first film in the mumblecore genre. Did I read something somewhere about how frequently, for some mysterious reason, the first in a genre is also the best? Homer, Milton, and Cervantes were mentioned. Could this be true of FHH? Is it the purest, as well as the first, mumblecore expression of newly-adult American modern life on the hoof, before the mumblecore melodrama of Mutual Appreciation or the variations on a theme in "LOL" or the psychological depth of The Puffy Chair? A question to keep in mind as I watch.Haven't heard much from the mumblecore community lately. What's the buzz? What's the buzz around saying what's the buzz? Stephen Holden called Baghead a mumblecore movie - comedy/horror mumblecore? Are movies like In Search of a Midnight Kiss moving mumblecore into some new merged genre? Was Old Joy really mumblecore, as it's often listed; some genre morphing might have already taken place in that one. Andrew Bujalski, who wrote, directed, and starred in FHH, hasn't made a feature film in years; he's done some acting but not made any movies. Kate Dollenmayer, who plays Marnie, the lead in FHH, appeared in Bujalski's next film and then disappeared behind the camera. There's an album with her name on it; otherwise, she's light on the google.FHH caught me in one of my watching-the-last-half-of-the-movie-first phases. I've recently finished Rules of the Game and War, Inc. that way. Watching those two films backwards helped them, in my estimation. I'm guessing in advance that watching "Funny Ha Ha," starting at the 45-minute mark, will not harm my enjoyment of the film and may help it. But we'll see.Fooey! Now I've slipped up and taken a peek at the first few paragraphs of A.O. Scott's FHH review in the NYT, wherein he tells us that the film is about a young woman's fruitless search for a little love and meaning in her life. Why did I read that? So now why should I bother dropping into the middle of the movie, already knowing that? The adventure and mystery are ruined. Feh. But I'll do it anyway. So. There Marnie is, passed out in a car. Now she stays with a girlfriend and her girlfriend goes on a job interview. Oops, Marnie is the girlfriend, not the drunk in the car. Confusion. Good. That's how I like it to be. No harm done reading a little A.O. Scott. Meanwhile, the theme of the movie is made clear in minutes, middle start or not, once I've got Marnie in my sights. Perhaps my initial excitement was a little attenuated, but now I'm involved, so onward!Marnie is wearing a T-shirt from a Newton grammar school. Newton is an upscale community in the Boston suburbs. Always made me think of fig newtons, not Isaac. I seem to remember a mall there, back in the 60s, out on Commonwealth Avenue. Bujalski was born in Boston. A good place to locate a movie about the just-graduated and I speak as one who swam in that social sea after college for a couple of years. Youth, out of school at last. FHH is the pure unvarnished article. The essence of mumblecore. Absolute minimum script, or so it appears onscreen. The meta experience identical to the dramatic experience; that is, there are two layers working here, carrying the same message: (a) level one, the young woman moving along through her first adult life structure while (b) level two, the actors live their lives for us by acting onscreen, so that, for this viewer at least, the element in FHH most profoundly moving is the sight of these twentysomethings struggling with their craft, new adult members of society, now with the responsibility of paying rent and negotiating car insurance (no small task in Massachusetts!), with the need to discover meaning in the challenges that they face and in their responses to those challenges. Not the characters, you understand, but the actors themselves. A reviewer comments "The semi-improvised performances seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters," but the point is that these performances highlight the actors not as the characters they portray but as individuals working - that is, acting. Or am I just being fooled into thinking that I'm seeing the actors, not the characters, because of Bujalski's style? But no. I know nothing about the actors; perhaps they have something in common with their characters, perhaps not. There is a signature cadence in untrained improvisation, with its small pauses not heard in everyday conversation, neither conversation between those who know each other nor that between strangers, tiny pauses born of the actor's interior monolog, pauses which replace the verbal overlaps and gaps found in everyday talk. So that as we watch, the actors think about their lines, or the direction just provided offscreen, or the act of acting, anything but the less conscious social drivers propelling the rest of us day-to-day in casual conversation. Each actor steps into the frame with an ineffable sense of innocence, usually with an embarrassed grin, and speaks, and we understand that here onscreen are living reminders of already-came-of-age, struggling with dialog as an instantiated metaphor for the whole all-of-it struggle involved in becoming an adult. I find this evocative in the extreme, a spiritual supermagnet pulling me back to that same time in my own life, with all the memories, nostalgia, speculations, and regrets attendant to it - a time in my own life when I'm more than ripe for that to happen. Could I, would I, do better a second time around? That question forms the emotional core of the movie for my demographic; the same thing happens when we watch our own children in their twenties. Where else can you get that in cinema? Not in The Incredible Hulk, that's for sure.The Boojer, by the way, saves the juiciest scenes in the movie for himself - an excruciating dinner and a later sort-of-extended-date with Marni. Cultural extra credit: compare and contrast the boy/girl dinners in FHH and I Think I Love My Wife.At the end of the second half, I return to reviewland and find:A.O. Scott: "What gives this film its quiet pathos is not so much the relative bleakness of Marnie's circumstances but the modesty of her expectations. At one point, she makes a to-do list, and its lack of ambition - spend more time outdoors, make friends with Jackie, learn to play chess - is both funny and sad."Carina Chocano: "Mainly, Marnie is staying afloat and trying to connect with others who are equally lost."Seems like I've seen a lot of this kind of hangdog vibe around the FHH reviews - negatives about mood and lifestyle - and I am not down with that (although I otherwise agree with the NYT and LA Times FHH review content). Perhaps having reached the top of the mountain makes it hard for Scott and Chocano to see those younger who are still way back down in the foothills. Marnie and her friends in FHH are newly-minted adults living life in that broad, spacious, undefined socioeconomicsphere found in first-world countries, a landscape where middle-class children find themselves free to roam, after emerging from college, if they happen to be situated in the middle of the startingout spectrum: neither at one end on the turf of the cinematically-ever-popular male slackers so often seen onscreen, nor the other end on that of the striving medical-school, law-school, and computer-geek proto-professionals; that is, Marnie and her friends are living the unfocused life that many of us lived in our twenties. I speak as one who stumbled off the college campus for the last time to find myself, at the age of 23, living alone in Boston, working at a job I wasn't interested in, and looking for love after refusing to commit to marriage and being dropped by my intended, who switched to her Plan B awfully quickly, it seemed to me. The quiet pathos for my demographic didn't happen then, it's happening to us now, in our dotage, on the viewer's side of the screen. Where is the pathos in Marnie's freshness and energy and in the potential of youth, for Marnie and her friends with an open and unknowable and limitless future stretching ahead of them, or in the knowledge that Kate Dollenmayer herself has moved on into that future, or in Bujalski's vision? Marnie's to-do list in no way lacks ambition; is in no way funny or sad. The act of making that list metaphorizes the ambition of the young; the contents of the list highlight the innocence of youth; it's a list drawn up by someone with all the time in the world and, interestingly, it is a list quite similar to such a one as made up by someone at the other end of life, without much time remaining.So I asked my daughter about this quiet-pathos thing, her being 23 and a recent graduate and living in Boston, all the same as Marnie; her reply: "As far as waitressing goes, I feel embarrassed about it at times, but I've actually made some valuable connections and now have places to stay and help finding employment if I want to go to South Carolina, Maui, Australia, or Columbia (have business cards/notes/emails from all of these people). Plus I make ok money, work with nice people, take home free food (ok, thats not completely kosher but its not like I get a salary or even hourly pay that amounts to anything after taxes). Plus, Im learning to speak Haitian Creole while simultaneously turning enemies into friends (the cooks didnt like me at first bc they assumed I was racist and told me so, but when I asked to learn their language they are suddenly happy to see me each day). So from my lowly job Im gaining: communication skills, agility training, extreme multi-tasking experience, networking opportunities, and employee benefits (that's the free food). Sounds almost ambitious when phrased correctly. This isnt to say I dont doubt what Im doing because I do, every day, multiple times a day. I get asked time and again by my bosses, co-workers and customers "why are you here if you have a degree from an Ivy League school??" One person even went so far as to say I was being selfish because letting my parents spend all that money to send me to a good school only to "disregard" my qualifications by working in a chain restaurant was just like throwing all that tuition money in the trash. Obviously obtaining "street smarts" and trying to experience different ways of life before choosing the "purpose-driven" one is something only misfits and failures do... So what am I trying to say here? Maybe im just trying to rationalize my own current existence when in reality it is just as ambitionless and lost as Marnie's. But maybe if the reviewers got off their NY Times and La Times high horses and really thought about what it means to EXPERIENCE and LIVE life, they might see things a wee bit differently. Or maybe not. Am I giggly all the time? as my friend Lynnea would say: "HELLS no!" But I dont think Ill look back on this period of my life and see it as a time of just "staying afloat" (my high school years on the other hand...)."One more take on the pathos meme, quickly, before getting on with the movie: Marnie celebrates her birthday quietly. Proactive note to lugubrious reviewers: this also is not pathos. What the heck did I do on my birthdays back in Boston? Who knows? I do remember being in a laundromat at North Station on Christmas Eve one year. It was snowing. Neither the Bruins nor the Celtics were in town, so The Garden was deserted except for me and an old woman. I went back to my room and drank. I still remember that, so I guess it means something to me, but I didn't feel pathetic at the time. I felt lonely but pretty good.Ginormous. I've had that word in my head. I'm thinking that if I write it down here, maybe it will go away.And so on to the first half of FHH.Oh my God. Bujalski saddles Marnie with an unrequited-love jones, up front. Booge, how could you? What were you thinking? This is something a novice twenty-something filmmaker would do. Oh, right. But this is why watching War, Inc. backwards helped the movie so much; the process cut out loads of unnecessary plot points till it was too late to matter. In the same way, I was able to watch the downslope of FHH without these moulting feathers of love annoying me. Hmm. Now Marnie liplocks some dude at the twenty-eight minute mark. I would never have predicted that. Oh, no, and then she osculates again three minutes later with her married-dude friend. I'm so glad I'm coming to this at the end and not at the beginning. Why? Because in the second half she's staring into the future without seeing beyond the walls of her room, locked in her head while her anger percolates unfelt somewhere down there lower in her body - after the drinking and smooching fail her - but I understood that, in the second half of the movie, without the presumptive romance-o-motivation of the first.No. I'm overreacting. Belay that last paragraph. I've been Hollywoodpavlovianized. This is not Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the last minute of Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail. This is random lowkey young adult semijoyless evolutionary smootching, pebbles in a pond that cause no ripples. Marnie pretends that it didn't happen, isn't happening, and I'll do the same. Romance is a big deal for these kids, perhaps the biggest deal. My twenties were mostly a history of bad dates. Easy to put off career issues to the next decade while getting the living part right. So Booge perforce makes use of that, but not so much that we can't shrug when the lips meet, and then move on. But still, this series of fraught encounters with men, I don't know; quit beating the drum, Booge. This does remind me, though, that I watched the original Forsythe Saga backward. As with Marnie and Alex in the second half of FHH, something heavy had obviously gone on between Irene and Soames, and Fleur's life was constantly perturbed by it, but it seemed more romantic to me to not know what that something was, not to know what had happened - seemed more romantic than watching the first half and seeing whatever it was that happened actually happen. Thesis: nostalgia coupled with imagination is always stronger than dramatic invention, probably because lived experience, including the actual act of imagination, is more visceral than skoptophilia and its milder brethren.New-Age side note: Coincidence #1: Earlier in this screed I wrote a sentence using the word "evolutionary" and then I started FHH up again and watched the last ten minutes of the movie, which I hadn't seen yet (minutes 35 to 45) and Marnie says to Alex or Alex says to Marnie, "You're the most evolved person I know." Coincidence #2: Later that day, I went to Blockbuster to return Get Smart (I'm rating it "j" on a scale of 1 to q) and while there I picked up The Last Request, which somebody somewhere liked a little bit, and while I was checking out, the clerk asked me how I liked Get Smart and I said, Anne Hathaway is no Barbara Feldon, and when I got home and started The Last Request, there Barbara was, in a starring role. The odds of plucking up a Barbara Feldon movie at random? Antiginormous. Coincidence #3: Marnie's shirt has the number 18 on its back. I'm 18b. My daughter, I learned THE SAME DAY, is living in apartment #18 in her building on Concord St. Consult your Jung! These coincidental whorls in the universal fabric happened ON THE SAME DAY as Obama's election and mean that FHH is connected to the core zeitgeist of the planet. You read it here first.Propositions: (1) The first half of a movie is usually better than the second half when the movie is watched in normal order. (2) Watching the second half of a movie first often improves the movie. Sometimes, watching the second half is sufficient in itself. (3) Thus, perhaps whichever half you watch first is the best.I had to ask Wilson, who assigned this movie to me, what the last two spoken lines of the last scene were. They seemed crucial in defining the mood of the movie, but mumblecore being named mumblecore for a reason, I couldn't make out what Alex and Marnie said to each other. Fortunately, Wilson could. And those two lines bear out my contention, or so I think, that Bujalski is a deeply optimistic guy and FHH is, in the end, a celebration, not a paean. In that final scene, Marnie shows some anger, a desire to move out into the world, and a rejection of the feckless Alex. Good for her and good for a society and economy (knock on wood) where youth is able to rattle around a little. I watched a mumblecore movie made by Joe Swanberg a while back, in which the protagonists grow stronger in the face of Swanberg's efforts to render them helpless; Bujalski throws down some marbles in Marnie's path, but his affection for her never lets her fall hard enough to break anything.This film that launched a genre reminds us that being young and being old are two entirely different things. (Bujalski turned 30 this year.) http://www.spout.com/blogs/jjgittes/archive/2008/8/1/33382.aspx Post By: jjgittes
Post To: jjgittes Blog
Post Date: 8/1/2008 10:22:41 AM
Body: I saw FUNNY HA HA in February on a panel for the new mumblecore movement and so for the first time since Reel 13 started, I turned off the TV after the short. I just couldn't sit through it again. That is not to say that it's this awful, unwatchable movie, but it's not good enough to rewatch so recently after seeing it for the first time. For those of you who aren't aware, mumblecore is an emerging movement in independent cinema (similar to the Dogma movement of the mid-90's) that feature non-actors, improvised dialogue, handheld verite camera, a loose plot and are shot with a micro-budget. The problem with most mumblecore films, including FUNNY HA HA, is that they are what they are out of necessity as opposed to aesthetics. In other words, they have handheld camera and non-actors because that's what they can afford, not because they have some high-brow artistic purpose. The scenes in FUNNY HA HA often feel quite staged for the camera, which belies the naturalism that mumblecore is supposed to represent. The shot and framing choices by director Andrew Bujalski are very traditional in nature, but they don't seem to mesh stylistically with the non-professional cast. One can't help but get the impression that he'd much rather be shooting a larger budget film with glamorous movie stars.Which is a good segue to the primary issue with the mumblecore movement and FUNNY HA HA which is the "actors". With meandering narratives and only small semblances of plot, the thing that makes or breaks any mumblecore film is the charisma of its on-screen talent. They're not trained, but they can carry a film if they have charm and are somewhat comfortable in front of the camera. In the best of cases, like for example, Aaron Katz's 2007 film QUIET CITY, the actors' personality fills the gap left by the lack of story and the result is a film that feels honest, real, resonant, relevant and a more organic portrait of real life. By contrast, FUNNY HA HA revolves around the character of Marni as played by Kate Dollenmayer, who isn't very interesting or appealing as a protagonist, nor does she appear at ease or natural when performing. This is true of pretty much all the players in the film (except the director himself who is very believable in a significant supporting role) and this becomes the Achilles heel of the film. With all the other limitations of the genre, whether budgetary or artistic, it's too enormous of a flaw to overcome.
]]>Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:22:41 GMTjjgittesjjgittes Blog8/1/2008 10:22:41 AMI saw FUNNY HA HA in February on a panel for the new mumblecore movement and so for the first time since Reel 13 started, I turned off the TV after the short. I just couldn't sit through it again. That is not to say that it's this awful, unwatchable movie, but it's not good enough to rewatch so recently after seeing it for the first time. For those of you who aren't aware, mumblecore is an emerging movement in independent cinema (similar to the Dogma movement of the mid-90's) that feature non-actors, improvised dialogue, handheld verite camera, a loose plot and are shot with a micro-budget. The problem with most mumblecore films, including FUNNY HA HA, is that they are what they are out of necessity as opposed to aesthetics. In other words, they have handheld camera and non-actors because that's what they can afford, not because they have some high-brow artistic purpose. The scenes in FUNNY HA HA often feel quite staged for the camera, which belies the naturalism that mumblecore is supposed to represent. The shot and framing choices by director Andrew Bujalski are very traditional in nature, but they don't seem to mesh stylistically with the non-professional cast. One can't help but get the impression that he'd much rather be shooting a larger budget film with glamorous movie stars.Which is a good segue to the primary issue with the mumblecore movement and FUNNY HA HA which is the "actors". With meandering narratives and only small semblances of plot, the thing that makes or breaks any mumblecore film is the charisma of its on-screen talent. They're not trained, but they can carry a film if they have charm and are somewhat comfortable in front of the camera. In the best of cases, like for example, Aaron Katz's 2007 film QUIET CITY, the actors' personality fills the gap left by the lack of story and the result is a film that feels honest, real, resonant, relevant and a more organic portrait of real life. By contrast, FUNNY HA HA revolves around the character of Marni as played by Kate Dollenmayer, who isn't very interesting or appealing as a protagonist, nor does she appear at ease or natural when performing. This is true of pretty much all the players in the film (except the director himself who is very believable in a significant supporting role) and this becomes the Achilles heel of the film. With all the other limitations of the genre, whether budgetary or artistic, it's too enormous of a flaw to overcome. http://www.spout.com/blogs/moviebabe/archive/2007/7/14/14310.aspx Post By: MovieBabe
Post To: MovieBabe Blog
Post Date: 7/14/2007 1:48:00 PM
Body: By Tricia Olszewski “Honest” is a word likely to be thrown around a lot regarding writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s debut, Funny Ha Ha. “Realistic” is another. As in, people in real life aren’t always articulate, and they’re not always interesting or put together, and they don’t always have a whole lot to do. Just like Bujalski’s characters. Man, it’s so honest. Yeah, but you know what? Sometimes—in fact, a whole lot of the time, if you’re lucky enough—people in real life are also well-spoken and charismatic and fun to be around. And therein lies the problem with Funny Ha Ha, a meandering drama about a meandering college grad and her dull friends. Sure, life right after college can be a drag. And certainly, adolescence can now extend well into one’s 20s, causing physical grown-ups to still make giant deals out of crushes and bust creamer containers in restaurants and yell out “Dorks!” to a couple of completely normal guys playing Frisbee. But does anyone really want to watch a movie about it? Funny Ha Ha spends 89 minutes with 24-year-old Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer), a pretty but unadorned Boston hipster who just got fired from an unspecified job for asking for a raise. She tells a friend, Alex (Christian Rudder), that she’s now just “walking the earth,” and sorta looking for a new job, too. And later that same night, after running into friends Rachel (Jennifer L. Schaper) and Dave (Myles Paige) and joining them for dinner with still more friends—of course, this being a slacker crowd, not only is the second group running late, no one’s actually decided where to eat—Marnie reveals that, omigod, she’s had the biggest crush on Alex for so long, and he didn’t tell her he just broke up with his girlfriend. But, uh, it’s, like, no big deal, guys. Seriously though! I’m, like, just, whatever. Really. This is just a paraphrase of Marnie’s stammered backpedaling, after Rachel, Dave, and Alex’s just-dropped-in sister, Susan (Lissa Patton Rudder), all, like, freak out at the news. But if it drives you crazy, be warned: They all talk like that. All the time. And the plot involves three basic things: Marnie’s crush, Marnie’s temp job, and Marnie’s new admirer, Mitchell (Bujalski), a nerdly type she meets at the temp job. Conversations are air-filled, consisting mainly of verbal-tic “sorry”s, “I dunno”s, and various nonreasons why pairing with either T-shirted dude won’t be in Marnie’s future. At night, they drink and crash at each other’s sparely decorated apartments. No one proves to have much of a personality or sense of humor, though nervous laughter accompanies their every sentence. Bujalski shot Funny Ha Ha in 16 mm. And to be fair, the grainy look combines with Bujalski’s reportedly loose script and the actors’ improvisation to give the movie an impressive documentary feel: Each performer hems and haws with Gen-X vérité, and the lights and sound are often home-movie imperfect. (Whether the latter was intended is another matter.) And there are several moments of gut-wrenching awkwardness, including Alex’s pre-emptive phone call to Marnie in which he around-the-bush refers to some “crazy things” his sister’s been saying and tells her it’s not going to happen (which he at least later criticizes as “an asshole move”) and Mitchell’s mini tantrum when the day he spends kicking back with the woman “probably 90 percent of her guy friends are in love with” doesn’t improve her perpetual semi-dour mood. He asks her, “What more do you want out of life?” It’s at least a hint that Marnie knows there’s more to living than just her listless existence—a tiny bit of growth reaffirmed in the movie’s last moment. But the ending’s so abrupt, and the sound quality so bad, that audience members may very well miss the final exchange, making the whole irritating enterprise seem pointless. And that might be a lot like life, too, but it’s not what anyone should call entertainment. If any of the female characters in Funny Ha Ha were in the position of Claire, the young French woman at the center of Eléonore Faucher’s Sequins, they’d, like, totally die. Claire (Lola Naymark), in contrast, is quite unlike most of the teenagers you’d meet in real life. Seventeen, pregnant, and living on her own, she’s surprisingly savvy and self-possessed. She’s made meticulous plans to give birth and place her baby for adoption discreetly, taking sick leave from her dreadful supermarket job when she starts showing and yanking out some of her curly red hair to prove her story—that she has cancer—to co-workers. Quaintly, Claire writes real pen-on-paper letters to her only friend, Lucile (Marie Félix), and her treasured hobby is embroidery, on rabbit furs she acquires after trading the cabbages she surreptitiously harvests off her family’s land. So, no, this 17-year-old character may not realistically reflect her modern demographic, but she’s never unbelievable. Nor will she work your last nerve. Depending on your taste for gossamer storytelling, however, Faucher’s feature debut as a whole just might. Sequins is quiet and decorous, desperate to be as exquisite as Claire’s fiery, cascading mane. The plot involves not just Claire’s pregnancy and isolation—she keeps only phone contact with her parents so they won’t find out, and doesn’t want a relationship with the baby’s father—but the low-key friendship she strikes up with Mme. Mélikian (Ariane Ascaride), a middle-aged embroiderer who recently lost her only son because of an accident caused by Lucile’s older brother, Guillaume (Thomas Laroppe). Lucile’s family encourages Claire to ask Mme. Mélikian for employment, noting that she probably needs help with her workload now that her son is gone. So Claire wraps her hair in a scarf and respectfully approaches Mme. Mélikian, who agrees to try her out. Claire shows up at the embroiderer’s drab home the next morning and goes to work, wordlessly—the dialogue in the first part of Sequins, penned by Faucher and Gaëlle Macé, is spare, and it doesn’t get any more gabby after Claire’s on the job. Instead, we see either Mme. Mélikian or Claire sewing/staring/generally looking pensive, often as Michael Galasso’s increasingly maddening, Philip Glass– esque string score plays. Shots of both embroiderers’ intricate work are frequent. For all Sequins’ simplicity in execution, there is complexity in both actresses’ delicate performances. Naymark expresses Claire’s soon-conflicting emotions about the baby almost entirely in her plain face, with her gorgeous hair also serving as an emotional barometer: Sometimes free, sometimes pulled back, and sometimes hidden by a scarf, Claire’s mane seems to correspond with her apparent battle between her head and, literally, her gut. And Ascaride allows Mme. Mélikian’s sorrow to come through a demeanor that initially seems merely stern. The character’s softening after she notices Claire’s belly is palpable; even after the woman attempts suicide, Ascaride infuses her desolation with dignity. Claire’s the one who finds Mme. Mélikian unconscious one day, and from this point on the two subtly trade off roles in an increasingly mother-daughter relationship. Toward the end of the film, Faucher allows each of the women a moment when she smiles for the first time, either at the other or at herself in the mirror, and after all the silent suffering the effect is unexpectedly joyous. Like the work the characters do, Sequins requires some patience, but the end result is more lovely than its parts might lead you to believe.
]]>Sat, 14 Jul 2007 17:48:00 GMTMovieBabeMovieBabe Blog7/14/2007 1:48:00 PM By Tricia Olszewski &ldquo;Honest&rdquo; is a word likely to be thrown around a lot regarding writer-director Andrew Bujalski&rsquo;s debut, Funny Ha Ha. &ldquo;Realistic&rdquo; is another. As in, people in real life aren&rsquo;t always articulate, and they&rsquo;re not always interesting or put together, and they don&rsquo;t always have a whole lot to do. Just like Bujalski&rsquo;s characters. Man, it&rsquo;s so honest. Yeah, but you know what? Sometimes&mdash;in fact, a whole lot of the time, if you&rsquo;re lucky enough&mdash;people in real life are also well-spoken and charismatic and fun to be around. And therein lies the problem with Funny Ha Ha, a meandering drama about a meandering college grad and her dull friends. Sure, life right after college can be a drag. And certainly, adolescence can now extend well into one&rsquo;s 20s, causing physical grown-ups to still make giant deals out of crushes and bust creamer containers in restaurants and yell out &ldquo;Dorks!&rdquo; to a couple of completely normal guys playing Frisbee. But does anyone really want to watch a movie about it? Funny Ha Ha spends 89 minutes with 24-year-old Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer), a pretty but unadorned Boston hipster who just got fired from an unspecified job for asking for a raise. She tells a friend, Alex (Christian Rudder), that she&rsquo;s now just &ldquo;walking the earth,&rdquo; and sorta looking for a new job, too. And later that same night, after running into friends Rachel (Jennifer L. Schaper) and Dave (Myles Paige) and joining them for dinner with still more friends&mdash;of course, this being a slacker crowd, not only is the second group running late, no one&rsquo;s actually decided where to eat&mdash;Marnie reveals that, omigod, she&rsquo;s had the biggest crush on Alex for so long, and he didn&rsquo;t tell her he just broke up with his girlfriend. But, uh, it&rsquo;s, like, no big deal, guys. Seriously though! I&rsquo;m, like, just, whatever. Really. This is just a paraphrase of Marnie&rsquo;s stammered backpedaling, after Rachel, Dave, and Alex&rsquo;s just-dropped-in sister, Susan (Lissa Patton Rudder), all, like, freak out at the news. But if it drives you crazy, be warned: They all talk like that. All the time. And the plot involves three basic things: Marnie&rsquo;s crush, Marnie&rsquo;s temp job, and Marnie&rsquo;s new admirer, Mitchell (Bujalski), a nerdly type she meets at the temp job. Conversations are air-filled, consisting mainly of verbal-tic &ldquo;sorry&rdquo;s, &ldquo;I dunno&rdquo;s, and various nonreasons why pairing with either T-shirted dude won&rsquo;t be in Marnie&rsquo;s future. At night, they drink and crash at each other&rsquo;s sparely decorated apartments. No one proves to have much of a personality or sense of humor, though nervous laughter accompanies their every sentence. Bujalski shot Funny Ha Ha in 16 mm. And to be fair, the grainy look combines with Bujalski&rsquo;s reportedly loose script and the actors&rsquo; improvisation to give the movie an impressive documentary feel: Each performer hems and haws with Gen-X v&eacute;rit&eacute;, and the lights and sound are often home-movie imperfect. (Whether the latter was intended is another matter.) And there are several moments of gut-wrenching awkwardness, including Alex&rsquo;s pre-emptive phone call to Marnie in which he around-the-bush refers to some &ldquo;crazy things&rdquo; his sister&rsquo;s been saying and tells her it&rsquo;s not going to happen (which he at least later criticizes as &ldquo;an asshole move&rdquo;) and Mitchell&rsquo;s mini tantrum when the day he spends kicking back with the woman &ldquo;probably 90 percent of her guy friends are in love with&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t improve her perpetual semi-dour mood. He asks her, &ldquo;What more do you want out of life?&rdquo; It&rsquo;s at least a hint that Marnie knows there&rsquo;s more to living than just her listless existence&mdash;a tiny bit of growth reaffirmed in the movie&rsquo;s last moment. But the ending&rsquo;s so abrupt, and the sound quality so bad, that audience members may very well miss the final exchange, making the whole irritating enterprise seem pointless. And that might be a lot like life, too, but it&rsquo;s not what anyone should call entertainment. If any of the female characters in Funny Ha Ha were in the position of Claire, the young French woman at the center of El&eacute;onore Faucher&rsquo;s Sequins, they&rsquo;d, like, totally die. Claire (Lola Naymark), in contrast, is quite unlike most of the teenagers you&rsquo;d meet in real life. Seventeen, pregnant, and living on her own, she&rsquo;s surprisingly savvy and self-possessed. She&rsquo;s made meticulous plans to give birth and place her baby for adoption discreetly, taking sick leave from her dreadful supermarket job when she starts showing and yanking out some of her curly red hair to prove her story&mdash;that she has cancer&mdash;to co-workers. Quaintly, Claire writes real pen-on-paper letters to her only friend, Lucile (Marie F&eacute;lix), and her treasured hobby is embroidery, on rabbit furs she acquires after trading the cabbages she surreptitiously harvests off her family&rsquo;s land. So, no, this 17-year-old character may not realistically reflect her modern demographic, but she&rsquo;s never unbelievable. Nor will she work your last nerve. Depending on your taste for gossamer storytelling, however, Faucher&rsquo;s feature debut as a whole just might. Sequins is quiet and decorous, desperate to be as exquisite as Claire&rsquo;s fiery, cascading mane. The plot involves not just Claire&rsquo;s pregnancy and isolation&mdash;she keeps only phone contact with her parents so they won&rsquo;t find out, and doesn&rsquo;t want a relationship with the baby&rsquo;s father&mdash;but the low-key friendship she strikes up with Mme. M&eacute;likian (Ariane Ascaride), a middle-aged embroiderer who recently lost her only son because of an accident caused by Lucile&rsquo;s older brother, Guillaume (Thomas Laroppe). Lucile&rsquo;s family encourages Claire to ask Mme. M&eacute;likian for employment, noting that she probably needs help with her workload now that her son is gone. So Claire wraps her hair in a scarf and respectfully approaches Mme. M&eacute;likian, who agrees to try her out. Claire shows up at the embroiderer&rsquo;s drab home the next morning and goes to work, wordlessly&mdash;the dialogue in the first part of Sequins, penned by Faucher and Ga&euml;lle Mac&eacute;, is spare, and it doesn&rsquo;t get any more gabby after Claire&rsquo;s on the job. Instead, we see either Mme. M&eacute;likian or Claire sewing/staring/generally looking pensive, often as Michael Galasso&rsquo;s increasingly maddening, Philip Glass&ndash; esque string score plays. Shots of both embroiderers&rsquo; intricate work are frequent. For all Sequins&rsquo; simplicity in execution, there is complexity in both actresses&rsquo; delicate performances. Naymark expresses Claire&rsquo;s soon-conflicting emotions about the baby almost entirely in her plain face, with her gorgeous hair also serving as an emotional barometer: Sometimes free, sometimes pulled back, and sometimes hidden by a scarf, Claire&rsquo;s mane seems to correspond with her apparent battle between her head and, literally, her gut. And Ascaride allows Mme. M&eacute;likian&rsquo;s sorrow to come through a demeanor that initially seems merely stern. The character&rsquo;s softening after she notices Claire&rsquo;s belly is palpable; even after the woman attempts suicide, Ascaride infuses her desolation with dignity. Claire&rsquo;s the one who finds Mme. M&eacute;likian unconscious one day, and from this point on the two subtly trade off roles in an increasingly mother-daughter relationship. Toward the end of the film, Faucher allows each of the women a moment when she smiles for the first time, either at the other or at herself in the mirror, and after all the silent suffering the effect is unexpectedly joyous. Like the work the characters do, Sequins requires some patience, but the end result is more lovely than its parts might lead you to believe. http://www.spout.com/groups/Realism_and_The_Lack_There_Of/Re_How_things_should_work_and_how_they_do/219/9756/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: Risselada
Post To: Realism and The Lack There Of
Post Date: 5/30/2007 3:02:05 PM
Body: Have you ever heard of Andrew Bujalski? I haven't seen any of his movies, but I've heard they are very realistic in a certain way in regards to a certain culture. Two of his movies are Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation
]]>Wed, 30 May 2007 19:02:05 GMTRisseladaRealism and The Lack There Of5/30/2007 3:02:05 PMHave you ever heard of Andrew Bujalski? I haven&#39;t seen any of his movies, but I&#39;ve heard they are very realistic in a certain way in regards to a certain culture. Two of his movies are Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2007/4/24/7543.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 4/24/2007 2:28:31 PM
Body: When is it time to demarcate a filmmaking "movement"? What if the filmmakers in this movement don't want to be grouped into any kind of movement at all? And what if the films in this movement revolve around the crisis of self-definition? Could it get any worse for one of its members than to have to talk about feeling self-conscious about being in a movement? An article in the Spring 2007 issue of Filmmaker Magazine begins by asking these very smart questions, which immediately intrigued me. The article, "What I Meant to Say," looks quite thoroughly at the independent film movement known by many as "mumblecore." There are several posts waiting to emerge from this article, so I hope Paul and some of the other guys will share their thoughts in the coming days. For now, just check out the article and take note of the collaboration aspect of this movement. The article generalizes these mumblecore films as "severely naturalistic portraits of the life and loves of artistic twentysomethings." Names like Joe Swanberg (LOL), Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha) are all names that bubble to the top of this "scene," if you can call it that. (I'll never forget stumbling across Funny Ha Ha with some friends. It was definitely unlike anything we had ever seen.) Here's another description from the article: The first aesthetic indicators--and, it must be stressed, not all friends of mumblecore make films like this--are improvised dialogue and naturalistic performances, often by non-actors. The films employ handheld, verite-style digital camerawork and long takes. Budgets are tiny. The plots hinge on everyday events. The stories are often obvious reflections of the filmmakers' lives. Most characters are white and educated and pursue creative endeavors when not pursuing one another. They are sensitive. They are sincere. So that's mumblecore, and it's been slowly emerging for a while now. But apparently something interesting started taking shape this year at SXSW, causing people to sit up and pay attention. The festival's promotional shorts were co-created by eight so-called mumblecore filmmakers, most of whom also had feature-length films at the festival (most of which were made with, written with, or acted by some of the other filmmakers). It may be hard to follow all that, but you get the idea--this is a tight group. Read the article and you'll see all the names and how they're intertwined. It's quite remarkable. And it made me think that something exciting is happening, whether or not I love this style of film (and I'm not convinced, yet, that I do--I'll get back to you after I see more). The exciting thing that's happening, from my perspective, revolves around a shared filmmaking experience that organically draws in ideas and talents from anyone who has some to offer. It's not about competition--rushing to finish your film first, get it to festivals, attract the most attention. It's about the love of making movies like this, of finding a format for expression that works, and sharing with others through that format. In the end, these films, as the Filmmaker articles says, are ultimately about "trying to communicate." While all films are trying to communicate something, it's often something that's inside one person (the writer or director). What's interesting (and rather poetic) about mumblecore, is that people are interacting and trying to communicate on the screen as well as through the creation process. That seems to be filmmaking collaboration at its best. Syndicated Feed From:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:28:31 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com4/24/2007 2:28:31 PMWhen is it time to demarcate a filmmaking "movement"? What if the filmmakers in this movement don't want to be grouped into any kind of movement at all? And what if the films in this movement revolve around the crisis of self-definition? Could it get any worse for one of its members than to have to talk about feeling self-conscious about being in a movement? An article in the Spring 2007 issue of Filmmaker Magazine begins by asking these very smart questions, which immediately intrigued me. The article, "What I Meant to Say," looks quite thoroughly at the independent film movement known by many as "mumblecore." There are several posts waiting to emerge from this article, so I hope Paul and some of the other guys will share their thoughts in the coming days. For now, just check out the article and take note of the collaboration aspect of this movement. The article generalizes these mumblecore films as "severely naturalistic portraits of the life and loves of artistic twentysomethings." Names like Joe Swanberg (LOL), Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha) are all names that bubble to the top of this "scene," if you can call it that. (I'll never forget stumbling across Funny Ha Ha with some friends. It was definitely unlike anything we had ever seen.) Here's another description from the article: The first aesthetic indicators--and, it must be stressed, not all friends of mumblecore make films like this--are improvised dialogue and naturalistic performances, often by non-actors. The films employ handheld, verite-style digital camerawork and long takes. Budgets are tiny. The plots hinge on everyday events. The stories are often obvious reflections of the filmmakers' lives. Most characters are white and educated and pursue creative endeavors when not pursuing one another. They are sensitive. They are sincere. So that's mumblecore, and it's been slowly emerging for a while now. But apparently something interesting started taking shape this year at SXSW, causing people to sit up and pay attention. The festival's promotional shorts were co-created by eight so-called mumblecore filmmakers, most of whom also had feature-length films at the festival (most of which were made with, written with, or acted by some of the other filmmakers). It may be hard to follow all that, but you get the idea--this is a tight group. Read the article and you'll see all the names and how they're intertwined. It's quite remarkable. And it made me think that something exciting is happening, whether or not I love this style of film (and I'm not convinced, yet, that I do--I'll get back to you after I see more). The exciting thing that's happening, from my perspective, revolves around a shared filmmaking experience that organically draws in ideas and talents from anyone who has some to offer. It's not about competition--rushing to finish your film first, get it to festivals, attract the most attention. It's about the love of making movies like this, of finding a format for expression that works, and sharing with others through that format. In the end, these films, as the Filmmaker articles says, are ultimately about "trying to communicate." While all films are trying to communicate something, it's often something that's inside one person (the writer or director). What's interesting (and rather poetic) about mumblecore, is that people are interacting and trying to communicate on the screen as well as through the creation process. That seems to be filmmaking collaboration at its best. Syndicated Feed From:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/jaybriel/archive/2006/3/12/425.aspx Post By: Jaybriel
Post To: Jaybriel Blog
Post Date: 3/12/2006 1:00:00 PM
Body: I sorta loved this film, but sorta thought it was awful. Which is probably the exact right response for a film that is all about indecision, paralysis, and the inability to deal. It's a far cry from Slacker, the granddaddy of all slacker-made, slacker-themed films, though.
]]>Sun, 12 Mar 2006 17:00:00 GMTJaybrielJaybriel Blog3/12/2006 1:00:00 PMI sorta loved this film, but sorta thought it was awful. Which is probably the exact right response for a film that is all about indecision, paralysis, and the inability to deal. It's a far cry from Slacker, the granddaddy of all slacker-made, slacker-themed films, though. http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/romance/MemberTagFilms.aspxromance
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