The Screengrab : joe swanberg

In Other Blogs: Selected Shorts

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

If you checked out our Oscar picks yesterday and are planning to use them as a basis for your own office pool, you should know that I, for one, pulled my short film predictions out of my hat. But at Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir has actually watched all the nominees. “Short films, at least as the category is defined by the Academy Awards, have even less to do with one another than feature films do. I mean, think about it: With very few exceptions, the films nominated for best picture over the years have all been three-act stories with plot, characters and a script, costing multiple millions to make and running somewhere between 80 and 160 minutes. A short, on the other hand, is any motion picture less than 40 minutes in length, and as in previous years, the 2008 nominees in animated and live-action shorts run the visual, conceptual and philosophical gamut.”

Hollywood and Fine uses the brewing Faye Dunaway/Hilary Duff feud as a jumping off point to discuss aging stars and plastic surgery. “The unkind thing, of course, is that Duff speaks a certain truth. Dunaway is yet another star who has let the fear of natural aging turn her to the sci-fi world of cosmetic surgery. This has given her face a certain computer-generated look – not quite real, not quite human. Put it this way: Dunaway makes Joan Rivers look normal. Or Cher… It’s dismaying to see the give-away cat eyes of cosmetic surgery on once-beautiful women – women who would be beautiful at any age if they just let themselves – like Catherine Deneuve, Jessica Lange and Candice Bergen. But you also detect the pursuit of elusive youth - in the form of Botox needle’s weirdly smoothing qualities - on the faces of favorite male performers as well.”

At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny talks Swanberg. “In January, in the midst of some armchair commentary on the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, I noted Mr. Joe Swanberg’s pronouncements at a press breakfast at which IFC announced a partnership with the film arm of South By Southwest, in which IFC would provide VOD screenings of varied SXSW premieres simultaneous to those films’ screenings at the festival. One of the films is the latest from Swanberg, the young filmmaker whose works (frequently tagged as components of a not-quite movement dubbed ‘Mumblecore’) are noted for their improvisational ‘realism’ and the unusual candor of their depictions of sexual matters (e.g., Swanberg himself and varied other members of his casts engage in unsimulated sex acts therein). Swanberg’s musings on where the ‘interest’ in his films began and ended solicited this rejoinder from your correspondent: ‘I think I speak for myself, and for many others, that when I hear about a new Swanberg picture my first question is "Does he show his schlong in it?" and if the answer is "Yes," my "interest" shrivels up like a Pac-Man that's just gotten it from Inky, Winky, Blinky AND Sue.’”

Around the corner at our own Paul Clark’s blog Silly Hats Only, the Third Annual Muriel Awards are getting underway. Some of your other favorite Screengrabbers are participating, wink wink. “What, not excited yet? Well, you should be. After all, we’ve got plenty of new goodies to go along with all of your old favorite Muriels traditions- that is, if you can call something two years old a tradition. I’d tell you what they are, but that would ruin the surprise, now wouldn’t it?”

Our partners over at Cracked (hey, it says over there in the right-hand column that they’re our partners, so who am I to argue?) have turned up 20 Baffling Foreign Movie Posters. That is, not posters for foreign movies, but posters for American movies as they appear in foreign lands. Such as the one pictured here for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Little known fact: The Turkish Director's Cut featured Shelly Duvall and swashbuckling zombies. Seriously, can you fuck up the poster for a Jack Nicholson classic any worse than this?”

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.

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.