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December 11, 2007
M-word: tracking its predecessors
At Good, Jaime Wolf does a cool job of tracing some of the lineage of recent movie movies that cost little and talk a lot and have been unfairly dubbed a silly collective name and dissed by indie elder Amy Taubin: How about Rohmer, Salinger, 
and Liz Phair? All's Phair: writes Wolf of her memorable debut long-player, "Exile in Guyville," "The lo-fi, livejournal-style indie rock version of a Joe Swanberg movie, Phair seeks self-knowledge via a diaristic series of regrettable hookups, disappointing boyfriends, unattainable fantasies, false hopes, fleeting erotic fulfillment, and meditations on the dichotomy between observer and participant." And: "It’s rare to watch a movie and believe it could have been made by one of the characters in it, but m--------- films have a documentary intimacy and rawness, a level of self-examination that feels new.They’re products of the thinner art/life membrane that affordable digital production tools have made possible, and which the imperatives of self-presentation on Facebook, blogs, and MySpace have made ubiquitous. Of course, it’s not all new. The dialogue in J.D. Salinger’s "Franny and Zooey" is pure mumblecore; so are the conversational erotics in Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud's and the characters’ ditherings in his Boyfriends and Girlfriends; the perpetual hangout milieu of Richard Linklater’s Slacker; and the diaristic songs chronicling Liz Phair’s sexual, emotional, and relationship crises on her album "Exile In Guyville"... Making eloquent use of inarticulacy, films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Mutual Appreciation happen to be precise (and to the extent of their precision, thrilling) depictions of post-collegiate flailing. They are set in a world populated by overeducated, unaccomplished, chronically ambivalent people who are starting to take grown-up jobs but still need a roommate to pay the rent; whose unfocused ambition and vague sense of artistic integrity propel them to pursue creative endeavors, even as they remain mystified by how a book might actually get published or a CD get made."
Posted by Ray Pride at December 11, 2007 10:29 PM
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Comments
I'll take Fuck and Run over YAB any day...
Posted by: mutinyco ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mcnblogs.com/mcindie/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 11, 2007 01:49 PM
Phair sings: "And I want a boyfriend, I want a boyfriend, I want all that stupid old shit like letters and sodas,
"And I can feel it in my bones I'm gonna spend another year alone
It's fuck and run, fuck and run
Even when I was seventeen
Fuck and run, fuck and run...
And whatever happened to a girlfriend
The kind of chick who tries to win you over?
And whatever happened to a girlfriend
The kind of chick who makes love 'cause she's in it?
And you want a girlfriend You want a girlfriend
You want all that boring old shit like letters and sodas
Letters and sodas
Letters and sodas
Letters and sodas"
Agreed... she's been good.
Posted by: rpride at December 11, 2007 05:19 PM
Anything that references Franny and Zooey is ok with me.
Posted by: Toms at December 12, 2007 11:42 AM
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