Karina on SpoutBlog

Aaron Katz’s third SXSW premiere in as many years, Let’s Get Down to Brass Tacks continues the filmmaker’s tradition of catching our attention with genius titles––somehow simultaneously catchy, evocative and a little tongue-in-cheek. Brilliant branding aside, the debut of Brass Tacks‘ debut flew somewhat under the radar this year; the twelve-minute short was tacked in front of screenings of the Emerging Visions entry Bootleg, Wisconsin, and many Katz fans seemed unaware that the film was even in the festival.

This is maybe for the best, because Brass Tacks is the kind of thing that needs to be seen without the influence of puffed-up expectations. Definitely slight but surprisingly satisfying, it’s a twelve minute short, staring the director, set in a Days Inn in Mystic, Connecticutt. Katz films himself eating, watching TV, taking a bath, taking a phone call, going to sleep, and waking up. Is that it? Yes, but of course, it isn’t. In long takes that pay special attention to colorless homogeneity of his “set,” Katz delivers a self-contained portrait of the eerie calm endemic to just hanging out, alone, in the type of business traveler room that’s really not meant to be hung out in.

A phrase I found myself saying a lot at SXSW this year: “I liked it. It’s not gonna change the world, but it’s good.” This definitely applies to Let’s Get Down to Brass Tacks, but unlike some of the other films I saw at SXSW, I think that description matches its aspirations. It’s not a grand statement, but as a sketch of a moment, a place, a feeling, it’s virtually perfect.

Under discussion:

The Ten Commandments  (1956)

The Tingler  (1959)

Mutual Appreciation  (2005)

Hannah Takes the Stairs  (2007)

Goliath  (2007)

Here’s an excerpt from a comment by Variety writer Peter Debruge, left on a SXSW dispatch by Aaron Hillis on Glenn Kenny’s blog:

Pretty soon, it all reduces to semantics, but the label benefits those it describes in that it connects films that, on an individual basis, would be too small to register on most people’s radar. Would Hannah Takes the Stairs or Quiet City or Mutual Appreciation have warranted a NY Times piece on their own? (Then again, is the NYT even the right forum to discuss such films, which seem to do just fine with the more selective audience of the blogosphere?)

Debruge is here giving us an object lesson in why most applications of The M Word are really, really frustrating: the genre label becomes a polite form of thinly masking the condescending assumption that none of these films can stand on their own without it. Mutual Appreciation is not a film that needs a movement as a prerequisite, especially one which mostly coalesced after its premiere. As resolutely analog as it is, it also hardly fits in with Debruge’s wider argument that “important thing is that digital cameras, home editing software and the internet have enabled a new wave of filmmakers, many of whom have become very close friends, sharing equipment, ideas, cast and crew.”

This statement is not totally false, but at the risk of sounding like a cranky Marxist, it seems like he’s really talking about the means/tools of production. Goliath and Hannah Takes The Stairs might share an actor and certain technical commonalities, but I can’t imagine two films being more different in their sensibilities. By Debruge’s rationale, The Ten Commandments and The Tingler were part of the same “movement,” because both were shot on film cameras, both were released in movie theaters, both were produced by gimmicky showmen, and both productions employed Vincent Price.

Actually, now that I think about it, The Ten Commandments and The Tingler are basically the same movie. Never mind!