So far at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, I’ve seen at least one movie with a good shot at landing on my year-end Top Ten List and one that may already be my personal lock for Worst Film of The Year.
Let’s start with the one I didn’t like: My Suicide, an achingly self-important act of digital onanism by David Lee Miller about a rich teenager who really FEELS, man...a pampered “rebel” who can’t deal with the fuckin’ family that bought him thousands of dollars of filmmaking equipment so he can make over-edited, under-conceived videos of himself doing bad Frank Caliendo/Fred Travalena-style impressions of Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro saying lines from much better movies, like the not-at-all-played-out quote, “You talkin’ to me?” (Take THAT, Mom and Dad!)
My esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak has already reviewed Miller’s Aronofsky-Lite homage at length, but I mention it as an example of the flashy, faux-edgy crap that’s just as mindless and cynically conceived as any high-concept Hollywood swill, yet frequently gets overpraised simply because the director has enough money for a trade show demo reel’s worth of digital effects and new “hot” indie bands on the soundtrack every few minutes to cram some "anarchy" or "ennui" down our throats (no matter how we actually feel about what’s happening on screen).
I work at a creative arts camp in the summer, making original mini-DV movies with young people, and I tend to cram my no-budget epics with songs, rapid-fire A.D.D. edits and gobs of iMovie special effects to distract the audience when scenes aren't working on their own.
On the other hand, when the writing and performances are strong, then I don’t need all the flash (or Flash animation): I just get the hell out of the way and let the actors do their thing...a strategy writer/director Lynn Shelton employs to great effect with Humpday, described in the SXSW catalogue as a comedy about Ben and Anna (Mark Duplass and Alycia Delmore), a smart yuppie couple whose seemingly perfect relationship is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Ben’s old bohemian pal, Andrew (a hilarious Joshua Leonard, finally reemerging from the oblivion of the Blair Witch woods).
That’s all I knew about the movie going in, and though the above summary makes Humpday sound like You, Me and Dupree, it actually develops into something far less predictable and a hundred times funnier. But even if you discover Humpday’s central plot twist in advance, the movie is still a goddamn delight: the only thing funnier than the dialogue is what’s left unsaid in double-takes and reaction shots. These are characters who actually think before they speak, refusing to flatten into predictable stereotypes, and the actors work together with the chemistry of a virtuoso jazz combo...especially Leonard and Duplass, a writer/director in his own right who’s developed into the mumblecore movement’s answer to Paul Rudd (or possibly Ron Livingston).
(And click here for a SXSW mumblecore double-feature review of Beeswax!)