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FeedMondays With Schobie: Mumble material
Some thoughts while pondering the best weekend of playoff football in recent memory:
• If you’ve yet to encounter the mumblecore movement, it’s, well, mumble-y. The films—The Puffy Chair, Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead, Humpday—are talky, a bit dry, and mostly unpretentious affairs that feel like the complete opposite of Hollywood product and even most indie films. And like any new movement in cinema, they are both hard to actually define as a movement, and wildly varied in terms of quality.
My first mumble experience was Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs, the film which brought the now ubiquitous Greta Gerwig to my attention. Its ambling spirit makes it an ideal mumble primer—if you can’t take this one, you’re unlikely to want to continue. I’m on the fence, I must admit, but I love what I read in today’s Los Angeles Times:
“Joe Swanberg—best known as one of the pioneers in the independent filmmaking movement known as mumblecore—is releasing a new film online [titled Marriage Material] for free next week.” Cool. Very cool. And very smart. And here it is.
As the filmmaker explains, “the date of the ‘release’ is connected to the shipment of the first DVD in the Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 set that Factory 25 is doing, but it's not lost on me that Sundance is also starting this week. The Sundance Film Festival makes the whole country aware of independent film for a week or so, but most people can’t be there, so it's fun to put something up that everyone can see.”
The plot summary from Vimeo is rather succinct: “Emily and Andrew, a young couple living in Memphis, agree to babysit their friend's 6-month-old for a day. The experience causes them to examine their own relationship and their feelings about marriage and children.” Perhaps a bit more intriguing is the cast, which heralds not one, not two, but three Swanbergs: Joe, Kris, and Jude.
Only fifty-five minutes long, Marriage Material seems ideal for web viewing. And if a few more folks now find themselves aware of Swanberg and the mumblers, the release will have proven a huge success.
• I’m as much of an awards junkie as any film freak, but there are now so many shows that I just can’t muster up much enthusiasm for the Golden Globes, especially when Rickey Gervais’s much-buzzed return felt so neutered.
The sheer fact that Madonna won an award for a song no one has heard from a movie no one (who has seen it so far) has liked underscores the sheer absurdity of the Globes.
• The Oscar nominations are next Monday, and it’s looking increasingly likely that David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will find itself a nominee for best picture. It’s also now clear that the film is a hit, no matter what it cost. It’s been odd to see online wags, and New York Magazine, especially, dub the film a flop. As S. T. Vanairsdale points out in a well-argued Movieline piece:
I'm not exactly sure what kind of money that experts thought David Fincher's 160-minute, hard-R-rated, unswervingly bleak adaptation of the bestselling novel was supposed to have made by now, but let's look at the facts for a second: Through Tuesday [January 10], Dragon Tattoo has earned a little more than $79 million domestically. … That would be $79 million in three weeks of release, the best showing ever for an R-rated December drama in that time frame. Or call it a thriller if you want; that still makes it second only to—wait for it—Scream 2.
The fact is the film has found its audience. Yes, it opened to surprisingly low numbers, but it is that rarity, a truly adult thriller, and there’s a reason why the word of mouth has been reported as phenomenal: because the movie is great. And underrated.
• Lastly, web-celeb singer Lana Del Ray made her much-hyped debut to the world outside of the blogosphere on Saturday Night Live this week, and yes, it was as bad as you’ve heard. It’s a shame, as “Video Games” remains a slow-building stunner. But this … Lana is lovely and talented, to be sure. Let’s hope she works on stage presence.
Photo credit: Swanberry, LLC.
