Deep thoughts

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• Fuzzy Bastard says:

  April 5, 2010 at 10:26 am

  I believe you mean “con­tain nud­ity that no one would ever…” The whole point of the art­icle being non-sexualized nudity!

• John Keefer says:

  April 5, 2010 at 11:27 am

  noth­ing to do with mumble­core or the linked art­icle and for that I apo­lo­gize but…
  Have you seen or were plan­ning to see Loren Cass?
  Just watched it and was intrigued by the pro­spect of more movies from Chris Fuller, was won­der­ing what you thought

• Graig says:

  April 5, 2010 at 2:09 pm

  I saw “Loren Cass”! Good god, what a chore that was to sit through. I nearly choked on my oat­meal when I read it was get­ting a the­at­ric­al release via (I think) Kino.
  Sorry to jump in, John, but the thought of that movie brought sour memor­ies flood­ing back.
  I browsed the Jessica Grose art­icle. Should I read the whole thing or.…?

• John M says:

  April 5, 2010 at 2:38 pm

  Weird hos­til­ity toward Loren Cass.
  Part and par­cel with the weird hos­til­ity toward all things low-budget (oh, sorry, mumble­core) these days.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  April 5, 2010 at 2:38 pm

  I have not seen “Loren Cass” yet. But it sounds pretty, um, polarizing!
  What’s finally really delight­ful about Grose’s article—what makes it, in a sense, the quint­es­sen­tial Slate piece—isn’t what it’s say­ing about the “hon­esty” of non-sexualized nud­ity, or deglam­our­ized sex scenes (both of which are things I’m per­fectly fine with, by the way), or even its implied pos­it­ing of Joe Swanberg, of all people, as a kind of fem­in­ist heroine. It’s the head­long glee with which Grose makes her iden­ti­fic­a­tion with the films known. “These movies are great and worth watch­ing because they’re about me me me!” she might as well have writ­ten. To hold view­er iden­ti­fic­a­tion as the most sig­ni­fic­ant meas­ure of the value of any work of art sug­gests depths of aes­thet­ic, intel­lec­tu­al, and spir­itu­al impov­er­ish­ment that would be sad in almost any oth­er con­text. But here they’re just funny. Albeit mordantly.

• Vadim says:

  April 5, 2010 at 3:33 pm

  That art­icle is indeed gross. But I do believe we’ve reached some kind of point where the sum total of anti-mumblecore hos­til­ity and writ­ing online out­weighs pros­elyt­iz­ing on its behalf.

• Tom Russell says:

  April 5, 2010 at 3:49 pm

  I did­n’t fol­low the link because I only very recently broke myself of the Slate-reading habit, a pain­fully long and embar­rass­ing pro­cess that, like all people recov­er­ing from things that are bad for them, I have no wish to repeat. Not every­one on Slate is a cret­in, and not every piece is cret­in­ous, but enough are that I can­’t go there without end­ing up read­ing some­thing that lowers my IQ. So I can­’t com­ment on the piece, and I’m not going to com­ment on any­thing mumbly-bumbly, except to say that my affin­ity for cer­tain films and film­makers is prob­ably by now a mat­ter of record.
  What I did want to com­ment on was the asser­tion that it’s pos­sible for a film to have a sex scene that no one in a mil­lion years would ever con­cieve of using as, um, an aid. And this I know from exper­i­ence. No, not that kind of exper­i­ence. Let me tell you a story.
  I once made a fea­ture film that was frankly pretty ter­rible, so ter­rible, in fact, that I don’t let any­one see it save for my closest, closest friends, and then only to say, can you believe a film this mean-spirited, vile, and just plain bad came out of me? And in said film, there was a sex scene that I devised spe­cific­ally to frus­trate onanists.
  I shot it in the most ali­en­at­ing, dis­join­ted way pos­sible, filled it to the brim with dis­turb­ing dia­logue (noth­ing unto­ward, just dis­turb­ing in the con­text of the story), and employed a num­ber of crude gags, the piece d’res­ist­ance being a close-up of the inside of a vagina which we sculp­ted out of raw meat. Really, the crudest, most dis­gust­ing thing you could think of– I’m really quite ashamed that I at one time thought this sort of thing was aes­thet­ic­ally acceptable.
  Anyway– so, I showed the film to an insult comic/impressionist I was friendly with at the time (again, not someone the present-day Tom Russell would even dream of asso­ci­at­ing with), who showed it to a some­what prom­in­ent Michigander, who wanted to meet me. Well, that soun­ded swell, so off I went.
  It turned out he hated the film, except for one part. And that one part was­n’t the minotaur doing laun­dry, was­n’t the par­ody of sad the-couple-is-apart mont­ages, was­n’t the off-broadway music­al retell­ing of the Pied Piper. No, it was that sex scene. “It was really fockin’ hot,” he said. “Really did the trick and then some.”
  No, I did not shake his hand.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  April 5, 2010 at 4:02 pm

  @ Tom: Yikes! (Also, hope the prom­in­ent Michigander was­n’t Jeff Daniels!)
  @ Vadim. Indeed. I rather wish the art­icle had been mak­ing its point about some­thing that it…wasn’t. Would have been more fun for me. What IS fun is that Grose’s piece made me remem­ber Rex Reed’s review, in the New York Daily News I think, of Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 “Don’t Look Now.” Many may recall that the Sutherland/Christie sex scene (which, as it hap­pens, is not only “neces­sary to the story,” as they say, but which func­tions as one of the film’s emo­tion­al linch­pins) was the sub­ject of much snick­er­ing “did-they-or-didn’t-they-really-‘do’-it” spec­u­la­tion at the time (which Peter Biskind, true to form, tries to revive in his recent Beatty bio­graphy). Anyway, wheth­er they did it or not, Reed thought the whole thing was JUST GROSS, and remarked that while in some films you’ll want to see the stars with their clothes off, if you watch “Don’t Look Now” you’ll be beg­ging its stars to put their clothes back on, ar ar ar.
  He did­n’t like the rest of the film, either.
  @ John M.: Who’s hos­tile to low-budget endeavors? “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is one of my all-time favorites!

• Tom Russell says:

  April 5, 2010 at 4:42 pm

  @ Glenn: No, it’s not Daniels– whom I remem­ber, con­trary to a lot of the scut­tle­but that goes around about his per­son­al style, as being very pleas­ant when he vis­ited my high school video class as a favour to my teach­er, Russ Gibb (yes, _that_ Russ Gibb).

• bill says:

  April 5, 2010 at 4:59 pm

  I love Jeff Daniels. Is that what we’re talk­ing about here?
  I still have not seen a single film that can be, or at any rate has been, labeled “mumble­core”, and all this end­less talk about it some­how makes me com­pletely unable to decide if I’m miss­ing out or not.

• Tom Russell says:

  April 5, 2010 at 5:03 pm

  Bill– “mumble­core” is such a weird term for so many dis­par­ate films. You might want to try QUIET CITY or MUTUAL APPRECIATION.

• THE FUTURIST! says:

  April 5, 2010 at 8:06 pm

  THE FUTURIST! likes this Grose quote very much.
  (com­ment pos­ted in the nude)

• John M says:

  April 6, 2010 at 4:51 am

  To Glenn: sorry for the mis­un­der­stand­ing, was­n’t imply­ing that you’re being hos­tile to low-budget film. I’m just let­ting the com­menters over at Hollywood Elsewhere get to me, let­ting that anger bleed over here, which I’m sure will make you happy. Basically, now over at Wells’ site, any­thing under $5 mil­lion there is con­sidered “mumble­core” and unworthy of the glor­i­ous sil­ver screen, where movies should be WORTH YOUR MOTHERFUCKING TIME.
  “Mumblecore” as a term really, really needs to be retired. It’s gunk­ing everything up.
  Regarding nar­ciss­ism in film review­ing, this irked the crap out of me:
  http://www.theawl.com/2010/03/flicked-off-greenberg-or-mean-is-the-new-sad
  A dis­cus­sion entirely rooted in the par­ti­cipants’ dat­ing lives. And one of the par­ti­cipants (the illus­tri­ous Natasha Vargas-Cooper) walked out of the movie about forty minutes before it ended because she JUST. COULD. NOT. TAKE. THIS. GUY. ANY. MORE. At least Grose had some soft cloak of fem­in­ism to snuggle in. These gals just sound like a cheese­cake roundtable on Golden Girls.
  Now, if any­one at Slate wants to write an art­icle about how Greta Gerwig is, finally, not much of an act­ress, well, I’m on board for that one.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  April 6, 2010 at 6:56 am

  @ John M: Um, thanks for that link. I think. It cer­tainly rep­res­ents a, erm, unique approach to arts assessment.
  Inane as it was, it did­n’t irk me nearly as much as it might have. Could it finally be true…that I’ve actu­ally got­ten TOO OLD to let this kind of crap both­er me? Do I really, after all this time, truly not care, as it were, that Julie Klausner does­n’t care…about that dude she were dat­ing’s band? Yes? Yes! How liberating!

• John Keefer says:

  April 6, 2010 at 11:36 am

  I just turned 27 and feel too old for this stuff to both­er me…
  That being said, what inane point­less crap is being passed off as essay nowadays is really start­ing to both­er me.
  Also, glad to hear a love for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, its grand guign­ol art to the max and, sadly, it seems les­sons that could be gleaned from it by would be hor­ror film­makers seem lost to the ages or to pla­cing 70’s hor­ror on a ped­es­tal, awash in remakes and shattered prom­ise and…
  But I digress. I think a rule of thumb that could be applied to Slate art­icles could be as fol­lows “Imagine the look on someone’s face if you were to tell them, in sum­ma­tion, what the ‘point’ of the art­icle you were writ­ing would be…and be hon­est. Rate on a scale of utter indif­fer­ence to coma-inducing”
  As for Loren Cass and los­ing oat­meal over it. I’d say what inter­ested me most was the prom­ise of what the film­maker, if he were to make more films, would be. I have a soft spot for 1^st films from inter­est­ing filmmakers…which is to say I have a soft spot for films in gen­er­al. The sound design of the film was intriguing, per­haps too on the nose at times but in an oth­er­wise plot­less film you kinda need it. Scenes of bru­tal­ity are simply shown, a symp­tom of the envir­on­ment. They also seemed com­pletely unstaged, as if the dir­ect­or simply said, “Ok now we’re going to fight each oth­er”. A viol­ence depic­ted and viewed without excite­ment, shock per­haps but a part of the land­scape. A punk rock Odyssey with some great icon­ic imagery, of rage and young love, viol­ence against oth­ers and against self. It’s a film with moxy and a sure way of telling its tale of three drift­ers in a time and place very spe­cif­ic but almost eph­em­er­al, they are still there, haunt­ing the back alleys, night­mares dreamed then lived.
  Sure there are some clunky moments but come on, still interesting.