Mumblecore, What Are We Even Saying?

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Funny Ha Ha

FILM United States 2002 · 89 min

Andrew Bujalski

The first feature by Bujalski and a veritable manifesto for the lo-fi, DIY, radically modest “mumblecore” movement, Funny Ha Ha stars Kate Dollenmayer as Marnie, a 23-year-old recent college graduate in Boston still drinking like a freshman and making bad decisions with dubious men as she drifts between mundane temp jobs and the kind of house parties that make you want to leave as soon as you arrive. “Mr. Bujalski captures the ache of [Marnie’s] existence without pity or melodrama… A deft group portrait of recent college graduates… groping their way across the flatlands of early adulthoods.” —The New York Times

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Mutual Appreciation

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Mutual Appreciation

FILM United States 2005 · 109 min

Andrew Bujalski

Bujalski’s second feature stars Bishop Allen vocalist Justin Rice as a Boston transplant musician freshly arrived in New York, looking for new bandmates while drifting between a noncommittal affair with a radio station DJ (Seung-Min Lee), boozy sessions of philosophizing with his pal, Lawrence (Bujalski), and bouts of quietly pining after Lawrence’s girlfriend, Ellie (Rachel Clift). Shot in high-grain black-and-white 16mm, Bujalski’s scruffy comic character study is a wincingly familiar, deceptively disheveled—but quite artfully constructed—evocation of post-collegiate drift and twentysomething anomie. “Wonderful… Has the kind of artfully artless, low-fi vibe that brings to mind the French New Wave of the late 1950s and the East Village film scene of the late 1970s… Modest and true.” —The New York Times

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The Puffy Chair

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The Puffy Chair

FILM United States 2005 · 85 min

Mark Duplass Jay Duplass

If one of the defining features of mumblecore was exploring just how minimal a “concept” could be made to produce emotionally rich, compellingly intimate cinema, the Duplass brothers’ The Puffy Chair—about one man’s (Mark Duplass) cross-country journey, with girlfriend Kati Aselton and brother Rhett Wilkins in tow, to pick up a La-Z-Boy recliner in Atlanta and deliver it to his dad as a birthday present—deserves especial credit for paring plot to the bone and deflating the overblown romance of the road movie. A La-Z Rider for the low-ambition millennial set, too wrapped up in quotidian concerns and petty grudges, like its characters, to get into any pretentious bluster about the American Dream.

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Humpday

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Humpday

FILM United States 2009 · 94 min

Lynn Shelton

Reunited after a decade apart, old pals Ben and Andrew (Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard) decide to make an amateur gay porn together to submit to Seattle’s HUMP! film festival. Complicating matters more than a little is the fact that both are, insofar as they know, heterosexual, and the whole idea was born of a “mutual dare.” What could easily have been a sniggery, one-joke affair becomes something much richer in the hands of Shelton, who tragically died in 2020 at age 54: a film about trust and intimacy that strips all the macho bluster from the buddy comedy to prod at the niggling insecurity underneath.

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Team Picture

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Team Picture

FILM United States 2009 · 62 min

Kentucker Audley

Shot in Memphis, Tennessee for a cool $1,500, the amiably ambling Team Picture stars Audley—in his debut as feature writer/director—as David, a twentysomething whose total disinterest in anything beyond noodling on his guitar is cause for concern to his ambitious artist girlfriend (Shawna Wheeler) and his parents, but no problem at all for Sarah (Amanda Harris), a new woman in his life who’s likewise drifting rudderless. A deadpan delight from Audley who, though his later work has veered from the ultra-naturalism of Team Picture, has remained committed—as a filmmaker and as curator of the NoBudge streaming platform—to the art of zero budget filmmaking to a degree unique among the “mumblecore” cohort.