Gawker
Two minutes or so into 'Hannah Takes The Stairs,' the little film that's had its proverbial shaggy haircut lovingly mussed by every critic under the sun, a dickish but clueless boss character announces to his employees that he's gonna "go check my email and update my blog and all that." Upon hearing this line, the entire audience of the 8 p.m. screening of the film at the IFC Center last night broke out in hearty laughter that sounded remarkably like 200 American Apparel-clad backs being self-patted simultaneously. Also, one person literally started applauding. If only I'd left then!
On seeing the preview, I thought I could relate, a bit, to our heroine Hannah. (That's the idea, right? She's supposed to represent a generation.) And she's my age, and her job seems to basically consist of sitting around cracking jokes with her coworkers all day in a fake office, and she's bad at relationships. She can't break up with her going-nowhere musician boyfriend so he has to break up with her by saying "I'm just going to make this easier on you. I'm breaking up with you because you're breaking up with me." She then immediately starts dating a coworker, who seduces her by telling her how "bright" she is (though there's very little empirical evidence of this in the film). He finishes his spiel about how great she is by saying, "and that's why I go to work every day." Awww! EWWW.
This is when the movie started to strain credulity. For starters, the actress who plays Hannah, Greta Gurwig, is megahot, like a 9.5 at least, with fantastic tits, too. And the guy who plays her coworker-seducer, filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, is so irretrievably fug. Seriously, there's a scene where he's in boxers during which I was basically cowering under my seat. The moles on his back, my God! His man-teats! His TEETH! The notes I took during this scene read, in toto, "Omg dude is so fug. Omg his JEANS. I wish I had gone to see the Bourne Supremacy Ultimatum."
What strains credulity even more is that this repellently ugly dude eventually starts ignoring Hannah. He's, theoretically, distracted because a "New York agent" is a "fan of the blog."
"Oh my god, your blog's gonna be a book!" shrieks Hanna upon hearing this news. Ha, as if. This scene made the movie seem at least two years old. Anyway, maybe he's really ignoring Hannah because she's fucking annoying? There's nothing worse than when actresses try to convey "quirky and neurotic" by basically acting drunk or stoned all the time and trying to convey "incredibly naturalistic" by just taking forever to spit out a sentence. Here's a tip, indie filmmakers: sometimes, in real life, people are quite articulate! Maybe write a movie about those type of people.
Also I just think that the fetishization of "neurotic hottie" as a lady-type should be banned. Seriously, guys, Annie Hall was great but get over it.
At the hour and a half mark, the audience began to fidget as one as a predictable love triangle emerged. Eventually, an overlong set piece where people play the trumpet badly in a bathtub finally ended the film (of course, right?). There was one good speech Hannah has at the end, though—it's excerpted in the trailer that made me think I might like this movie. It's about how "Do you think having crushes on people is kind of manic? And after it becomes real it stops being thrilling." On the one hand, some people can't hear this often enough. On the other hand: Duh.
Comments
I don't mean to preach. Really, I don't. But they told me that Pepsi was the voice of my generation, and all I got for it was six hours in a dentist chair.
Were the people all in one bathtub with a trumpet, or in parallel tubs per Cialis ads?
Yeah, unless there's a movie out there of gay men snorting the morning after pill off the crystalline surfaces of their iPhones, then there's no movie that speaks to me or my generation.
And when is this blog going to be a book? You should at least put out a hardback edition of Foxymorons.
In the follow-up "Hannah Takes the Elevator" she learns to live, love, and mumble in uh ... okay, it's the exact same movie, just a different title.
Heinous Takes The Stairs.
Everyone knows that in Movieland intelligent women, no matter how physically attractive, only date fug men because a) deep down they don't think they can do any better, what with the smartness, or b) we're secretly so narcissistic that we can't stand not being the better looking person in the relationship. (Stabs self in thigh with pencil)
Hannah and Her Tits Bore
Are there any Time Travelling Ninja Cyborg Robots?
No?
Then fuck off!
"I wish I had gone to see the Bourne Supremacy."
It was that bad that you wanted to go back to 2004?
@sexbot: You should at least put out a hardback edition of Foxymorons.
Boy, you must really love the discount book bin at WalMart. Or maybe they'd shrink-wrap it in a three-pack, with Titty Smalls' new book and The Manny, as the "Hampton's Star Room Reader Pack" for when you get kicked out of the club for punching a girl in the face.
Friday the 13th was the Zeitgeist film of my generation. That was disappointing, too.
stupid andrew bujalski. while everyone was sucking his dick over Mutual Appreciation, i was quietly suffocating under the weight of all the pretension. and jizz.
Sounds like Emily saw a little too much similarity between herself and Hannah...
1) teats not tits? love it! people DO care about how they speak and write!
2) I admit, I had to look it up myself, but Bourne Ultimatum. Supremacy was the last one.
@c_webb: It depends on age. In the three ages of movie-womanhood (Babe, District Attorney, Driving Miss Daisy), it's only the Babes who are required to date men whose attractiveness is inversely proportional to the woman's brains.
Eh ... she's like a 7, tops.
"this repellently ugly dude eventually starts ignoring Hannah.."
So Mystery co-stars in this mess? Think I'll go see The Sorrow and the Pity instead
You know, I hate to disparage somebody else's creative efforts (seriously) and I haven't seen this yet, but I watched one mumblecore movie, Funny Ha Ha, and it took way too much effort to get through it.
And why do the trailers for all of these movies look like people just took videos of their friends and started each scene in media res?
@Ned B: And I completely mismatched number in that sentence. D'oh well.
The genre that this film belongs to is called--prepare to douse yourself with gasoline--"mumblecore." I can't believe someone paid to have this turd distributed.
Also I just think that the fetishization of "neurotic hottie" as a lady-type should be banned. Seriously, guys, Annie Hall was great but get over it.
AMEN SISTER!
I am just so sick of just how fucking ancient these "indie" people can be wrt their collective mis-understanding of femiladies and what they are/can be. And yeah, anything that is supposed to me about me usually isn't. I'm over it.
When are young directors going to accept that not everything needs to be an elegy to the torture sequence in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly?
Yeah, I think you and the hipsters were the only ones who had any faith in this film.
And for the record, if you think that Greta Gerwig "is megahot, like a 9.5 at least" then I seriously am at a loss for words here. I mean, if the scale went to 50, then shes a solid 9.5. Shes maybe a little cute, at best.
Shes like, butch lesbian hot.
Great work, Emily. This review obliterated the possibility of my ever seeing this floppy-haired little snatch of secondhand zeitgeist.
Aside from all the texting and beards and anal sex, I really don't see how this new mumbling generation is different from any other.
@Ned B: They also have to pretend to be attracted to dudes whose ass wrinkles are older than they are, both on film and in real life.
Is that a pic from the film? It looks like 1993 and they're both fug. Her hair is awful. It was that picture that kept me from reading that NY Times article. A slinky, futon, and a bleached growing-out pixie cut? Please tell me this film was a costume drama.
Um, yeah, that girl's kinda fug, too. I mean, kinda really fug.
@Mediahohoho: Thanks. Now I am going to spend the rest of the day twisting around, trying to see if I have ass wrinkles.
@Ned B: My wife keeps me well informed of them. She's an actress. Much younger than me. I love my life.
@Ned B:
Would that list also work as "Babe/Fertile, Bunny Boiler/Menopausal, Crochety/Post Menopausal"?
@hfree: It took place in a breathtakingly hip dimension that was a cross between colonial Williamsburg and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, also known as the eye of the countercountercultural movement.
Which one is Hannah?
@Pope John Peeps II: you know peeps, you and i have had our run-ins. there was that time that you called me "gawker's pet manhattanite." there was that time i implied that you resided in your mother's damp, dark basement deep in the bowels of the canadian wilderness. getting past all of that, i still possess the ability to recognize hilarity and the "hampton's star room reader pack" crack was freakin' funny.
@Mediahohoho: My wife's never mentioned any, but now I'm even more paranoid.
@sexbot: Hey, I coined the term "Foxymorons." So if they title the book that, I'll be expecting royalties.
@hfree:
Uh, duh, it would be 1993 if that was their living room, but it's so totally 200x to have a slinky and a futon at work.
Or wait, when was the dot com bubble?
@c_webb: Or Cheerleader, English Teacher, Prinicipal.
Hey Em,
You know Dennis Lim doesn't actually make any real, serious qualitative judgement about the film in those two whole pages. Doesn't it make you think that he seriously hated the shit out of it, but perhaps had to make the NYT seem like it was ebracing the avant-garde?
If only we could hack his iphone, I bet we'd see outgoing emails like "OMG the jeans. OMG man-tits!"
She fell for the Neg! I bet if we watch the finale of Douche School, this guy ends up the champion...
@c_webb: @Ned B: I believe the shorthand for these 3 ages of mediatized womanhood is Lauren C., Ann C., Suze O.
@c_webb: So that's why the intelligent women never went for me. I'm too attractive!
I always suspected as much.
@the cajun boy: As was your awesome club story. I can count on the fingers of one hand all the times something I've read deserved a blogorrhea link. That one was the pinky. I only wish that there was a follow-up. Who was the guy? Where does he work? Does he have a hedge fund?
20-something film students have nothing to say - there should be a test at the bank before you use up your trust fund making this crap.
I'd almost have to see the writer/director of this type of film first make something well-plotted and intelligently structured, to disprove my overwhelming suspicion that this "Mumblecore" bullshit doesn't really just stem from a complete ineptitude at the craft of storytelling.
Oh, and the lead is SO NOT HOT. I'm sorry.
@KimGordonsPanties:
The beards make all the difference.
@Pope John Peeps II: oh god look at us all lovin' on each other. we better go back to slinging hate in each others' direction before some stoned filmmaker sitting right now in a williamsburg cafe decides that the story of two gawker commenters who once were rivals and then turned to lovers would be great material for an ifc feature.
what would be the title?
"cajun boy and peeps take the shaftway"
How cute. Sounds like the sequel to "Slacker" -- what happens to the kids after they decide to, like, gets jobs and write stuff.
If THAT is "mega-hot" and a 9.5, I'm glad I'm gay.
I just remembered that I had that haircut in 1997. I used little jeweled bobbypins to make it stand up more. I think I was probably too old to be sporting that look, even then, but I was still looking young for my age in those days.
@Ned B: Your taxonomic kung fu is strong.