The writer-director So Yong Kim's second feature, Treeless Mountain is set in South Korea and stars pair of kindergarten-age children as six-year-old Jin (Hee Yeon Kim) and her younger sister, Bin (Song Hee). The movie begins with the girls' young mother (Soo Ah Lee) announcing that she's taking them to stay with "Big Aunt" (Mi Hyang Kim) while she goes out in search of their estranged father. Jin still sometimes wets the bed, and in a delicately observed scene early in the film, she has to wake her mother and let her know that it's happened again. Mom cleans her up and, before sending her to sleep on the unoccupied side of her own bed, whispers a reminder that no one will ever know what's happened: "It's just between us." Later, when the girls are with their aunt, the woman pulls them out of bed in the morning to find the sheets stained with urine and instinctively blames the smaller girl, who protests her innocence in a piping voice. Big Aunt doesn't believe her, which is bad enough for both girls--the one who winds up being punished for something she hasn't done, and the one who has to feel guilty for having been too afraid to take the rap. But what's really upsetting is the difference in Big Aunt's tone and approach from the girls' mother. It's not just that she's scolding and angry; she sounds as if she wouldn't mind sticking a sandwich board reading "I PEE THE BED" on the kid. Whoever's the guilty party, it is definitely not just between them.

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Well, it had to happen sometime. What with two weeks' worth of crushing hype mid-summer, the mumblecore kids were due for a backlash, but who knew Amy Taubin would be the one to do it? Taubin, after all, went on record in 2005 with a "Distributor Wanted" for Mutual Appreciation, exceeding all the hype two years ahead of time by calling Andrew Bujalski's work "Rohmer without subtitles." The tide turns, viciously, in a Film Comment jeremiad that goes viciously ad hominem in record time, from an opening shot bidding goodbye to "the indie movement that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding." Studiously ignoring her own early championing (Matt Zoller Seitz correctly points out that Taubin seems to be suffering from "buyer's remorse"), Taubin taunts the movement for not making enough money at the IFC Center, accuses all involved of racism for not inviting So Yong Kim's In Between Days to the party "because the filmmaker is a Korean-American woman and her heroine is a Korean immigrant," and calls Joe Swanberg a "lout." These aren't criticisms of film; seemingly the spirit of political campaigning in the air has infected Taubin, whose article is as ridiculously mean-spirited as any negative ad.

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