Kissing on the Mouth

What a time we live in when someone like this Joe Swan-whatever the hell is considered a good filmmaker...or even a filmmaker at all! Where are the new crop of filmmakers with brains AND talent??? We need them bad, and to hell with mumblecore!

This movie is about nothing, just as the characters in the film stand for nothing. It's this horrible, so-called Gen Y, that is full of bored idiots, some of which declare themselves filmmakers with out bothering to learn anything about the craft before shooting. Well, Orson Welles was a filmmaker. John Huston was a filmmaker. Fellini was a filmmaker. Dreyer was a filmmaker, etc. Current films like these show just how stupid young, so-called "filmmakers" can be when they believe going out with no script, no direction, no thought, no legit "camerawork" (everything shot horribly on DV), no craft of editing, no nothing, stands for "rebellious" or "advanced" film-making. Nope, it's called ignorance and laziness or just pure masturbation of cinema (and there actually is an in-your-face "jack-off shot," so be ready).

Look at the early films of any accomplished "indie" filmmaker: Linklatter, Morris, Allen, Lynch, Hartley, Jarmusch, Jost, Lee, or Herzog...none made anything as tedious and aimless as this, yet Swan-whatever the hell, is still going to SXSW every year and hailed as some kind of gutsy, new talent. It's crap! I can't imagine anyone liking this, and everything else this so-called filmmaker has done (all seen by me) is just as bad (the newer stuff clearly made to appeal to a more mainstream audience, one of the sitcom calling). Steer clear, unless you're a friend or family member of those involved...on second thought, if you're a family member or friend you'd probably be embarrassed to see a family member or friend in such compromising situations...

Utter garbage. This isn't art. This is the ultimate opposite of it.

You can only do so much with little or no budget. This movie does what it must, I guess, following two or three, very ordinary young folks around, listening to their Hopes And Dreams, capturing plenty of their nudity, doing for their sex lives what Margaret Mead did for the Samoans', listening to them ramble on.

It's in some ways a novel venture. I'd always wondered how women shaved their pubic hair. Now I know, but I still don't know WHY they do it. I can understand a man's trimming his mustache. If you let it go, after a while you can't eat donuts anymore.

I also know something about male masturbation in the shower. I read it about it somewhere, once. But it does absolutely nothing for me to watch a close up of some guy whacking off amid the soap suds.

But then the entire movie, aside from being -- perhaps necessarily -- a little dull in conception, is maddening in execution. Or, let me put it this way: whatever happened to the medium shot? It's a brave movie but not an especially interesting one. If it's a movie, it ought to have a coherent plot somewhere. If we want a slice of humdrum life we can always find somebody tape of the old PBS program, "Family." Somebody compared this to "Brown Bunny," but that's an inept comparison. This one lacks the raw sex and the arrant male narcissism of "Brown Bunny." This one could have been much better if there had been some effort put into the writing, assuming any effort at all was put into it. You can do stuff successfully without having ten million bucks. Has anyone seen "The Little Fugitive"?

I'll be frank: remember I sought this out because it was a) Joe Swanberg's first movie, and b) it seemed like it was, in part, a soft-core porno. No, it's not that. It has practically hardcore scenes with the director himself. Unfortunately I remember some of those scenes more than the scenes of drama, which involve the revolving lives of college aged people in love (and some of this looks like people in dorms).

It's so naturalistic that it is trying for something different entirely, almost breaking the mold of both pornography films (the usual rough quality is at least given here a more direct shot-list, I think, than what is usually done by directors), and not unlike the other (must quote) "mumblecore" movies there is no firm script so the dialog and talk between actors and what is kind of breaking the fourth wall about relationships is extreme and intimate and extremely intimate all at once.

When I mean extreme is that we get intimate with these actors to where that line is blurred between what is perhaps, arguably, exploiting the young actors who agreed to be in this (female and male, I mean this involves the cutting of public hair on camera), on top of the emotional extremes displayed. What this all amounts to is... maybe not a whole lot. But I was mesmerized watching this - it doesn't function as a typical porno despite the rampant nudity, and it doesn't function as your typical three-act structure dramatic narrative.

It's experimental and in your face and primal and even philosophical and it doesn't give a good damn what you think of it. That's refreshing for a first movie. I just wish I could muster enough energy to watch it again.

Joe Swanberg was bold to make Kissing on the Mouth his directorial debut. Everything about it is a risk, and in 2005, do-it- yourself filmmaking had not gained the incredible momentum it has in recent time. This is the kind of film you make your fifth or sixth film, after you've established a name for yourself and your work and have created your own style of filmmaking.

This is an uncommonly ambitious directorial debut from a man I admire quite heavily and have made an effort to pay attention to for the last couple of years. Since Kissing on the Mouth, Swanberg has predicated his film career off of making extremely low- budget films that often explore the themes of sexual exploration, technology, communication, the filmmaking process, and post-college life and his entry into the film world is one that steadily prepared us for what was to come. Ever since Swanberg entered film, he has been met with a sizable fire-storm of criticism for his low-budget style, which is often billed as mumblecore, a subgenre of film that is heavily defined by character, cheap production values, and excessive amounts of naturalistic dialog.

The film follows Ellen (Kate Winterich), a twentysomething who has just had sex with an ex-boyfriend while currently seeing Patrick (Joe Swanberg), a fellow twentysomething currently invested in a personal project he's constructing that includes commentary on modern relationships and personal feelings on love. Patrick is the jealous type, while Ellen is the type of girl who possesses an "I don't care, you shouldn't care" attitude when it comes to issues in her life, and when the possibility of her cheating comes into question by Patrick, she increasingly becomes more closeted and alienating in her attempt to try to piece together what she wants without her entire love-life crumbling.

A large part of this already short film (seventy-eight minutes) is sex, and by a large part, I mean roughly forty percent. However, the sex here is unconventional. It has an unpolished, imperfection to the way it is filmed, with Swanberg using extreme closeups on pubic hair, nipples, and unclear parts of the body. This style provoked intrigue as well as frustration for me because while I get a subversively shot sex scene I am also greeted with a shot that doesn't have accurate placement nor clear distinction of what exactly is occurring. Some will undoubtedly find this annoying and irritating, and, for that, it's almost too easy to dismiss everything the film has housed in it.

Admittedly, Swanberg relies too heavily on these sex scenes, which scarcely come off as erotic more-so than as an anarchic attempt at creating style. Where Swanberg shines is in filming heavily-improvised dialog between the cast members, which is always a great time in my book. Because of the naturalism and inherent authenticity to the material based on its lack of gloss and polish, the actors could very well be expressing their own opinions to us and with that we naturally take away what we want from their monologues and discard whatever we don't want.

While forty percent of the picture is made up of extended sex scenes shot with varying uses of the closeup camera shot, the remaining sixty is dialog or music montage. Obviously, the dialog takes prominence here because then we really can get a sense of what these characters are about and what their opinions on love are. The film's most revealing attribute is Patrick's audio montage of several different unseen people weighing in on subjects from marriage to hookups to relationships. This provides for a pleasantly relativistic look on other people's opinions of popular subjects. If sex/ relationships were political topics, Kissing on the Mouth would be the ultimate debate film.

Just a few days ago I viewed Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless for the first time, a film that fundamentally and aesthetically changed the ideas of cinema by shamelessly bending the rules and toying with conventions that were long carried out by new as well as veteran directors. When Godard's directorial debut hit the scene in 1960, a breakthrough movement in cinema history was born. To compare Swanberg's Kissing on the Mouth to Godard's Breathless, to some, would seem like comparing trash and art but if one looks at how they fearlessly shatter all preconceived judgments and convention, one could view them as birds of a feather. It just so happens that one feather went on to leave an irrevocable watermark while the other left something of a lesser marking. For one of the pioneering films of the mumblecore subgenre in cinema - a subgenre I adore and simply can't get enough of - it's still quite fascinating and, at times, moving in its insights.

Starring: Kate Winterich and Joe Swanberg. Directed by: Joe Swanberg.

No, I don't like it.

The summary makes reference to the main character's (Ellen) insertion of the word "like" in just about every sentence! It's a common,annoying California verbal tic that once you hear it, you can't stop hearing it! And she's got it bad! "So he's, like, "I don't know," and I'm, like, "Why not?" so they like, got up and left, and we, like, got up and left, too..." Pretty much every time she speaks..

No one involved with the movie noticed this? Totally unwatchable! Also, what's with the guy jerking off in the shower? What was the reason to subject us to that? My guess is the guy was horny and, this being such an amateur attempt at movie making, said, "Let's use it - it's edgy!"