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A Movie Guide to Your Never-Ending Twenties

An avid student of the depiction of youth in movies, I’ve taken to calling the twenties, as we live them nowadays, the benties, after the British word “bent,” for messed up. And, while I realize not everyone will have found this decade of late adolescence / imposed maturity as disconcerting as all that, I know …

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Without Theatres: ‘Silver Bullets’ a romance of werewolves and art

The term “mumblecore” is usually evoked as a derisive umbrella-term for the films of Joe Swanberg, the Duplass brothers, Andrew Bujalski, and several other twentysomething directors of the 2000s working with little to no budget and a lot of talking. Critics such as Vadim Rizov reject the labeling entirely, noting their disparate qualities, yet the term …

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Noah Buschel’s ‘Sparrows Dance’: A Charming Agoraphobic Mumblecore Romance

Set in modern-day New York City, Noah Buschel’s Sparrows Dance follows the day-to-day life of an agoraphobic former-actress (a drabbed down Marin Ireland, Homeland). Hitting a decent amount of the Mumblecore check points, the film is low budget (an estimated $175,000 production) and uses naturalistic dialogue and pacing. At the beginning of the 82 minute film, a good fifteen minutes or so is dedicated to establishing that the female lead is indeed agoraphobic and that her life revolves around bodily functions such as going to the bathroom (the film starts with her on the toiler), exercising (on a vintage-looking stationary bike) and eating (takeout: the agoraphobic’s choice).

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‘Things I Don’t Understand’ turns metaphysics into mumblecore

Things I Don’t Understand Written by David Spaltro Directed by David Spaltro USA, 2012 Of the many unanswerable metaphysical questions that surround life, the most confounding, ironically, are those that concern death. Humanity’s pathological and evolutionary imperative to survive has driven us to try and rationalize our collective eventualities, in hopes to both understand and …

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