Patreon update #4: Interstellar & The Prestige (+ millennials, Soviet communism, mumblecore & more) and preview for Fire Walk With Me as horror/art film & Fellini montage

This week brings the first double feature (expect many more, as well as triple and occasionally quadruple features as the number of 2nd-tier patrons - and therefore patron-selected films in focus - grows). Usually they won't be particularly linked but two different patrons recommended Christopher Nolan films this month so I thought it would be a good idea to pair them. I think this was only the second time I saw both of these films, and I was surprised what I had forgotten. Elsewhere, the podcast's theme seems to be generations and the passage of history - I talk about my short film Class of 2002, confusion about millennials, the legacy of the sixties in the eighties, Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, and the curiosity of reviewing a 2002 film in 2009 - and then discussing that film in 2018. I also attempt and probably fail to pronounce "epistolary," "epoch," and "Bujalski."

By the way, make sure you check out the links in the podcast post - this week in particular they're chock full of fascinating tangents.

Update 1/21: upcoming podcast and sneak peek

January "See the Future" Preview (3rd tier reward): Fire Walk With Me as horror/art film & Fellini Montage

Update 1/27: next episode coming soon (hopefully today)

Podcast #4: Interstellar & The Prestige (+ millennials, Soviet communism, mumblecore & more)

Line-up for Episode 4

Intro
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WEEKLY UPDATE/2nd tier Biweekly Preview: Fire Walk With me as horror & Fellini montage video
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WEEKLY UPDATE/recent posts: Class of 2002 5th Anniversary
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WEEKLY UPDATE/works in progress: Phenomena as part of FWWM/horror, FWWM & season 3, FWWM & original episodes, The Art Life, The Wire viewing diary, upcoming montage (Kieslowski/Winehouse), The Last Laugh for Voyage into the Movies, postponing character series, including Diane recordings in her character entry, background character entry
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FILM IN FOCUS: Interstellar
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FILM IN FOCUS: The Prestige
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TWIN PEAKS REFLECTIONS: audiobooks of The Secret History of Twin Peaks & The Final Dossier, The Lodgers discuss Lynch/Frost collaboration
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OTHER TOPICS: defining (and misdefining) millennials, "tankies" & violence (Marxism-Leninism/Stalinism/the recent Twitter controversy), Hill Street Blues episodes about 60s/70s radicals in the early 80s
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LISTENER FEEDBACK: plausibility of The Prestige, Nolan as blockbuster auteur (would Lynch have followed his path if Dune was a hit?)
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OPENING THE ARCHIVE: "Sophomore Slump" (January - March 2009), this week's highlight: Funny Ha Ha

BECOME A PATRON

Frances Ha

Frances Ha is a fish-out-of-water story in which we actually see that process take place. Flailing, failing dancer Frances (Greta Gerwig), shuffled from home to home, falling behind her pack of friends, wandering off to Paris on a whim and mail-order credit card, is like a sea creature swimming along contentedly until the tide abruptly goes out, leaving her flopping on the shore unexpectedly. One moment the spot she inhabits was her watery home, the next it's her sandy grave. Not that the film is so dark; it's a charming comedy of manners, and one of its charms is that it neither takes itself too seriously nor treats itself too flippantly. One of Frances' most likable qualities is that even as she radiates neurotic discomfort and disappointment, she staggers on, trying to make the best of things instead of wallowing in misery. Her ethos is almost old-fashioned, like a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd hero determined to run with the big boys even as we love them precisely for being incapable of making it.

Mutual Appreciation

Wannabe rock star Allan (Justin Rice) shows up in New York to pursue his career, experience city life, and hang out with his friends Lawrence (writer/director Andrew Bujalski) and Ellie (Rachel Clift) - Lawrence's girlfriend, whose feelings for Allan may give the movie its sly title. As Allan and Ellie skirt closer to the edge of a sexual and emotional engagement, they realize they're playing with fire - without care, their happy trio could quickly go up in smoke.

As with all of the talented Bujalski's films, a plot description does not fully convey the movie's appeal. Actually, Mutual Appreciation is one of the best films of the decade. The attraction lies not so much in the story, which gives the fleeting moments and prevailing mood a context and a destination (though as always, a climax is present without a full-on resolution), as in the texture of the film. The beautiful, grainy black-and-white 16mm film look suffuses the proceedings with a melancholy, romantic atmosphere. Bujalski elicits charismatically naturalistic performances from his entire cast, and the improvised feel of the exchanges (though they are, in fact, hardly improvised) deepens the relaxed sensation of being immersed in an authentic universe which the filmmaker, like a Deist God, set in motion and then left to spin of its own accord.

Mutual Appreciation's rock musician hero and hip Brooklyn setting (touristy exteriors are eschewed for just-as-evocative apartment rooms and occasional basement clubs) are double-edged swords. They create a buzz and excitement around the film which can draw viewers in (Bujalski's first film took place in a more grungy post-college setting; his third in a workaday, more practical thirtysomething milieu). However, these elements also allow some to smugly deride the film as trendy or "hipster" and thus dismiss it. In fact, Bujalski's prevailing mood is a warm engagement with life, limned with melancholy; he eschews arch, ironic distancing for exposure of the raw feelings which race beneath young people's social interactions. He even has the guts to show the discomforting parasitism which underlies the musician's free-wheeling life, as he stumblingly phones his dad for money and endures a lecture about finding a job. Bujalski's first films spawned a movement jokingly dubbed "mumblecore" (these films can be intriguing but remain mere snapshot details of Bujalski's larger, richer canvas). Most other filmmakers of this milieu would have you believe that their characters survive on unconvincing half-baked "cool" jobs or some nebulous notion of financial independence. (This honesty manifests itself in different ways in different Bujalski films: in Funny Ha Ha, the character struggles through dreadful-looking temp jobs while Beeswax gives its characters relatively un-hip professions like lawyer and store manager). Anyway, after Bujalski kicked off an under-the-radar movement (of which most filmgoers remain blissfully unaware), he lay low for a while, appearing in a few of his peers' films but apparently waiting until the buzz blew over and he could go back to making his own unique, inimitable movies without being pigeonholed.

This review was originally published at the Boston Examiner.

Nights and Weekends

For more background on mumblecore – a no-budget “movement” of young filmmakers, which has been building buzz through the 00′s – read my review of LOL, my follow-up on Funny Ha Ha and then the comments section for Funny Ha Ha, particularly this.

Nights and Weekends, 2008, dir. Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg, released on DVD Aug. 25, 2009

Most of the conversations in Nights and Weekends have a random feel, but one in particular is random with a purpose. Mattie (Greta Gerwig) is returning from a photo shoot with James (Joe Swanberg), her long-distance still-sorta boyfriend. At the shoot, the photographer coaxed the couple into playing cute for the camera, cooing “That’s adorable,” when an embarrassed Mattie cringed or looked at James with uncertainty. Sure enough, her snapshots transform the awkward into the semi-iconic and when the two look at them later on a computer screen, it’s almost enough to convince them they’re a real couple (they start making out, in the most genuinely sensual moment of the film, after viewing the uncomfortable kiss captured on camera hours earlier). “They’re like present us,” James tells Mattie before leaning in for the kiss, “only acting out past us.” Cue future us.

Funny Ha Ha

Not sure what to expect, I was presented with a pleasant surprise in Funny Ha Ha. Actually, that's too light a term, implying a kind of trivial but enjoyable experience. Funny Ha Ha is one of the best films of the decade, and as such it transcends its reputation as the "root" of mumblecore. Watching the movie, it's clear that writer/director/editor Andrew Bujalski did not set out to start a movement, but rather to capture something, an ineffable flavor of post-college life. Funny Ha Ha rings strange bells in 2009, seven years after it was released. I'm sorry, but I can't quite think of 2002, the year I graduated high school and entered college, a year after 9/11, a year before Iraq, as "the past." Yet seven years is a long time - for example, '95 was seven years before '02 and think of the distance between those dates. At times, Funny Ha Ha reveals this distance, but part of its unfamiliarity may have to do with its own idiosyncrasies, as well as the peculiar position it's been put in, as progenitor to a still-growing trend.

LOL

There's a growing mumble in movieland. Though "mumblecore," the movement (genre? grab-bag?) of no-budget features crafted by twentysomething auteurs and usually dealing with relationships, has been around since 2002, it has mostly been under-the-radar. I myself first heard about these films (which have not been coming to a theater near you) a few years ago in a Village Voice article chronicling a retrospective of the mumblecore canon (these filmmakers work so fast that in the five or so years since Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, a dozen or so mumblecore movies had already emerged). I did not attend the retro, but have been intrigued ever since, heightened by the slow-burning buzz which has been emerging up to now.

Then, lately, the mumble has turned into more of, well, a whisper at least. First there was Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running, devoting an increasing number of posts to the most self-promoting, and hence most controversial, member of the mumblecore mafia, Joe Swanberg. This led to probably the best comments thread I've ever read in the blogosphere (you can check it out here; please do). Then there was David Denby's excellent, sympathetic ruminations on the subject, which led to some more of Kenny's trademark snark. Meanwhile, in a bookstore the other day, I came across one of those arty little magazines, in this case called "Paste," which featured Swanberg and mumblecore starlet Greta Gerwig on its cover, accompanied by the caption "The Penny-Pinching Future of Indie Cinema." Penny-pinching certainly does sum up the spirit of the times, to the extent that I didn't buy the $5-plus publication, but I did peruse it in the store, and it got me thinking.