By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Andrew Bujalski in the Times: quality of a puppy dog or a child
VOICE film editor Dennis Lim gets some more quality time in the NY Times, profiling marvelous micro-moviemaker Andrew Bujalski and his two features, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation: “Instead of being motormouths, his characters speak in half-sentences that trail off into excruciating silences. Compared to Richard Linklater‘s earnest philosophers or Noah Baumbach‘s poised wiseacres, Mr. Bujalski’s sheepish drifters are mortifyingly tongue-tied. But their verbal tics, taken together, could stand as a fumbling generation’s poignant cri de coeur: “I guess,” “I mean,” “I’m sorry,” “I don’t know.” “Both films are slow-burning comedies about the fear of adulthood made by someone who isn’t yet inclined to sentimentalize or belittle these threshold years. As Mr. Bujalski presents it, the quarter-life crisis is an inherently funny condition, but it’s not necessarily a laughing matter… Robb Moss, a documentarian and Harvard lecturer who lent Mr. Bujalski a Steenbeck editing machine for Funny Ha Ha, said, “One of the charms of Andrew’s films is that they spend no energy convincing you of his ambition.” An even more entertaining (and sweet) quote comes from Bujalski’s website, where veteran filmmaker and professor-mentor Dusan Makavejev avers, “This film does not leave me. I do not know why. It simply comes back from time to time. It has this great camera-created film glue. Quality of a puppy dog or a child—film has ‘look at me’ quality.”