The Screengrab : hannah takes the stairs

Trailer Review: Baghead

Paul Clark — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later: the first mumblecore horror movie. Even as someone who has never really had much use for the mumblecore movement, this one has me intrigued, in large part because the two elements seem so incongruous. The casual loosey-goosey feel of movies like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Mutual Appreciation just doesn’t seem to jive with the stylistic and storytelling conventions of the fright genre, which if nothing else makes it a noble effort by The Duplass Brothers to make it work. But how successful will it be? A few weeks ago, Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent saw the film at Tribeca, where he praised the comic aspects of the film but had little to say about the horror, which leads me to believe it’s not as much of a factor in the film as this trailer would lead you to believe. Still, I’m willing to give this a shot, which is more than I can say with many movies of its ilk.

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.]

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

Greta Gerwig and the SXSW Invasion

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In approximately 24 hours, the bars and hotel lobbies of Austin will be crawling with filmmakers, actors, publicists, studio weasels, and, lowest of the low, film bloggers. Yes, your Screengrab pals Leonard Pierce and yours truly will be on the scene to bring you up-to-the-minute news, reviews and free booze. No, wait. The free booze is for us. But you’ll reap the benefits when you get to read our semi-drunken posts.

In anticipation of SXSW Film 08, this week’s issue of the Austin Chronicle is jam-packed with coverage. The cover girl is Greta Gerwig, which is entirely appropriate as the leading lady of mumblecore is practically the face of SXSW these days. The 2006 festival featured the premiere of LOL, in which Gerwig made her screen debut (granted, it was only her voice on an answering machine, but it was a start). Hannah Takes the Stairs premiered at the following year’s SXSW, which also showcased Gerwig in an amusing series of promos that screened through the festival.

This year she’s everywhere: Sunday night you can see her in both Baghead (the mumblecore horror movie from the Duplass brothers) and Nights and Weekends (which she co-wrote and co-directed). The following night she’s starring in Mary Bronstein’s Yeast as a “maddeningly oblivious, tyrannical and emotionally stunted young woman.” The Chronicle’s Spencer Parsons talked to Gerwig on the eve of her Austin takeover and found that success hasn’t spoiled her yet. “I still haven't figured out how to make money out of this, but it's more of my life, and it's real, and it's great. Now I think, yeah, it's not impossible, but you've also got to be pragmatic. I'm smarter now about how I earn my money in New York, having a job, and even if I can't fully support myself doing this, I can still do it if I want to, and that's great.”

The issue also contains interviews with Elvis Mitchell, who discusses his documentary The Black List, Crawford director David Modigliani, and the ever-popular Zellner Brothers, who sum up the festival’s appeal perfectly: “South by Southwest takes place during the best time of year, which gives visitors an interesting misconception that Austin's always really pleasant and wonderful to live in [laughs]. Sure the weather is perfect today, but in two months it's going to be hell. But they won't ever experience that.”

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.