LOLPlot in a Nutshell
Joe Swanberg’s quintessential “mumblecore” movie about three twentysomething men who seem more at ease communicating via cellphone and e-mail than through face-to-face conversations.
Thoughts
I was at the movies a couple of months ago and was surprised to see a trailer for Baghead, the upcoming indie horror movie that’s also partly a spoof of the so-called “mumblecore” movement. I was surprised for a couple of reasons: one, the trailer was playing at the downtown cineplex rather than the arthouse cinema, which seemed to suggest that Baghead would be getting an unexpectedly high-profile release for a low-budget indie; and two, not a single mumblecore movie has ever played Edmonton, which means that Edmonton audiences would be seeing a parody of the genre before they’d ever been exposed to the genre itself.
Well, Baghead has yet to appear, but in the meantime, Metro Cinema (our local cinematheque) has announced a week-long festival featuring many of the key mumblecore films: LOL, Frownland, Four Eyed Monsters, Quiet City, The Guatemalan Handshake, and more. And as the film editor of the local alt-weekly, I’ve started boning up on the genre, starting with the DVD of LOL, which Andrew Grant at Benten Films was kind enough to send me.
LOL is such a small, unassuming movie, made with such modesty of means, that it’s hard to imagine it at the forefront of an entire film movement. And I have to admit, the cheap-looking digital photography and the improvised performances by the mostly non-professional cast made LOL a hard movie for me to warm up to at first—we’ve all seen indie movies about “ordinary,” “inarticulate” young people before, but it kind of takes you aback to see genuine inarticulateness onscreen. There’s no “found poetry” in the dialogue here, no random moments of spontaneous wit or humour—just long, rambling conversations peppered by awkward half-jokes and nervous laughter. The very title LOL is kind of a put-on—there’s not a single laugh-out-loud moment in the entire thing.
And yet, for all of the film’s unpolished visuals and intentionally charisma-free acting, I think Swanberg is onto something. As I watched LOL, I couldn’t help but think that I’d never seen another movie do a better job of capturing the way twentysomething people dress and relate to each other and have sex and make art. These are unmistakably the people who read the newspaper I edit—a large segment of our readership, anyway—and I’d never seen their world captured before in such an effortless, matter-of-fact, deglamourized way. And sure, Swanberg’s big theme, that technology is isolating us instead of bringing us closer, is a little trite, but I certainly recognized myself in the character he plays, a guy who can’t stop tapping away on his laptop, even when he’s watching TV. (In one scene, he and a friend sit on a couch IMing each other on their laptops about his girlfriend, who’s sitting on the floor right in front of them watching TV.)
It’s an intriguing movie, but its anti-dramatic aesthetic seems like a promising starting point for future exploration more than a satisfying end in itself. Stay tuned over the next week or so to see how I react to the other films in the series!
RATING: 3.5/5
HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSEPlot in a Nutshell
Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s celebrated 1991 documentary about the various agonies Francis Ford Coppola experienced while making Apocalypse Now.
Thoughts
I just finished writing a friend an e-mail in which I mentioned I’d just watched this movie, and said how it made me fall in love with Francis Ford Coppola all over again—in his prime, the man was an ideal combination of visionary artist and unabashed huckster, and I observed that I wished I had a little more of both sides of Coppola’s personality inside me, the visionary as well as the huckster. There’s a great scene in the movie where John Milius (who wrote the original screenplay for Apocalypse Now, which Coppola wound up departing from in several key ways) describes being sent to talk to Coppola several months into the shoot, soon after Martin Sheen’s near-fatal heart attack almost shut the picture down for good. Milius says he went into the meeting thinking he would be the voice of reason, urging Coppola to scale back his grandiose dreams and finish the damn picture already. “I came out an hour and a half later,” Milius says, “and he had convinced me that this was the first film that would win a Nobel Prize.”
Apocalypse Now exists at the other end of the filmmaking spectrum from LOL, and I’m not sure which director is more inspiring: Coppola, with his megalomaniacal ambitions, his willingness to pour millions of his own dollars into realizing his vision, his ability to stand up at a Cannes press conference and solemnly state that his film isn’t about Vietnam, it is Vietnam; or Swanberg, who’s proven that you don’t need money, trained actors, a script, a large crew, or even film in your camera to make a movie that thousands of people will still be interested in watching.
Does Swanberg sweat over the endings of his movies the way we see Coppola agonizing over the final sequence of Apocalypse Now? Coppola is so overwhelmed by the task he’s set for himself, of summing up the entire Vietnam War, that he’s half-tempted to “accidentally” step off a high platform while filming, and paralyzing himself in such a way that he will no longer be obligated to finish the movie. I imagine Swanberg’s biggest worry on LOL was keeping an eye on the battery on his camera to make sure it didn’t run low.
The irony is that Swanberg, in a way, is the culmination of the prediction Coppola makes at the very end of Hearts of Darkness, in which he says that his great hope is that video technology will place the ability to make movies in the hands of people who ordinarily wouldn’t think of expressing themselves that way—that “some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the next Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s camcorder.”
Swanberg is neither fat, nor female, nor the next Mozart... nor, I suspect, is LOL quite the kind of film Coppola was hoping for from the camcorder generation of directors. I love the fact that a movie like LOL can not only get made, but gain a foothold in the cinematic marketplace as well. But I mean no disrespect to Swanberg when I say that I’m hungrier to see one more movie in the tradition of Apocalypse Now than a dozen indies modeling themselves after LOL.
[Bizarre Fact I Couldn't Fit Anywhere Else Into This Post: Hearts of Darkness co-director Fax Bahr also wrote the screenplays for two Pauly Shore movies—Son in Law and In the Army Now—as well as the lowbrow Jamie Kennedy farce Malibu's Most Wanted.]
RATING: 4.5/5
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