The Screengrab : mumblecore

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 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!)

All The Real Girls Is One of the Most Influential Movies of the Decade

Vadim Rizov — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Over the weekend I watched All The Real Girls for the first time since it came out for a couple of reasons. One, it's been a weird year for David Gordon Green fans, watching his two weakest films (Snow Angels — with its nervy naturalism eventually undercut by an all-too-schematic doom-and-gloom plot and heavy-handed symbols straight from the worst middlebrow novels — and the pointless '80s simulacrum of Pineapple Express) come out in quick succession. Was I overrating Green based on false memories, or is he just going through a weird transitional phase? Two, I was wondering if All The Real Girls is secretly one of the most influential films of the decade.

The answers are no and yes. Sort of.

Five years down the line, All The Real Girls retains its position as one of the most visually distinctive American independent films produced. Working with immensely talented DP Tim Orr, Green sets pretty much every scene to "stun." Unfortunately, that hasn't really rubbed off on followers; as in George Washington, Green wanted to bring a new way of looking at poor regional areas to the screen, making them as gorgeous as any movie set in ostensibly pretty settings. Instead, we got the self-consciously ugly Ballast. Oh well.

All The Real Girls' true influence extends in two directions, mostly pernicious. There's the issue of score: as in George Washington, Green loves droning, post-rock guitars suffusing everything in an atmospheric haze, punctuated by the occasional indie-rock ballad (Will Oldham for the opening!). I don't recall this happening in independent films before Green, but it seems to be everywhere now (e.g. Bubble, Half Nelson). This isn't really that big a problem, though sometimes it makes movies blur together. Presumably this and the post-Juno wave of twee pop soundtracks will get into a battle to the death.

The other influence is a broader, thematic one. All The Real Girls is nothing if not embarrassingly unmediated in presenting all the soppy and jejune things young couples can say to each other when no one is listening. Sometimes this leads to emotional honesty; unfortunately, occasionally it leads to stupidly "quirky" lines like Zooey Deschanel's infamous "I had a dream that you grew a garden on a trampoline and I was so happy I invented peanut butter." This realm of affectation and self-conscious quirk in the name of emotional truth (as opposed to what it actually is: stupid, youthful self-indulgence of everything you think being interesting to other people) is, of course, directly how we got to Garden State and all its off-spring. In many respects, Zach Braff's emo template seems more than ever like an unacknowledged steal of All The Real Girls' aesthetic and proclivity for mawkishness without any of the things that made it interesting. On the bright side, as Matt Dentler once said, it also seems like a direct path to mumblecore. Unless that makes you angry too.

Screengrab Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:30:00 GMT

Like Robin William’s out-of-focus actor in Deconstructing Harry, it’s often hard to really see any new Woody Allen film clearly.

For some, the director is a creepy old relic who shot his load in the seventies and eighties, then slept with his not-quite-technically underage not-quite-technically stepdaughter and keeps churning out ever-more-terrible movies to suck whatever money he still can from the wallets of the aging bourgeoisie pseudo-intellectuals willing to pay for his particular brand of nostalgic, non-threatening real estate porn. For others, the Soon-Yi controversy wasn’t as much of a deal-breaker as the sight of Allen snogging comely young co-stars who (to paraphrase Wooderson from Dazed and Confused) kept staying the same age while he kept getting older. Some just never dug his insular, overeducated, upper-class shtick in the first place. And even for die-hard fans, it’s hard not to greet each new Allen film like each new Prince album, hoping against hope that somehow this time it’ll be Purple Rain again, only to be disappointed when it's not (and wondering vaguely why he can’t just save up all his remaining talent for one last masterpiece rather than cranking out so much sub par material).

Like Jacob Marley’s chains, personal and cultural baggage come pre-tangled with Allen’s projects, making it difficult for critics and viewers not to greet them with preconceived notions...and the director’s ritualistic obsession with certain recurring themes, cadences, soundtrack palettes, filmmaking tropes and opening title designs can inspire (usually unfavorable) comparisons between what you’re watching and better earlier work.

So let’s pretend instead for a moment that Vicky Cristina Barcelona was directed by Andrew Bujalski or Joe Swanberg or Jay Duplass or one of those other low blood pressure mumblecore guys, upgrading one of their typically meandering, fitfully amusing Petri dishes of human behavior with better production values, bigger stars and a tighter script. Though trading on certain shopworn but reliable stereotypes about bloodless American yuppies and passionate Spanish artistas, you’d probably find Buswanplass' latest offering a pleasant diversion, a well-paced travelogue of gorgeous locations and philosophical landscapes, from Oviedo and Passeig de Gracia to Rebecca Hall’s Type A realist Vicky and Scarlett Johansson’s fickle, restless Cristina, a spoiled wannabe bohemian who can only define her life in terms of what she doesn’t want. Over the course of the story, Buswanplass demonstrates how the seemingly opposite personalities of American friends Vicky and Cristina ultimately lead to similar frustrations with life and love. But Javier Bardem and (especially) Penelope Cruz are the real stars of the movie, and the best thing about it. Their chemistry as incompatible soul mates is a grown-up refraction of the Vicky/Cristina dynamic, with Bardem cool and sexy as the “reasonable” one and Cruz a total hoot as the hot-blooded free spirit he loves and loathes (and vice-versa).

Do you really need another meandering romantic roundelay sprinkled with New Yorker one-liners, flavored with hints of another director (in this case, Almodovar) and a score free of rock, pop or hip-hop? Well, no, probably not. But as empty summer calories go, Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s probably healthier than another helping of CGI fast-food, and goes down easy like sangria on a long summer weekend.

Related Stories: Take Five - Woody, Penelope Cruz Shows Off Bronzed Woody, Scarlett Johansson-Penelope Cruz Smooch “Least Sexy Thing Ever”

Screengrab Review: "Garden Party"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Garden Party, opening in limited release next week, is being touted as the arrival of a hot new talent in the person of writer/director Jason Freeland. In fact, though, Freeland's first film was an entire decade ago, a somewhat bewildering James Ellroy adaptation called Brown's Requiem. His new film, though, with its attractive young cast and allegedly verite look at contemporary Los Angeles, is getting way more attention than Brown's Requiem ever did, and if it's not technically his debut, it's at least poised to be his breakthrough. We had a chance to screen Garden Party recently; should you believe the hype?

Boiled down to the one-sentence description that no doubt got it through the vetting process, Garden Party is the story of a group of young people, all recently relocated to the vast construct of the American psyche that is Los Angeles, who try to get by faced with all the pitfalls and perils the wicked city is home to. Peopled with a game young cast, the movie gives us a bunch of characters who aren't quite established enough as archetypes to come across as trite right off the bat; there's the vaguely sinister real estate agent/drug dealer, the allegedly brilliant young musician who drifts through life intersecting with the other characters but never making a real emotional commitment to any of them, the renegade bohemian with a porn fetish, the sexually abused teen, and half a dozen other characters who seem like they just got off the late shift at the Quaalude factory. Needless to say, their stories all intersect in sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable ways; needless to say, a few of them experience what could be called a revelation if it didn't come across as so utterly trifling; and, needless to say, there's lots of fashionable sex, drugs, and pouting to make thing palatable to the drugged-out, pouty teenage couples who are presumably the movie's target audience. With all this stuff being needless to say, you might ask: why was it even necessary to make the film? The answer? That is a good question.

There are a few good reasons to see Garden Party. Freeland has a distinctive, if rather undeveloped, visual sensibility, and his pacing is very fine, keeping you involved in the story even when it spills over into the cliches he generates as a writer. And a number of the members of the largely anonymous cast are worth watching, particularly the lovely, polished Willa Holland in the lead role. However, these aspects are overwhelmed by its overall shapelessness and the fact that it seems kluged together from parts of other, usually better movies: the plot and structure capture the worst aspects of Rent but can't handle the best of Short Cuts. The teen cast and sexual panic aspects play like a lite version of Kids. The pseudo-verite is drawn from Cloverfield and the sense of communal destiny is like a mopier version of Magnolia. It draws its "depressed young white people unable to make significant emotional connections" vibe from the mumblecore movement, and its misunderstood-sensitive-genius characters from the mind of every teenager ever. Even the ad campaign makes it look like a moody remake of Swimfan. Freeland has the talent to make distinctive movies, but he seems to lack the focus to make ones that don't mostly remind us of a million things we've seen before.

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!

SxSW Review: "The Lost Coast"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Mumblecore, in case you missed the seventy majillion articles about it in all the smart magazines, is the hot new thing in the indie film biz, and South By Southwest is no exception. Love it or loathe it, it's the mode of the moment, and probably half the movies I saw over the last few days could be jammed into that category with a minimum of injury. For those blessedly unfamiliar with mumblecore, it involves low budgets and a bunch of attractive but poorly dressed young white people who spend a great deal of time pouting because they are emotionally paralyzed and cannot communicate with each other. I'm sure you can imagine how exciting this all is. With The Lost Coast, writer/director Gabriel Fleming has presented us with a colossal leap forward in this boundlessly underperforming genre: the gay mumblecore movie!

On Halloween Night in San Francisco, two men and a woman — all of whom are attractive but poorly dressed young white people who are emotionally paralyzed and cannot communicate with each other — wander the streets of the city trying to score some X. (The scene where they finally succeed is one of only two funny moments in the film.) They are eventually joined by another attractive but poorly dressed young white person, who does not seem to be emotionally paralyzed (at one point, he makes a strong connection with a dog), but is a jackass. Jasper is the moody one, whose fiancee is in another country; he pouts a lot and is upset that he once had a gay relationship with Mark. Mark is the gay one, who maintains the same smirky facial expression whether he is yelling at someone or being fellated; he smirks a lot and is upset that he no longer has a gay relationship with Mark. Lily is the female one, who experiences the movie's only epiphany when she decides to get the hell away from these two yutzes; she frowns a lot and is upset that she basically has nothing to do in the whole movie except shuffle around looking sad.

The shame of this petrifyingly dull movie is that Fleming really knows what he's doing behind the camera; his pacing is all screwy, but that's the fault of his script, not his direction, and many of the scenes (especially an early-morning walk through Golden Gate Park that turns eerie, if a bit predictably grim) are absolutely gorgeous pieces of filmmaking. It would be fascinating to see what he's capable of when directing someone else's script. But The Lost Coast gives us no reason to care about the characters, nothing to understand about them, and no stake in the ultimate resolution of their relationships. It's simply a dull, self-absorbed film that hopes we won't notice through all the pretty pictures.

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.