The Screengrab : andrew bujalski

Trailer Review: Humpday

Paul Clark — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Up to this point, I could sort of take or leave the indie-film movement that’s become known as “mumblecore.” While I respect the scruffy lo-fi aesthetic of these films, I’ve never quite bought into the “voices of a generation” hype that’s followed such adherents as Andrew Bujalski and the Duplass Brothers. However, ever since I first heard about Lynn Shelton’s Humpday in reports from Sundance this year, I’ve been pretty eagerly anticipating the film. Part of the reason is the premise itself- two straight friends co-starring in an amateur gay porn more or less on a dare. For one thing, I like the twist this premise brings to the usual comedy-of-homoeroticism formula, perhaps because I don’t find it funny when characters are oblivious to the “gayness” of their actions, but hilarious when they acknowledge the homoeroticism, and their feelings about same (the jackass movies have much the same approach, albeit without so much tentativeness). Add to this the fact that the Joshua Leonard character bears an almost uncanny resemblance to an old college friend- the kind of friend who would have been totally down for a stunt like this- and this looks to be right up my alley.

SXSW Review: Beeswax

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:10:00 GMT

(Click here for a review of Humpday, part one of my SXSW mumblecore double-feature coverage!)

Mumblecore, as defined by Wikipedia, is “an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s. It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors.” The mumbly side of the equation stems from the genre’s fealty to vérité naturalism over manipulative plotting and the stammered rambling of speech as it’s spoken rather than the too-perfect rhythms of tightly-crafted screenplay dialogue.

To be fair, mumblecore’s loose, meandering style is something of an acquired taste...though at its best and most accessible, it can yield the sort of fresh, relatable characters and scenes that breathe fresh life into clichéd cinematic scenarios. The self-aware riffing of the Judd Apatow brand has reinvented Hollywood-style romantic and stoner comedies in recent years with a more polished, pop culture-heavy, testosterone-infused version of the mumblecore "bromance" makeover of Lynn Shelton’s Humpday or the gentler rhythms of Andrew Bujalski’s mumblecore “legal thriller” Beeswax.

Boston native Bujalski was one of the founding fathers of mumblecore with Funny Ha Ha, his 2002 tale of insecure, often inarticulate twentysomethings searching for love and job satisfaction in the post-collegiate ghetto of Allston, Massachusetts.

Beeswax, meanwhile, is about slightly older characters searching for...well, job satisfaction and love. This time around, though, Bujalski (who remains stubbornly committed to celluloid while most of the indie-verse has switched to digital video) has a slightly higher budget, a slightly tighter pace and an even more charismatic cast of talented “non-actors,” including fellow low-budget directors the Zellner Brothers (Plastic Utopia, Goliath) and Alex Karpovsky (whose documentary Trust Us, This Is All Made Up is likewise showing at the 2009 SXSW festival...which, not-very-coincidentally, one expects, is being produced this year by fellow castmate Janet Pierson, who together with husband John, has long been a member of the Indiewood Illuminati that helped thrust the film’s Austin, TX locale into the cinematic spotlight back in the early ‘90s).

But the heart and soul of Beeswax are the film’s charismatic co-stars Tilly and Maggie Hatcher, real-life twins who play fictional twins Jeannie and Lauren. Bujalski wrote the film with his two old friends in mind, and the plot (such as it is) revolves around a job offer that would take Jeannie to Africa while Lauren struggles with a potentially litigious business partner to maintain control of a funky vintage boutique.

Oh, and by the way: Lauren (and the actress playing her) are wheelchair-bound, though audiences expecting Lifetime Movie melodrama over the plight of the “otherly-abled” young woman (or, for that matter, suspenseful John Grisham-style legal showdowns) will be sorely disappointed.

Lauren’s condition is simply a given in the film, as is the same-sex relationship between the twins’ mother and Pierson’s character -- a quietly revolutionary approach to material that’s typically whitewashed or overdramatized in most mainstream media -- while the legal side of the story is treated as a real world pain in the ass the characters must contend with (rather than a twisty puzzle box that renders the characters irrelevant).

While a film like My Suicide uses visual overkill to hide the one-dimensional nature of its characters and themes, filmmakers like Bujalski and Shelton focus on the rich, simple pleasures of the real world.

Related Stories:

SXSW Review: Humpday
SXSW Review: Me and Orson Welles

SXSW Explosion!

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

What, more preview? Well, the Film Issue of the Austin Chronicle is now out, and it’s chock full of goodies, whether you’re planning to be here for the fun or you just want to experience it vicariously from your igloo. Highlights include:

- A roundtable discussion with three documentary filmmakers now living in Austin: Bradley Beesley (Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo), Ben Steinbauer (Winnebago Man) and Alex Karpovsky (Trust Us, This is All Made Up).

- A preview of Tobe Hooper’s long-lost first film. “Eggshells makes explicit what many have long assumed – that Hooper's sense of cinema is the defining characteristic that makes Chainsaw great. Eggshells is a true 1968 film, psychedelic and political; it seems clear that Hooper had watched more than a film or two by Jean-Luc Godard. The film celebrates alternative lifestyles and politics and people and an odd, kinky semimysticism that is grounded more in humor than the supernatural. It captures what Austin looked like in the Sixties as well as the political sensibility shared by so many at the time.”

- An interview with Beeswax director Andrew Bujalski. “I needed a wheelchair-accessible vintage-clothing store. My whole script depended on that ... and they're really hard to come by. Vintage stores are usually very cramped places, and that's part of their charm, but I started to panic a little bit, because I thought I had written something that doesn't exist. ...So I spent a week driving around Austin. I went to every vintage store you could find. And the last place I walked in the door was Storyville on 51st and Duval, and it was eerily right on. It was so much how I had written it, down to there being this sort of back room behind the counter, which is what I had written. And the counters were low, so it also made sense that someone in a wheelchair would be back there. ... So that more than anything seemed like a sign from God that we should be here.”

- A look at the new wave of Australian films well-represented at this year’s festival. Could this be Ozsploitation: The Sequel? “Australia has given us tales of crazy villages in the outback (Welcome to Woop Woop), cross-dressers on the rampage (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), and, of course, hard men with big hearts (Crocodile Dundee), but this year at South by Southwest, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade wants us to know it's not all about kangaroos and costumes anymore. The filmmakers of seven Down Under films, which range from slashers to piss-your-pants drollery, will attend SXSW 09, the result of a government grant for the Australia International Cultural Council through film body Screen Australia.”

- A visit to the editing room of Tim McCanlies (Secondhand Lions), as he works around the clock to finish The 2 Bobs in time for its SXSW screening. “For two days, McCanlies and Reisch have been going through the film with a fine-tooth comb and a digital equalizer, raising and lowering volumes so that vital bits of plot information come through and less vital bits recede into the background, and cutting frequencies in the tone of certain actors' voices so they don't sound like they're speaking from inside a well. They watch and rewatch shots over and over again until the untrained ear becomes completely numb to the experience.”

SXSW Preview: Ten Must-See Narrative Features (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Our 2009 SXSW Film Festival preview continues with a look at the most promising narrative features on the slate. (You can check out my documentary picks here and here.) I’ve left out the big ticket items that are due in theaters soon, like Adventureland and I Love You, Man. They don’t need my help.

BEESWAX

Mumblecore maven Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha) returns with this legal thriller “for anyone who finds 'legal thriller' to be an oxymoron.” Real life twins Tilly and Maggie Hatcher star as identical twins Jeanne, who is paraplegic, and Lauren, who isn’t. The pair find themselves dealing with a vague threat from Jeanne’s partner in a vintage clothing business, Amanda. New SXSW producer Janet Pierson has a supporting role, which is certainly an ingenious tactic by Bujalski.

(Screens March 14th at 2 pm, Paramount Theater)

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF LITTLE DIZZLE

Strange. Odd. Twisted. These are words that crop up frequently in reviews of Little Dizzle, which debuted earlier this year at Sundance. A cleaning crew of misfits, hallucinatory cookies and a strange new toilet-based life form are the ingredients that could only add up to a fun time at the movies. Presumably.

(Screens March 15th at 9:15 pm, March 19th at 4 pm, Alamo Ritz, March 21st at 11 am, Alamo South)

EGGSHELLS

This 1969 “American Freak Illumination Time & Space Fantasy of the exploding Austin inevitable” was the first feature directed by Tobe Hooper and has long been considered a lost film. But it’s lost no more! A print has been found, and Hooper’s hippie poltergeist movie will finally see the light of day. Or the dark of theater, I guess.

(Screens March 17 at 7 pm, Alamo South)

LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLERS

Once you’ve come up with the title Lesbian Vampire Killers, do you even have to bother writing a script? Won’t the financiers immediately start lining up at your door? Actually, the title is slightly confusing: are the lesbians killing vampires or are the vampires also lesbians who are being killed by someone else? Judging from the trailer it’s the latter, but hey, either way works for me.

(Screens March 16th at 11:59 pm, March 18th at 11:30 pm, Alamo South)

MAKE-OUT WITH VIOLENCE

The Deagol Brothers would have you know that, although it involves an animated corpse, Make-Out with Violence is not a zombie movie. Rather, it’s “a dreamlike coming-of-age tragicomedy.” And a “rock musical wherein the living love the dead and break into silence instead of song.”

(Screens March 14th at 8 pm, Alamo Ritz, March 17th at 9 pm, March 21st at 9:30 pm, Alamo South)

Independent Film Festival of Boston: The Zellner Brothers & Goliath

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Goliath, a quasi-mumblecore tragi-comedy by the Zellner Brothers of Austin, TX plays this weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. The indie feature, about a man who loses both his wife and his beloved cat in the same harrowing year, was first reviewed here at The Screengrab by Scott Von Doviak during the 2008 South-by-Southwest Film Festival.

David Zellner and his brother, Nathan, have been crafting distinctive independent cinema since 1996, but I first became aware of them at a terrible film festival called 30th Parallel that leeched onto the back of the 1997 SXSW fest, analogous to the Slamdance/Sundance arrangement, but much shoddier (and short-lived, since 30th Parallel barely made it through its first and only installment).

I know about the 30th Parallel Fest, because it featured the Texas premiere of my own indie film, Apocalypse Bop. The whole misbegotten affair kicked off with a back room hotel reception marked by a sad tray of vegetables and the absence of any members of the 30th Parallel staff to greet us. This led to some awkward bonding among the invited filmmakers as we all stood around, confused, waiting for some information about what we were supposed to do. Then, eventually, we all left.

Because just about every movie theater, auditorium and/or other screening venue in Austin was booked for SXSW, 30th Parallel mostly screened its selections in the back rooms of bars, which wasn’t a terrible idea in theory. Unfortunately, the Zellner Brothers had the misfortune of premiering their surrealist mime masterpiece Plastic Utopia on “Melrose Monday” at some 6th Street dive, meaning that many of the 30th Parallel films screened that evening were drowned out by blaring Melrose Place-themed trivia questions from the front of the bar.

Additionally, the 30th Parallel projectors were seeming World War II-era relics that kept jamming and breaking down every few minutes...and, even when they worked, they often caused the projected films to stutter, blur and, occasionally, melt.

And yet, it is to the Zellner Brothers’ credit that, despite all the hellacious distractions, I not only sat through the entire, tortured screening of Plastic Utopia, but came away considering it one of the most brilliantly deranged independent films I’ve ever seen, a surrealistic cult classic that, sadly, has never inspired nearly the cult it deserves.

Yet, while not cult figures on the level of, say, John Waters, Kevin Smith or Jim Jones, the Zellners have slowly built a small, devoted following, in Austin and elsewhere, despite their tiny budgets and occasional peculiar experiments like 2001’s Frontier, a faux foreign film in a fake foreign language (Bulbovian) starring an older, puffier Wiley Wiggins (of Dazed and Confused fame).

Recently, the Zellners have devoted themselves to dry, absurdist short subjects which highlight the pair’s strengths: unexpected, offbeat writing and visuals combined with their own very likeable recurring screen personas: David, the excitable, put-upon cynic and Nathan, the mellower zen weirdo.

The shorts (available for viewing at ZellnerBros.com) opened the door to the influential Sundance Film Festival, which recently premiered their latest feature film, Goliath, once again starring David and Nathan, with cameos by Wiggins and mumblecore poster boy Andrew Bujalski.

The film, in terms of tone and subject matter, plays like the bastard child of Little Children and Year of the Dog. Goliath, the titular tiger-striped tabby owned by David Zellner’s protagonist, goes missing and his recently divorced owner goes more than a little insane, eventually scapegoating a neighborhood sex offender (played by Nathan) as the source of his troubles.

The film plays out in a deadpan naturalistic style that left me yearning for a little more of Plastic Utopia’s antic narrative drive and visual invention, yet nevertheless hooked me with its own peculiar rhythms, dry wit, occasional slapstick, Asian porno drumming (yeah, you heard me) and its sometimes harrowing depiction of the hazards of love and pet ownership...without giving too much away, I’ll just note here that if you’re a tender-hearted pet lover, this may not be the movie for you.

Independent Film Festival of Boston 2008

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The Boston Film Festival began in 1976 at the late, lamented Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, and was reborn, in a new incarnation, in 1985. Although hardly a big, buzzy fest like Sundance or Toronto, packed with deal-making, career-launching glamour, the BFF was still an exciting venue for independent cinema, where local audiences got their first glimpse of films like Blue Velvet and Down By Law, complete with special guest appearances by the likes of David Lynch. And, while the Boston Film Festival is still up and running, offering hometown premieres of future arthouse fodder like Jesus Camp and The U.S. Versus John Lennon, it’s telling that the Best Comedic Actor Award at last year’s edition of the fest went to Dane Cook for Good Luck Chuck.

But even as The BFF becomes ever more non-essential, the Independent Film Festival of Boston (which kicked off last night with the East Coast premiere of local hero Brad Anderson’s latest, Transsiberian) has restored the excitement and thrill of discovery to Beantown's movie-going diet.

Reflecting the fresh energy and opportunity of the Hub’s resurgent indie scene (as well as its recent adoption by Martin Scorcese and other Hollywood players), the IFFB presents itself as a vital, hands-on event, with a “filmmaker friendly” focus, offering panels like “Breaking into the Boston Film Industry” while championing homegrown talent like Anderson and mumblecore progenitor Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha).

Click here for more information on IFFB 2008 (which runs through April 29), and stay tuned for reviews of this year’s festival fare!

Writers' Strike Hits Indie Film

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Anthony Kaufman of the Village Voice reports that indie film production may well turn out to be the "unintended casualty" of the current Hollywood labor troubles. The ongoing writers' strike has heightened the likelihood that there will be a Screen Actors Guild strike as the June 30 expiration date on the current SAG contract draws near. The big studios, which stockpiled scripts in anticipation of the writers' strike, is now putting high-paying productions into overdrive in anticipation of actors walking out next summer. This means that lower-paying indie productions are strapped for talent because, as producer Mike S. Ryan puts it with regard to one actor whose agents won't return his calls, "they're trying to fill his dance card until June 30." Another producer, John Sloss, says that "There's an actor I know who is getting a threefold raise just because he's the only comedy guy left." Many of the indie filmmakers are sympathetic with the goals of the strikers but still have to wonder just how hard they'll end up taking the brunt of the blow if the current talent drought is followed by a lack of side jobs from the studios, which many an indie director relies on to make ends meet. "Mumblecore" guru Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) says, "Worst-case scenario: I have to pull some kind of shitty day job." Insert joke here. . . — Phil Nugent

Die Mumblecore Die

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

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.

Gradually, it emerges that Taubin doesn't seem to hate mumblecore (a vast umbrella of filmmakers more disparate than they initially seemed), just Swanberg. Now, there's plenty of reasons to get annoyed by the queasiness-inducing auteur; I've only seen Hannah Takes The Stairs, and frequently wished that Swanberg would learn what a camera does besides recording images. (Some framing would be nice, in other words.) But I'm also struck by his knack for turning potentially ruinously indulgent improv bull-sessions into something like emotional truth, and the fact that he's the weakest out of the four filmmakers I've sampled (which includes Bujalski, Aaron Katz and the Duplass brothers) speaks strongly of everyone. And only in Taubin's insular, privileged world (one, frankly, I'd like to be a part of) could mumblecore count as some kind of overwhelming "film movement," one which she inexplicably feels compelled to note has nothing on "the French New Wave or the postwar American avant-garde." Follow the growingly uncivil controversy at Greencine's comments section, which has swelled to thirty-six indignant missives, including a rightfully pissy riposte from SXSW honcho Matt Dentler. — Vadim Rizov

Correction: We originally reported that Joe Swanberg had himself posted comments on the Greencine page. He hadn't. Sorry, Joe.