Welcome back to Projections, the only movie newsletter where mumbling is a prized trait.
I’m en route to the Telluride Film Festival, my happiest place, for the eighth time. On The Big Picture this week, we talked about the films we can’t wait to see this fall, and hopefully I’m about to knock a few of those titles off the list.
Festival season is about two things: anticipation and discovery. They’re often in opposition to one another. The former is easy—map out the release calendar, survey the festival announcements, coordinate the puzzle pieces. Discovery is an altogether different thing. You have to take chances and open your mind to lesser-known titles and filmmakers. Give yourself a chance to be swept away. At a festival like Telluride, there is a limited window to conquer your anticipation; for me, too often, discovery is discarded during my quest to check boxes. I’m fortunate that this year I’ve had a chance to see many of the expected movies, so I intend to spin the wheel on a few films I don’t know much about.
It’s a feeling that reminds me of living on the Lower East Side in New York in the 2000s. I lived on the Lower East Side, Orchard St. to be exact, less than 500 steps from Sunshine Cinema, a lovely five-screen theater run by Landmark that opened in 2001. I routinely popped into Sunshine just to check out whatever was playing whenever I could. It was there (and at the still extant IFC Center) that I saw many movies that were considered a part of the “mumblecore” movement, which effectively lasted throughout the duration of Sunshine’s existence. A largely NYC-based strain of independent films that featured naturalistic acting, improvised dialogue, the emotional troubles of youthful creatives, and micro-budgeted production values, mumblecore became a bit of a dirty word among its progenitors—it’s a reductive classification, but it was convenient for the press and categorical film fans. There was something both raw and flimsy about many of the films, with craft frequently overwhelmed by a get-it-done slackness. It was written about frequently and then it seemed to evaporate quickly. But there have been major reverberations. The very loose confederation of directors and actors who comprised the generation making these movies has gone on to various degrees of success and notoriety. Some have soared to the pinnacle of Hollywood moviemaking; others have stepped away from film; most have continued making work that is modestly scaled with personal integrity. Sunshine Cinema was closed and demolished in 2018, but what played there lives on.
