As mumblecore legends Andrew Bujalski and Joe Swanberg release new films, Computer Chess and Drinking Buddies, Ryan Gilbey talks to them about the meandering legacy of a movement that irritated as many as it, um, inspired
Cinema history does not want for new waves. But the batch of lo-fi American movies referred to during the past decade as "mumblecore" may be the first example of a no-wave: a movement without movement, a revolution only in the sense of something going round and round with little discernible progress. All of the artists associated with it have moved on to some extent. Andrew Bujalski, the most skilful of the mumblecore group, has made the playful, experimental Computer Chess, released later this month. The prolific Joe Swanberg, whose loosey-goosey methods on early movies such as Hannah Takes the Stairs extended to living with his cast and crew in one apartment during production, directed...
Cinema history does not want for new waves. But the batch of lo-fi American movies referred to during the past decade as "mumblecore" may be the first example of a no-wave: a movement without movement, a revolution only in the sense of something going round and round with little discernible progress. All of the artists associated with it have moved on to some extent. Andrew Bujalski, the most skilful of the mumblecore group, has made the playful, experimental Computer Chess, released later this month. The prolific Joe Swanberg, whose loosey-goosey methods on early movies such as Hannah Takes the Stairs extended to living with his cast and crew in one apartment during production, directed...
- 11/8/2013
- by Ryan Gilbey
- The Guardian - Film News
This first feature by San Francisco-based director Colin Trevorrow is very much a whimsical product of both the Sundance Institute's brand of independent cinema and the rambling, low-budget movie genre known as mumblecore. The latter features characters who live in the interstices of society and are as talkative as they are inactive, and the term was coined in the earlier years of this century by Eric Masunaga, a sound editor who works in this area. One of the leading roles in Safety Not Guaranteed is played by the writer-director Mark Duplass, who with his brother, Jay, pioneered mumblecore, most notably in their picture The Puffy Chair, the shaggy dog tale of a search around the American south for an old lounge chair to be given as a birthday present to their father. They went on to make Jeff Who Lives at Home, which featured the familiar faces of Jason Segel,...
- 12/30/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
The Duplass brothers made a certain impression a few years back with a rambling road movie, The Puffy Chair, an exercise in the genre of talkative, semi-improvised, ultra-low-budget American independent pictures that was wittily dubbed "mumblecore" by Eric Masunaga, a sound engineer who'd worked on several of them.
Now the Duplasses have come to Hollywood with a reasonable budget and a strong cast provided by two brothers who work at the opposite end of the industrial spectrum, Ridley and Tony Scott.
The result is the oddly touching Cyrus, starring plug-ugly character actor John C Reilly as a sad, long-divorced, freelance book editor. His considerate ex-wife (Catherine Keener) takes him to a party, hoping he'll find a girl and he hooks up with the attractive, sweet-natured Marisa Tomei. But it transpires she has an overweight 21-year-old son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill, hitherto the star of gross Judd Apatow comedies), a possessive, childlike...
Now the Duplasses have come to Hollywood with a reasonable budget and a strong cast provided by two brothers who work at the opposite end of the industrial spectrum, Ridley and Tony Scott.
The result is the oddly touching Cyrus, starring plug-ugly character actor John C Reilly as a sad, long-divorced, freelance book editor. His considerate ex-wife (Catherine Keener) takes him to a party, hoping he'll find a girl and he hooks up with the attractive, sweet-natured Marisa Tomei. But it transpires she has an overweight 21-year-old son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill, hitherto the star of gross Judd Apatow comedies), a possessive, childlike...
- 9/11/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
There's a scene in Noah Baumbach's latest film, "Greenberg," in which Greta Gerwig's character, Florence Marr, is going through her voice mail. As she listens to an awkward yet sincere message from Roger (played by Ben Stiller), there's a mesmerizing close-up of her face, and you see the true beauty of the equally awkward yet sincere Florence. In other words, Gerwig has arrived. The actor formerly known as the "Mumblecore Queen" definitely has what it takes to play with the big boys.Aside from her role as the sassy best friend in last year's "The House of the Devil," Gerwig's credits—including "Nights and Weekends," "Baghead," and "Hannah Takes the Stairs"—are all within the recent Diy filmmaking movement dubbed mumblecore. Think $1,000 budgets, hand-held digital cameras, and often inarticulate dialogue improvised by filmmakers serving as actors—hence the term coined by sound mixer Eric Masunaga."We didn't know...
- 3/19/2010
- backstage.com
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