June 2008

Funny Ha Ha (2002, Director: Andrew Bujalski): Perhaps the first of the films later lumped together as “mumblecore,” Funny Ha Ha was written and directed by 27-year-old Harvard film graduate Andrew Bujalski. Made on a shoestring budget with non-professional actors, it toured film festivals for almost three years before getting a limited theatrical release in 2005. I believe this is the first time the film has screened theatrically in Toronto.

Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) is a recent college graduate still living in the student ghetto near her school. Though she’s no longer a student, she seems unable to move on to the next phase of her life. She still hangs around with her college friends, partying and working temp jobs. Her obsession with her friend Alex is obvious to everyone, despite the fact that he’s already in a serious relationship. Nonetheless, when she hears Alex has broken up with his girlfriend, she’s reluctant to make her feelings known, despite the urgings of all her friends, including Alex’s sister. She meets another guy, Mitchell (Bujalski), at her temping job and he awkwardly asks her out. Then her friend Rachel’s boyfriend Dave kisses her drunkenly after a party. None of these relationships are going the way she wants. She quits the temping job and finds a better one as a research assistant. Alex begins hanging out with her and flirting ambiguously. Then suddenly she finds out he and his girlfriend have not only reunited, but eloped and gotten married. But he still shows up drunk late on the night of her birthday. “Marriage is complicated,” he says.

With prospects like these, Marnie clearly needs to get away from these people and maybe even this town, and by the end, we get an inkling that that’s what is going to happen. But for about 90% of the film’s running time, we float through Marnie’s life just the way she has. What saves it from being completely tedious is Dollenmayer’s open and pretty face, and her gradually increasing determination to move on with her life.

Funny Ha Ha is extremely primitive, with no music and no external lighting. As my colleague Bob Turnbull expressed, it’s almost a Dogme 95 film. But there’s plenty of humour, of both the goofball and the cringeworthy varieties, and a sympathetic protagonist. When the film ends rather abruptly, I wanted to know what was going to happen to Marnie, and that means that Bujalski has hooked me.

NOTE: I was delighted to find out that Kate Dollenmayer is actually an animator whose credits include work on Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001).

Official site of the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: generationdiy, independent, mumblecore

Nights and Weekends (2008, Directors: Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig): A fitting opening night film for the Toronto leg of the Generation DIY mini-fest, Nights and Weekends is co-director Joe Swanberg’s fourth feature film in four years (in addition to two series of online shorts), and he’s still just 26. Perhaps no other director better exemplifies the DIY spirit right now. This particular film grew out of a close collaboration with Greta Gerwig, who has acted in most of Swanberg’s previous films. Their real-life friendship informs and adds some tension to this story of a long-distance relationship.

James lives in Chicago while his girlfriend Mattie lives in New York. We eavesdrop on their hurried lovemaking and awkward conversations in both cities and then quickly it’s a year later and they’ve broken up. The last half of the film deals with their unresolved feelings as they both want to make it work but know that it can’t. For anyone who’s ever been involved in a long-distance romance, much of this will ring true. Physical distance creates both intense longing and emotional blind spots. The film begins with them tearing each other’s clothes off at the beginning of a rare weekend together. But once that’s done, they spend the rest of the time trying not to deal with their impending separation. Though they promise to come up with a plan to be together, it never takes shape. The film is full of awkward silences and glances, as these inarticulate characters struggle to hold onto what they have. There is a tension throughout the film that gradually slackens into sadness, and in another sex scene near the end of the film that bookends the opening scene, both characters can’t keep their fatalism at bay long enough to consummate their desire. It’s an emotionally affecting scene, even in the absence of any particularly well-written dialogue.

According to Swanberg and Gerwig, a lot of the dialogue was improvised, and credit must be given to the skillful editing (also by Swanberg) for shaping this into a film with an emotional arc. Of all the “mumblecore” directors, I think Swanberg is the least concerned with filmmaking “flourishes”. His films are the least “arty” in my opinion. Instead he seems to aim for emotional authenticity and in this case, he has the perfect collaborator. Gerwig is the better actor (something Swanberg freely admits), and her mood changes effectively communicate her confusion and frustration in every scene. It doesn’t hurt that the camera adores her. Even the harshness of digital video cannot dim her natural beauty.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the intensely intimate sex scenes in the film. Though we never see James and Mattie actually having sex, there is plenty of nudity and foreplay on screen. When Hollywood films show people in sexual situations, you’re keenly aware that these are actors who probably don’t know each other very well, but here we have two real-life friends, co-writers and co-directors of the film, not only emotionally but physically naked in front of each other and the audience. It’s raw and brave and awkward all at the same time. I couldn’t help but wonder what Swanberg’s wife thought of all of this, though he’s featured this sort of matter-of-fact sexuality in all of his films.

In my review of his film LOL, I wondered (perhaps a little unfairly) what it would be like for Swanberg to work with “real” actors, but I think Gerwig is the real thing. Still, I’d like to see him stay behind the camera (preferably a 35mm film camera) and work with a fully-formed script next time. That being said, and although this film feels unpolished and slightly unfinished, Nights and Weekends contains moments of genuine emotional power.

Here is the Q&A with directors Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig from after the screening (and that’s Canada AM’s film critic Richard Crouse asking the first few questions) :

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Duration: 25:49

Official site of the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: generationdiy, independent, mumblecore

The Last Pogo (1978, Director: Colin Brunton): In 1978, I was too young to get into bars, but I was a huge fan of punk rock. Of course, at that young age, I thought it all came from England. It wasn’t until a year or two later that I got into a punk/rockabilly band from Hamilton called Teenage Head. But in 1978, they headlined a rather infamous gig at The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street West in Toronto. Concert promoters Gary Topp and Gary Cormier (“The Two Garys”) were well-known for promoting the best new music, and were booking punk bands into the Horseshoe from the beginning. But by December 1978, they’d lost the lease and were set to move to a new venue, the Edge. They decided to stage a going-away bash with all their favourite local bands, and The Last Pogo is the visual record of that wild night. Featuring The Scenics, The Cardboard Brains, The Mods, The Ugly, The Viletones, and Teenage Head, it was a legendary show which ended with the cops breaking up a near-riot. The film had not been screened theatrically in 30 years, so I was really looking forward to the screening (part of the annual North by Northeast Music and Film Festival), and Brunton had promised that several special guests would be in attendance.

On my way to the screening, I had to pass by the Much Music studios, which for some unknown reason were surrounded by screaming teenage girls. Queen Street was closed off and there was a stage set up as well. Before long, some band of scantily-clad women jumped onstage and sang some forgettable ditty while shaking their junk in perfectly choreographed time. It was ironic that on my way to see some punk history, I had to be subjected to some of the unspeakable horrors of popular music.

I took my seat at the NFB cinema behind a group of rowdy fifty-something punk ladies, who proceeded to hoot and howl all through the film itself. It was rather disturbing. The special guests included Dave Quinton who drummed for The Scenics and later for the Dead Boys, Vince Carlucci from The Cardboard Brains, and a few others, but alas, no one from Teenage Head. And the film itself, though a treasured document of the event, proved to be slightly disappointing. The reason is that as the concert wore on, the club reached and then exceeded its capacity, and just before Hamilton’s finest took the stage, they were notified that they were only permitted to play one song and then the police would be shutting the place down. Understandably, the place went nuts, and so the footage from their performance isn’t the greatest. I even think the audio is out of sync.

Interestingly enough, Teenage Head would be at the centre of another riot a few years later, and for the same reasons. When they played the Ontario Place Forum, hundreds of fans were locked out after the venue reached capacity, and the resulting riot caused the management of Ontario Place to ban rock concerts for many years. Luckily, I was prepared and had arrived early. It was one of only two times I saw the band live. The other was at my high school, and was forgettable because in my excitement, I’d consumed an entire mickey of rye, became separated from my friends, and peed my pants. I was so mortified that I ran home, missing most of the show.

In happier news, director Brunton has spent the past two years filming and editing an expanded version of the film, to be called The Last Pogo Jumps Again. He’s revisited many of the players from that night and I’m eagerly looking forward to the film’s release, tentatively planned for Hot Docs 2009. It was also through him that I found out that writer Liz Worth has written what looks to be the definitive history of punk in Toronto. Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, 1976-1981 should be released this year. I’ve been wanting to write this book since reading Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s incredible Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, but at least now I’ll be able to read it.

After the screening, I was hoping there would be a Q&A with the director and maybe some of the participants, but no such luck. I was able to speak briefly with both Colin Brunton and Liz Worth, and hope to conduct some short email interviews with them in the next several months.

P.S. It seems strange that it was at this very time and place last year that I was seeing Nightclubbing, another document of those years which is being made into a longer retrospective documentary.

Official site of the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: music, nxne, punk, toronto

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Kontroll (2003, Director: Nimrod Antal): Set entirely within the subterranean world of the Budapest subway system, this directorial debut is a stylish pastiche of a number of different genres. It follows the exploits of a team of ticket inspectors headed by Bulcsu, a former architect who ran away from the pressures of that life and is now essentially trapped underground. He even sleeps in the subway, flagrantly disregarding the counsel of Petula Clark. His crew is the standard ragtag bunch, stock types who fill out comedies from Budapest to Boston. There’s the Professor, a “lifer” who knows all the rules, written and unwritten, of the system. Tibor (Tibi) is the rookie, naive and just a bit stupid. Muki is the truly stupid one, a hulking simpleton with an unpredictable temper but an equally unpredictable case of narcolepsy. Lastly, there’s Lecsó, a scruffy character who looks like he should be on the other side of the law.

It’s a clever bit of comedy to set these guys up as if they were a group of cops, because that’s essentially what they are, except that they pursue perpetrators of victimless crimes. The subway appears to run on the honour system, but there’s no honour. Hardly anyone pays, and if the inspectors ask for a ticket, people just tell them they don’t have one. This particular group of inspectors are almost completely ineffectual, but they don’t seem to care that much. They’re content to swap stories and engage in macho contests like “railing,” where they race each other through the tunnels just ahead of the last “express” train each night.

The film’s atmosphere is mostly just gritty until we find out that someone has been pushing people in front of trains. Although the members of our crew really aren’t interested in capturing the killer, there’s a sense of the police procedural that drives the narrative forward. Here the director’s style really takes advantage of the setting. Underground tunnels in Budapest have a gothic creepiness that New York’s or Toronto’s would never have, and I found myself thinking about vampires. In fact, it’s half-comical and half-frightening that our main character Bulcsu seems to be bleeding in almost every scene. And he never sees daylight. Hmm…

Toward the end, the film takes a turn into psychological thriller territory, with mixed results. It seemed like the director wasn’t quite sure what type of film he wanted to make, so he made all of them. It’s an understandable weakness in a debut film, but Antal shows he can create something both entertaining and a bit artistic within some very tight constraints.

Official site of the film (English version)

Purchase the DVD from Amazon.com
Purchase the DVD from Amazon.ca

(7/10)

Tagged as: debut, hungary, subway