The Screengrab : mark duplass

SXSW Review: Humpday

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

So far at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, I’ve seen at least one movie with a good shot at landing on my year-end Top Ten List and one that may already be my personal lock for Worst Film of The Year.

Let’s start with the one I didn’t like: My Suicide, an achingly self-important act of digital onanism by David Lee Miller about a rich teenager who really FEELS, man...a pampered “rebel” who can’t deal with the fuckin’ family that bought him thousands of dollars of filmmaking equipment so he can make over-edited, under-conceived videos of himself doing bad Frank Caliendo/Fred Travalena-style impressions of Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro saying lines from much better movies, like the not-at-all-played-out quote, “You talkin’ to me?” (Take THAT, Mom and Dad!)

My esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak has already reviewed Miller’s Aronofsky-Lite homage at length, but I mention it as an example of the flashy, faux-edgy crap that’s just as mindless and cynically conceived as any high-concept Hollywood swill, yet frequently gets overpraised simply because the director has enough money for a trade show demo reel’s worth of digital effects and new “hot” indie bands on the soundtrack every few minutes to cram some "anarchy" or "ennui" down our throats (no matter how we actually feel about what’s happening on screen).

I work at a creative arts camp in the summer, making original mini-DV movies with young people, and I tend to cram my no-budget epics with songs, rapid-fire A.D.D. edits and gobs of iMovie special effects to distract the audience when scenes aren't working on their own.

On the other hand, when the writing and performances are strong, then I don’t need all the flash (or Flash animation): I just get the hell out of the way and let the actors do their thing...a strategy writer/director Lynn Shelton employs to great effect with Humpday, described in the SXSW catalogue as a comedy about Ben and Anna (Mark Duplass and Alycia Delmore), a smart yuppie couple whose seemingly perfect relationship is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Ben’s old bohemian pal, Andrew (a hilarious Joshua Leonard, finally reemerging from the oblivion of the Blair Witch woods).

That’s all I knew about the movie going in, and though the above summary makes Humpday sound like You, Me and Dupree, it actually develops into something far less predictable and a hundred times funnier. But even if you discover Humpday’s central plot twist in advance, the movie is still a goddamn delight: the only thing funnier than the dialogue is what’s left unsaid in double-takes and reaction shots. These are characters who actually think before they speak, refusing to flatten into predictable stereotypes, and the actors work together with the chemistry of a virtuoso jazz combo...especially Leonard and Duplass, a writer/director in his own right who’s developed into the mumblecore movement’s answer to Paul Rudd (or possibly Ron Livingston).

(And click here for a SXSW mumblecore double-feature review of Beeswax!)

Screengrab Exclusive: "Baghead" Clip

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Mark and Jay Duplass, the duo behind the seminal mumblecore feature The Puffy Chair, are back with what has been most often described as "the mumblecore horror movie." That's a fun marketing hook, but you shouldn't expect Baghead to be a nerve-jangling exercise in terror ala The Strangers, even if both movies feature menacing figures with bags on their heads. At once a self-reflexive send-up of the lo-fi movement they helped launch and a sly love quadrangle, Baghead is more funny than scary, although some of the relationship issues it explores may give you the heebie-jeebies. The set-up is simple: four struggling actors hole up in a cabin in the woods for a weekend, planning to write a movie for all of them to star in. In this exclusive clip, available only on the Screengrab, a brainstorming session turns into an awkward attempt at seduction.

Click here to check it out.

Baghead (Sony Pictures Classics) opens in selected cities Friday.

Baghead Snubs New York, L.A.

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Those of who live in the 99.999% of the country that lies between New York and Los Angeles long ago came to terms with being second class citizens when it comes to movie release dates. Sure, we’ll get your Indys and Hulks at the same time as everyone else, but it’s always irritating when the rave reviews for a There Will Be Blood start rolling in and we still have to wait two months to see it. We’ll begrudgingly admit that it does make some sense for movies seeking buzz to open in the two largest media centers first, particularly late in the year when Oscar-qualifying rules require week-long runs in New York and L.A. theaters. Still, in an online age when buzz is transmitted globally with a single keystroke, the platform release begins to seem like an outmoded convention.

Still, it’s at least somewhat gratifying when a movie bucks the conventional wisdom and opens in one of these other American cities you may have read about or seen on the TV. As Michael Cieply notes in the New York Times, it does happen on occasion. “Thus Samuel Goldwyn Films four years ago picked up the New Age semidocumentary What the Bleep Do We Know? after its producers had already found an audience in the Pacific Northwest. It then expanded the release to other heartland cities but stayed out of central Manhattan, confining itself to what Goldwyn’s president, Meyer Gottlieb, called ‘the fringes’ of New York…In June 1980, 20th Century Fox defied conventional logic by opening The Stunt Man, directed by Richard Rush and starring Peter O’Toole, in Seattle. Months later, when it played New York, the film was panned by The Times.”

The latest example is Baghead, the mumblecore horror movie from the Duplass brothers. “The movie will show first in Austin, Tex., where its writer-directors, the brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, got their filmmaking careers in gear. Then Baghead will probably move on to Dallas, Houston or, maybe, Portland, Ore. — cities that, in the words of Tom Bernard, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, ‘tend to connect with what’s new and different.’ In July or August, if all goes well, Baghead will finally make it to screens in Manhattan and West Los Angeles, where independent film gems are supposed to be discovered by sophisticated viewers who live on the culture’s cutting edge. Or used to.”

Mark and Jay Duplass spoke with the Austin Chronicle about the strategy. “Too often with a small movie like Baghead,” Mark says, “if you open it in New York or L.A., it never gets a chance to find its legs. We liked the idea of opening up in a place where people might give it a chance and where it actually might play for more than a week or two before it gets knocked out by the next big summer movie… Austinites are smart, and they're looking for something different; you've gotta keep them on their toes. For us, Austin is the quintessential movie-watching town, because people there will go to the movies without even knowing what they're going to see, just to see something new.”

Related:
Tribeca Film Festival Review: Baghead

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Baghead"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Baghead bills itself as being presented by "the Duplass Brothers." That's Jay Duplass, who a few years ago directed The Puffy Chair, from a script he co-wrote with brother Mark, who starred in it and produced it. Along though The Puffy Chair was no major world-changing feat, it had a story and actual jokes and was decently lit, all of which easily set it apart from the work of most of the filmmakers who've been lumped together under the heading "mumblecore"--such as Joe Swanberg, whose Hannah Takes the Stairs featured Mark Duplass as the first, and funniest, of the serial boyfriends of the confused heroine (Greta Gerwig). The Dupplass boys may be having second thoughts about that, because Baghead, on which they share writing and directing credits, opens with a fairly vicious parody of a half-assed "mumblecore"-style independent film that looks as if the print had been delivered to the projection room in a cinnamon roll box with the icing still stuck to the insides. After the in-jokes are out of the way, our heroes--two failed actor-brothers named Matt (Ross Partridge) and Chad (Steve Zissis) and the women in their lives (played by Gerwig and Elise Muller)-- repair to a family house in the woods to work on their fantasy of writing a script for a movie that will launch the four of them out of film-extra work and to see what they can come up with in the way of comedy and drama with the tangle of misfiring sexual and romantic attractions between them. (Chad, who's a bit of a schlub in comparison to his brother--"You got Elvis hair," he tells him reproachfully--is in love with Gerwig, who has does indeed have the hots for Matt, who in turn think that he and Muller have broken up as a couple, even though she still regards him as her "soul mate.")

Baghead runs out of gas about twenty minutes from the finish line, when it resorts to a plot twist reminiscent of the lesser work of Sherwood Schwartz. But up to that point, it's surprisingly funny. Like The Puffy Chair, it's scaled small, and because it's set mostly in the house, it lacks the built-in advantage that The Puffy Chair had just by virtue of its being a road movie: it's easier to forgive the lack of forward momentum when at least the scenery keeps changing. The Dupplass brothers have humor, but they don't (yet) have a farce architect's talent for stoking the tangle of longings and self-delusions they set up until it builds to a comic explosion. They seem content to just polish and turn them over and examine them from different angles. That's an honest approach, and this new movie is likable even after it wears out its own possibilities, but if they plan on being in movies for the long haul, they need to start thinking bigger. The good news is that, unlike some of the directors they've been linked with, I can actually picture them doing that. For now, the biggest surprise in Baghead is Greta Gerwig, who seemed embarrassingly callow, and even not so bright, in the overhyped Hannah Takes the Stairs. Here, she seems callow and not-so-bright, but this time it's deliberate, and she manages to be charming, too. It's actually a good sign for her long-term prospects that she's better at playing a character than she was at Embodying the Emotional Confusion of Her Generation.

[Correction: This piece originally falsely stated that Mark and Jay Duplass, who wrote and directed Baghead, act in it as well. We regret the error.]