I did find some of the information rather interesting, agreed with some of the comments, and whole-heartedly took issue with others. Basically, the author explains that the mumblecore "movement" is a creation of marketing, a ploy of film festival programming, an attempt to brand these films as the hot new thing so that they would do better as part of a group than they could on their own.
Well, okay. I always got the impression anyway that filmmakers branded with the label were always kind of puzzled by it, even put off by it, as well. It reminds me of another much-maligned, commercially-coined genre of which I have been an unapologetic follower: emocore music, more colloquially known as 'emo.' A label which is unwanted at best and derisive at worst, which no one can accurately define and almost no one is willing to use to define themselves. Most musicians slapped with the emo label would probably tell you that they don't know what it means either, and they they just make the music they want to make, man. Let the market, which needs everything to be easily classified and defined, make those distinctions. Such is the same with filmmakers of the mumblecore movement.
The emo genre and mumblecore have much in common. Products of both get an inordinate amount of shit for being self-indulgent works of self-absorbed people. And in some cases I'm sure that's a valid criticism. That said, I take issue with the following point of the article:
The mumbler with the loudest mouth and the director of three defining mumblecore features—Kissing on the Mouth (05), LOL (06), and the aforementioned Hannah—is Swanberg, who commented on GreenCine last year that his work “is not about seclusion, it’s just a reflection of the white, hipster neighborhood I live in.” Deep-throating his own foot even further, he told Filmmaker magazine (in the Spring ’07 issue) that he didn’t feel he had “anything to say right now about the Iraq war. The story of my life and my friends’ lives are the ones I can tell most completely.” That Swanberg believes that his life and those of his friends are separate from the war or the global meltdown that is upon us seems to me reason enough to bring back the draft. I wouldn’t take these pronouncements seriously, were they not borne out by movies that are just as smug and blatantly lazy.Emphasis is mine. I don't think every film, or every work of art, for that matter, needs to be a treatise on the current geo-political state of the world, or contribute to any kind of political debate. Or, for that matter, be relevant to anything at all. I take the author's point that young people feel separate from the war and uninterested in current events, but you can't fault the guy for making films about what he wants to make films about. I find this criticism just unfair and mean-spirited.
The author makes no secret of her dislike for Joe Swanberg or his films, but seems to really like both Andrew Bujalski and Adam Katz, calling them the "break-out talents" of mumblecore. I can't say anything about Katz, since his two films, Dance Party USA and Quiet City haven't come out on DVD yet and I missed them at IFC in August. But I can see how the latter two perhaps have more emphasis on "craft" than Swanberg. Perhaps.
I don't like placing value-judgments on films. They are what they are. And I couldn't help but have a gut-reaction to the article based off of the provocative title alone. I wanted to take issue with it before I even read it. Hannah Takes the Stairs elicited genuine emotion when I saw it, and inspired me to do my own work. And I'm not the only one. What else can you ask from a film? Call it whatever you want, but it's definitely not dead.
EDIT: Oh, I also wanted to say congratulations to the Duplass Brothers (who I'm sure will never read this) for their new film, Baghead, getting accepted into Sundance.
