“If I have to watch another conversation on a couch, I’m going to kill myself,” he said in his interview with the Times. After his fourth film in four years, he said,
“I realized that because I’d been producing so much work, I hadn’t changed enough as a person between projects. At that point I couldn’t make another movie even if I’d wanted to, because I hadn’t had a life for so long.”
Real-life sex scenes (so, is this porn?), minute-long silent pauses to reflect (I’m not sure I need to see people thinking when I know what’s going on in their heads, thanks to having been told everything already in unscripted dialogue), and the depiction of what it’s like to be white, middle-class, and worrying about nothing potentially hazardous to your life—all this leaves me unconvinced that mumblecore is doing anything for film that reality TV hasn’t done for TV.
I realize that I’m happy to have missed the bus on blatant self-promotion and content to be a standing passenger on the local line, only glancing ahead at the main hipster players who are ostensibly attempting to transform our third media medium—while riding what I’ve come to see as a narcissistic wave.
Photo courtesy of ifccenter.com
