Momma's Man.

"Considering that Azazel Jacobs, the director of Momma's Man, is the offspring of American avant-garde filmmaker extraordinaire Ken Jacobs, one would be forgiven for expecting his film to be more experimental and abstract than the seemingly conventional narrative that plays out," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Yet buried beneath the poignant clutter of this occasionally familiar stunted-youth-in-life-transition tale is a surprisingly complex, elegantly detailed meditation on creativity and artistic growth."

Updated through 8/22.

"Thirtyish guy - bit of a schlub but married, with a newborn baby - comes back from California to visit aging parents in New York and, overtaken by a mysterious lethargy, moves into his tiny childhood room. Momma's Man... is one of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote." So begins J Hoberman's review in the Voice, where, further in he notes, "Although my most vivid memories of Aza Jacobs are as the unnamed infant installed in a crib in a Johnson City apartment and called, for what seemed like a very long time, 'Mr Baby,' I've known his parents for nearly 40 years, going back to my undergraduate days at the State University of Binghamton, where Ken Jacobs impressed me as possibly the most brilliant film teacher in the world."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir introduces his interview with Jacobs: "It's the kiss of death for a critic to proclaim some young filmmaker the heart of a movement - 'mumblecore' seemed to evaporate as soon as it was named, and that's probably just as well - and that's not actually what I think about Jacobs. But he did graduate from the American Film Institute school with a cadre of peers devoted to low-budget filmmaking. Most notably these include Goran Dukic, who made Wristcutters: A Love Story, and Gerardo Naranjo, who co-wrote and starred in Jacobs' second film, The GoodTimesKid, before going on to make Drama/Mex and the forthcoming I'm Going to Explode, which will premiere at the Venice, Toronto and New York festivals next month. There isn't necessarily an aesthetic that ties those three filmmakers and their friends together, but arguably they're trying to follow the DIY maxim Jacobs applies to himself."

Aaron Hillis introduces his interview for IFC: "The reason for our meeting [in December] was mostly professional, as Benten Films (a DVD label I run with film blogger Andrew Grant) had fallen in love with Jacobs' previous film, The GoodTimesKid, starring his real-life girlfriend Sara Diaz, I'm Going to Explode writer/director Gerardo Naranjo, and himself. (Benten will release The GoodTimesKid in early 2009, so let the shilling stop here).... Back in New York for the premiere, Jacobs spoke to me by phone from his childhood home and makeshift movie set — though to avoid repeating other recent interviews, we talked mostly about the Clash."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Jacobs "about the intersection between truth and fiction in the film, not blinking for four months during post-production, and his childhood plan to save his family with pennies and magic rocks."

"The son of an experimentalist, Jacobs fils understands the power of the unexpected - which is why the most moving moments in this unspoken love story come courtesy a wind-up toy, a corny pop song, glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to a ceiling," writes the L Magazine's Mark Asch.

"Within its modest docudrama style, Momma's Man addresses universal experience as presumptuously as does a mainstream Pop epic," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

IndieWIRE interviews Jacobs, too.

Earlier: James Van Maanen's interview with Azazel Jacobs; and reviews from Sundance and David D'Arcy.

Updates, 8/22: "With its few locations, small cast and limited budget, Momma's Man looks deceptively humble. But Mr Jacobs has succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks given a director, which is to make a character come alive through the filmmaking, not exposition." In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis now finds the film "more complex than the valentine to Mom and Dad I originally had it pegged as when I first saw it at Sundance."

"The film doesn't indict society for turning a generation of males into oversize infants so much as dive headfirst into the confusion that causes such men to burrow into childhood 2.0," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "That you still walk away sympathizing with the pathetic Mikey is a testament to both Boren's close-to-the-bone performance and Jacobs; for a young filmmaker whose previous movie, The GoodTimesKid, suggested he was a precocious talent, this moody, pitch-perfect ode to immaturity ironically proves he's finally grown up."

"Indie films about arrested adolescence have practically become a genre, but the way Jacobs avoids pat explanations for Boren's behavior - or any kind of forced catharsis - is so refreshingly low-key that it's easy to feel like Jacobs has reinvented the wheel," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Honestly, he hasn't, but Momma's Man is a welcome change of pace regardless."

"Many months have passed since my first viewing of Jacobs's latest film, Momma's Man, yet I am more confident than ever in saying that no motion picture has ever pierced me so directly to my core." Michael Tully talks with Jacobs at Hammer to Nail.

"If the movie is initially confusing, and then disturbing, what ultimately lends it poignancy is the art-versus-reality tug-of-war playing out right on the surface," proposes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "As Mr Jacobs's camera makes its way through the cluttered chaos of the apartment he inhabited as a child, it seems the director himself wants not only to wrap his arms around a life that no longer exists, but to grasp a fading filmmaking community - one pioneered in part by Ken Jacobs - that wants to push aside the machinations of 21st-century Hollywood in a bid to resurrect the independent spirit of New York City circa 1965."

Online viewing tip. Tribeca talks with Ken Jacobs.

Posted by dwhudson at August 21, 2008 3:58 AM