{"id":5255,"date":"2010-06-07T08:19:41","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T12:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5255"},"modified":"2010-11-10T23:05:09","modified_gmt":"2010-11-11T03:05:09","slug":"beeswax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5255","title":{"rendered":"Beeswax"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In Danny Boyle\u2019s Trainspotting<\/em>, his adaptation of Irvine Welsh\u2019s notoriously impenetrable novel, there\u2019s a scene where Johnny Lee Miller\u2019s character, Sick Boy, is heartbroken over the death of his child. All of the other heroin addicts in the room are stunned, staring at the dead baby. Sick Boy screams at Ewan McGregor\u2019s character, Mark Renton, normally the quick witted member of the group, to help out with by breaking up the tension.<\/p>\n

\u201cSay something Mark. Fucking say something, huh<\/em>!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Unfortunately Renton\u2019s response is more selfish, trying to delude himself about what\u2019s going on, and he says, \u201cI\u2019m cooking up\u201d (i.e. he\u2019s going to get high to forget the pain).<\/p>\n

\u201cFucking say something<\/em>,\u201d is a perfectly natural reaction to Andrew Bujalski\u2019s Beeswax<\/em>, a more accomplished film than his Funny Ha Ha, <\/em>but still frustratingly unnecessary and inert. There\u2019s so much emotional paralysis that the fact that only one of his main characters is in a wheelchair is a miracle.<\/p>\n

\"\"Is Beeswax<\/em>, nominally a mumblecore film*, a genre primarily worried about detailing hipster inexpressiveness (in this case, twin sisters, Jeannie and Lauren, played by Tilly and Maggie Hatcher) an accurate representation of a group of go-nowheres in Austin, Texas? Probably, but Bujalski has limited his movie to worrying about irritating people with nothing to say. Sure, part of what makes the film different is the insistence on only showing us what happens between<\/em> the important conversations and events in its characters\u2019 lives. Unfortunately this attitude allows Beeswax<\/em> to be summed up by one lingering shot, where the camera focuses, for no particular reason, on Lauren\u2019s armpit hair. Like armpit hair, Beeswax <\/em>is sweaty, unpleasant, in need of cutting, and without a point.<\/p>\n

So trivial is Beeswax<\/em>, that one of the many subplots left dangling concerns Jeannie\u2019s employee Corinne (Jeannie runs a vintage clothing store, big surprise!), and the predicament about whether or not Corinne will be able to make her shift is she goes to a protest march, you know, in case she gets arrested. And while the petty back and forth between Jeannie and Corinne is symptomatic about the heinous level of passive-aggression on display throughout the film, certainly worthy of mocking, it\u2019s one of the only humorous moments that Bujalski is able to dig out of the morass.<\/p>\n

\"\"While it\u2019s brave to limit your scope to the inertia of complacency, Bujalksi and his deliberately amateurish actors stray from potentially interesting material on purpose. Jeannie\u2019s boyfriend Merrill, who looks like a mix of Eric Bogosian and Demetri Martin (or Booger from Revenge of the Nerds<\/em>), plus a hairlip, but minus any charm or wit, seems about to tell a story about meeting someone in rehab when he was 19, but Bujalski cuts away before Merrill even starts. Why even bring it up if you\u2019re just going to tease us?<\/p>\n

Of course, once you remember that the characters don\u2019t actually have anything to say (there\u2019s a motif about light bulbs going out, which suggests they had ideas in the first place), you don\u2019t really care that Jeannie is getting sued because she basically doesn\u2019t know how to communicate, or that Merrill has to pass the bar, or that Lauren may or may not go to Africa to teach. There\u2019s talk of Jeannie and Merrill missing Lauren, but it isn\u2019t clear what exactly there was to miss (Bujalski, despite going the spare Jarmusch route<\/span><\/a>, is also really bad about doling out basic information, so figuring out who is who takes far too long**). When Merrill and Jeannie talk about the \u201chot sex\u201d they just had, it\u2019s mostly unlikely because hot sex would require some manner of passion, which neither of these characters possess.<\/p>\n

\"\"Not helped by its hideous burnt orange color scheme, Beeswax <\/em>works on the viewer until attrition eventually sets in. It\u2019s not that we need to know how the story turns out, but the movie is so weary that its very lack of ambition puts you in a haze. As a movie, Beeswax <\/em>plays like the stand-ins for the road company are somehow being filmed without the real cast\u2019s knowledge. It\u2019s like 90 minutes of sound check or an hour and a half of Alan Iverson rehearsing<\/em> his \u201cit\u2019s about practice\u201d speech without realizing that the cameras are rolling.<\/p>\n

* In my interview with Humpday<\/em> director Lynn Shelton<\/span><\/a>, I referred to mumblecore as a genre made by\u00a0 \u201cmid-20\u2019s white guys suffering from post-collegiate ennui who, even though they don\u2019t surf, all call each other dude \u2014 and aren\u2019t Noah Baumbach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, Baumbach\u2019s own Greenberg<\/em>, starring mumblecore stalwart Greta Gerwig, is like the smart and funny version of Beeswax<\/em>, uncomfortably and aggressively dealing with passive aggression, rude behavior, and stunted maturity.<\/p>\n

** There are two different characters who appear to be the mother of the twins. It’s never clear if the two women, who live together, are lovers, sisters, cousins, or exist in parallel universes that happened to coincide in a random kitchen in the Houston suburbs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Danny Boyle\u2019s Trainspotting, his adaptation of Irvine Welsh\u2019s notoriously impenetrable novel, there\u2019s a scene where Johnny Lee Miller\u2019s character, Sick Boy, is heartbroken over the death of his child. All of the other heroin addicts in the room are stunned, staring at the dead baby. Sick Boy screams at Ewan McGregor\u2019s character, Mark Renton, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12],"tags":[5188,6498,6497,6501,6513,6500,6508,327,6510,6494,1708,5053,786,1104,6496,1052,6492,6505,6506,3176,5339,4871,1625,6499,612,6511,6502,1013,6504,907,4878,4600,6493,6509,1031,1958,5189,1697,6495,1225,6512,2904,6503,781,6507],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5255"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}