Quiet City.

"For all its air of casualness and the actors' unerring ability to deliver semi-improvised dialogue that sounds overheard, Quiet City is a formal movie, elegantly edited, whose images, both still and moving, are conjoined to a soundtrack that reduces the noise of the city to an evocative background hum, quiet but not silent," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The mumblecore genre, with its minimalist aesthetics, minuscule budgets, home-movie casting of friends and acquaintances and its fly-on-the-wall, quasi-documentary spontaneity, is so wide-open for parody that it is a sitting duck for the most withering send-up. Quiet City is fortunate to arrive just before the inevitable demolition crews arrive to tear it to shreds. Tender and sad, it is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry."

Updated through 9/4.

IndieWIRE, which has already run Michael Koresky's review, pointed to earlier, interviews director Aaron Katz.

And so, this entry now takes over from "Weekend mumbles" and "Matt Dentler and Andrew Bujalski."

Updates: "[I]f the longings of Katz's reluctant adults are still inchoate, they're depicted with unfaltering eloquence," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

"With its unforced, shot-on DV pace and erratic jumps between and within scenes, it'd be easy to accuse [Joe] Swanberg of being a talented eavesdropper with a short attention span," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi of LOL. "But when a minor moment from earlier in the film comes back with deliberate timing and real intent - over and over and over, as our three high-tech boys make the same mistakes over and over and over - and you recognize Swanberg's got something to say and a fresh voice to say it with."

Online viewing tip. Joe talks about dealing with the mumblecore backlash and his next project (after Nights and Weekends, that is), Butterknife, on ReelerTV, where Karina Longworth follows up with another reminder to not overlook three of her favorites in the New Talkies: Generation DIY series.

As suggested by Quiet City producer Brendan McFadden, David Lowery "borrow[s] a page from the New York Times' old 'Watching Movies With...' series, in which filmmakers would watch and discuss a favorite film, relating it to their current body of work" and gets on the phone with Katz and McFadden to talk about Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay notes that Quiet City "has its own very distinct sensibility that's quite different from some of the genre's other filmmakers.... It's delicate, wafer-thin at times, but, like the best minimalist narratives, it winds up saying something memorable with the slenderest of means."

"That a bunch of slovenly, misshapen movies (not necessarily a pejorative) has come to be so closely grouped together, so quickly and forcefully, speaks to the intense need of the current independent film community to feel part of and champion something in the American independent landscape," writes Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot. "I chide these guys (where are the girls? or the minorities, for that matter?) a bit not because I find mumblecore some kind of aesthetic blight - I'm actually somewhat in awe of how they've played their hand thus far - but because I've only caught glimpses in these films of the wanton playfulness and voracious need to experiment that characterized the Nouvelle Vague or early 80s American indie. Maybe this desire isn't there, and maybe it doesn't need to be, but forgive me if I wouldn't mind an American filmmaker standing up and announcing him or herself as the heir to Jacques Rivette or Alain Resnais.... For this writer, there's hope in the modest pleasures of Quiet City that this all isn't an aesthetic dead-end waiting to be taken out with the trash."

Matt Dentler talks with Quiet City's other producer, Ben Stambler, "who many in the indie-film biz know as an aquisitions exec at THINKFilm (and shortly before that, Magnolia Pictures)."

Updates, 8/30: "Where Hannah Takes the Stairs is talky, itchy, sleepless, self-regarding, Quiet City is a contemplative widescreen experience that views its landscape - the borderline-industrial hipster neighborhoods of Brooklyn, NY - with painterly patience," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Swanberg is usually right on top of his characters, seeking a Bergman-esque intensity, while Katz's characteristic gesture is more the Terrence Malick long shot or the Edward Hopper midnight tableau."

Michael Tully sees good things in store for Quiet City, insists that you catch Ronald Bronstein's Frownland if you can and bumps into - no, really - Abel Ferrara.

"I just had my fourth year anniversary of living in New York, and I've spent most of that time living either in Brooklyn, or just across Newtown Creek in Long Island City," writes Karina Longworth. "Quiet City captures the odd beauty of the outer boroughs on a good day in a way that makes me nostalgic for my own very recent past."

There was a Quiet City Q&A last night and the Film Panel Notetaker was there.

For Filmmaker, David Lowery talks with Ronald Bronstein about Frownland, "a grimy, manic masterpiece of black comedy that buries its humor beneath layers of egregious discomfort" and "one of the most confrontational and uncompromising visions to emerge from the American independent scene in recent memory." On Wednesday, September 5, Filmmaker will host a special screening at the IFC Center.

Updates, 8/31: "Katz has a good feel for the low-key rhythms of everyday life among the slackerati," writes Nathan Rabin of Quiet City at the AV Club. "Hopefully next time out he'll figure out a way to transform that into something approximating art."

"I'm starting to think that grouping themselves into a promotable 'movement' is both the smartest thing any of these filmmakers have done for their careers and the dumbest thing they could do for their art," writes Phil Nugent. He argues his case for quite a while, and then notes that David Lynch spent three years of his life making Eraserhead:

Now Lynch, who has done as much if not more than any American filmmaker to aim past the perceived limitations of his medium and bring tantalizing new audiovisual feats to his fan base, has caught the DV DIY bug; he can't get over how much easier it is working in DV and swears that he'll never go back to film, though his DV epic Inland Empire is the most shapeless, unfocused, ultimately wearying mess to which he's ever signed his name. In this fast-evolving technological age we live in, even people who you'd expect to know better seem more and more inclined to lose sight of the fact that what makes things easier for the artist and what's best for his art may not necessarily be the same thing.

Online listening tip. It's an all-mumblecore edition of Spout's FilmCouch.

Update, 9/4: Don R Lewis talks with Katz for Film Threat.

Posted by dwhudson at August 29, 2007 2:08 AM