(Click here for a review of Humpday, part one of my SXSW mumblecore double-feature coverage!)

Mumblecore, as defined by Wikipedia, is “an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s. It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors.” The mumbly side of the equation stems from the genre’s fealty to vérité naturalism over manipulative plotting and the stammered rambling of speech as it’s spoken rather than the too-perfect rhythms of tightly-crafted screenplay dialogue.

To be fair, mumblecore’s loose, meandering style is something of an acquired taste...

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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.

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Over the weekend I watched All The Real Girls for the first time since it came out for a couple of reasons. One, it's been a weird year for David Gordon Green fans, watching his two weakest films (Snow Angels — with its nervy naturalism eventually undercut by an all-too-schematic doom-and-gloom plot and heavy-handed symbols straight from the worst middlebrow novels — and the pointless '80s simulacrum of Pineapple Express) come out in quick succession. Was I overrating Green based on false memories, or is he just going through a weird transitional phase? Two, I was wondering if All The Real Girls is secretly one of the most influential films of the decade.

The answers are no and yes. Sort of.

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Like Robin William’s out-of-focus actor in Deconstructing Harry, it’s often hard to really see any new Woody Allen film clearly.

For some, the director is a creepy old relic who shot his load in the seventies and eighties, then slept with his not-quite-technically underage not-quite-technically stepdaughter and keeps churning out ever-more-terrible movies to suck whatever money he still can from the wallets of the aging bourgeoisie pseudo-intellectuals willing to pay for his particular brand of nostalgic, non-threatening real estate porn. For others, the Soon-Yi controversy wasn’t as much of a deal-breaker as the sight of Allen snogging comely young co-stars who (to paraphrase Wooderson from Dazed and Confused) kept staying the same age while he kept getting older. Some just never dug his insular, overeducated, upper-class shtick in the first place. And even for die-hard fans, it’s hard not to greet each new Allen film like each new Prince album, hoping against hope that somehow this time it’ll be Purple Rain again, only to be disappointed when it's not (and wondering vaguely why he can’t just save up all his remaining talent for one last masterpiece rather than cranking out so much sub par material).

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Garden Party, opening in limited release next week, is being touted as the arrival of a hot new talent in the person of writer/director Jason Freeland.  In fact, though, Freeland's first film was an entire decade ago, a somewhat bewildering James Ellroy adaptation called Brown's Requiem.  His new film, though, with its attractive young cast and allegedly verite look at contemporary Los Angeles, is getting way more attention than Brown's Requiem ever did, and if it's not technically his debut, it's at least poised to be his breakthrough.  We had a chance to screen Garden Party recently; should you believe the hype?

Boiled down to the one-sentence description that no doubt got it through the vetting process, Garden Party is the story of a group of young people, all recently relocated to the vast construct of the American psyche that is Los Angeles, who try to get by faced with all the pitfalls and perils the wicked city is home to.  Peopled with a game young cast, the movie gives us a bunch of characters who aren't quite established enough as archetypes to come across as trite right off the bat; there's the vaguely sinister real estate agent/drug dealer, the allegedly brilliant young musician who drifts through life intersecting with the other characters but never making a real emotional commitment to any of them, the renegade bohemian with a porn fetish, the sexually abused teen, and half a dozen other characters who seem like they just got off the late shift at the Quaalude factory.  Needless to say, their stories all intersect in sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable ways; needless to say, a few of them experience what could be called a revelation if it didn't come across as so utterly trifling; and, needless to say, there's lots of fashionable sex, drugs, and pouting to make thing palatable to the drugged-out, pouty teenage couples who are presumably the movie's target audience.  With all this stuff being needless to say, you might ask:  why was it even necessary to make the film?  The answer?  That is  a good question.

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Goliath, a quasi-mumblecore tragi-comedy by the Zellner Brothers of Austin, TX plays this weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. The indie feature, about a man who loses both his wife and his beloved cat in the same harrowing year, was first reviewed here at The Screengrab by Scott Von Doviak during the 2008 South-by-Southwest Film Festival.

David Zellner and his brother, Nathan, have been crafting distinctive independent cinema since 1996, but I first became aware of them at a terrible film festival called 30th Parallel that leeched onto the back of the 1997 SXSW fest, analogous to the Slamdance/Sundance arrangement, but much shoddier (and short-lived, since 30th Parallel barely made it through its first and only installment).

I know about the 30th Parallel Fest, because it featured the Texas premiere of my own indie film, Apocalypse Bop. The whole misbegotten affair kicked off with a back room hotel reception marked by a sad tray of vegetables and the absence of any members of the 30th Parallel staff to greet us. This led to some awkward bonding among the invited filmmakers as we all stood around, confused, waiting for some information about what we were supposed to do. Then, eventually, we all left.

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The Boston Film Festival began in 1976 at the late, lamented Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, and was reborn, in a new incarnation, in 1985. Although hardly a big, buzzy fest like Sundance or Toronto, packed with deal-making, career-launching glamour, the BFF was still an exciting venue for independent cinema, where local audiences got their first glimpse of films like Blue Velvet and Down By Law, complete with special guest appearances by the likes of David Lynch.  And, while the Boston Film Festival is still up and running, offering hometown premieres of future arthouse fodder like Jesus Camp and The U.S. Versus John Lennon, it’s telling that the Best Comedic Actor Award at last year’s edition of the fest went to Dane Cook for Good Luck Chuck.

But even as The BFF becomes ever more non-essential, the Independent Film Festival of Boston (which kicked off last night with the East Coast premiere of local hero Brad Anderson’s latest, Transsiberian) has restored the excitement and thrill of discovery to Beantown's movie-going diet.

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Mumblecore, in case you missed the seventy majillion articles about it in all the smart magazines, is the hot new thing in the indie film biz, and South By Southwest is no exception. Love it or loathe it, it's the mode of the moment, and probably half the movies I saw over the last few days could be jammed into that category with a minimum of injury. For those blessedly unfamiliar with mumblecore, it involves low budgets and a bunch of attractive but poorly dressed young white people who spend a great deal of time pouting because they are emotionally paralyzed and cannot communicate with each other. I'm sure you can imagine how exciting this all is. With The Lost Coast, writer/director Gabriel Fleming has presented us with a colossal leap forward in this boundlessly underperforming genre: the gay mumblecore movie!

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Anthony Kaufman of the Village Voice reports that indie film production may well turn out to be the "unintended casualty" of the current Hollywood labor troubles. The ongoing writers' strike has heightened the likelihood that there will be a Screen Actors Guild strike as the June 30 expiration date on the current SAG contract draws near. The big studios, which stockpiled scripts in anticipation of the writers' strike, is now putting high-paying productions into overdrive in anticipation of actors walking out next summer. This means that lower-paying indie productions are strapped for talent because, as producer Mike S. Ryan puts it with regard to one actor whose agents won't return his calls, "they're trying to fill his dance card until June 30." Another producer, John Sloss, says that "There's an actor I know who is getting a threefold raise just because he's the only comedy guy left." Many of the indie filmmakers are sympathetic with the goals of the strikers but still have to wonder just how hard they'll end up taking the brunt of the blow if the current talent drought is followed by a lack of side jobs from the studios, which many an indie director relies on to make ends meet. "Mumblecore" guru Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation) says, "Worst-case scenario: I have to pull some kind of shitty day job." Insert joke here. . . — Phil Nugent

Well, it had to happen sometime. What with two weeks' worth of crushing hype mid-summer, the mumblecore kids were due for a backlash, but who knew Amy Taubin would be the one to do it? Taubin, after all, went on record in 2005 with a "Distributor Wanted" for Mutual Appreciation, exceeding all the hype two years ahead of time by calling Andrew Bujalski's work "Rohmer without subtitles." The tide turns, viciously, in a Film Comment jeremiad that goes viciously ad hominem in record time, from an opening shot bidding goodbye to "the indie movement that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding." Studiously ignoring her own early championing (Matt Zoller Seitz correctly points out that Taubin seems to be suffering from "buyer's remorse"), Taubin taunts the movement for not making enough money at the IFC Center, accuses all involved of racism for not inviting So Yong Kim's In Between Days to the party "because the filmmaker is a Korean-American woman and her heroine is a Korean immigrant," and calls Joe Swanberg a "lout." These aren't criticisms of film; seemingly the spirit of political campaigning in the air has infected Taubin, whose article is as ridiculously mean-spirited as any negative ad.

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