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Under discussion:

Hannah Takes the Stairs  (2007)

The New Talkies festival is barely underway (as I type this, the first screening of Hannah Takes the Stairs is scheduled to begin in about 2 minutes), and already forces more powerful than you or I are contemplating a mumblecore backlash. I’m still trying to actually write about the movies before heading out to IFC’s Hannah premiere party (which, if Twitter is to be believed, is shaping up to be the event of the season for people like me who rarely leave the house), but while I’m busy with that, here’s a round up of the circulating wariness. I’m sure I’ll have more concrete thoughts on the health of the meme over the course of the next week.

• Stu has a long makings-of-the-movement piece over at The Reeler, including the now-obligatory “don’t call it a movement” quote from Andrew Bujalski. “I feel like the things that these films all have in common are the least interesting things about them. It’s the differences that make them interesting. You read the synopses — ‘These are films made cheaply about young white people talking to each other.’ And of course it sounds excruciating. And there are plenty of films that fit that description that are excruciating. The things that make the films good are not that.” Also: Joe Swanberg worries about a post-Pulp Fiction-esque wave of imitators.
• Anthony Kaufman says we’re killing Mumblecore by talking about it. “If these films are hyped, they may be doomed. One of the joys of stumbling upon a charming or sophisticated or funny low-budget ‘mumblecore’ film is just that, stumbling upon it, whether given to you on DVD by a friend or the filmmaker himself or walking into one of them unknowingly at a film festival.” Still, he has his own entry into the hype ring: a Mumblecore video primer.
• In a semi-positive review of Hannah in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz says we’ve already killed Mumblecore by hyping the filmmakers to the point where they’re now able to get real jobs. “Hannah plays like an incidental swan song, a signpost marking the point when mumblecore became a nostalgic label rather than a present-tense cultural force, and its most acclaimed practitioners moved on to bigger things.” The implication is that, right at the breakthrough moment, right when the masses are maybe starting to care, the filmmakers are moving on to studio work and leaving their audience behind. But Kaufman says Seitz is just thinking of himself: “If Seitz is right, and Hannah already marks the movement’s premature passing into obsolescence, it may only be because he wants it to stay something that he caught at a film festival and is not reviewing for The New York Times.”

I got a press release this morning about the new website for Body of War, otherwise known as “the Phil Donahue doc“, otherwise know as one of the most highly anticipated of the many highly political films set to debut at the Toronto Film Festival. Unfortunately, it looks like I won’t be in town when it makes its debut — the premiere (which will apparently involve a live performance of songs from the film by Eddie Vedder) is on September 11, and I’m leaving on the 10th. I can stand to miss the Vedder, but I am disappointed that I won’t be able to see the movie or Donohue’s sure-to-be impassioned Q & A.

The website has pictures, a full synopsis and a trailer (embedded in a lesser-quality YouTube version above), which features one of the two songs Vedder wrote for the movie.

Welcome to MumbleWeek!