Customer Reviews

Hannah Takes the Stairs

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I felt as though I was watching someone's high school class project. Very low budget film; I didn't like anything about it and couldn't finish.

An unusual but provocative film that seems spontaneous, which strangely adds to its magic. I was captivated by it.
Down Pat

To start off, I love independent film. I love low-budget films. After all, Clerks (Collector's Series) was a low budget film. But, that movie was entertaining and funny. This movie seemed to have no redeeming value.

Hannah is a twenty-something intern at a production company. She starts off with one boyfriend, and quickly gets rid of him, because she likes someone else that she is working with. He starts to get a little stale as well, so she replaces him with the other guy that they are working with.

I would find it more interesting if there was a script intact. I could deal with ad-libbing if it were amusing or enjoyable, (not to say that this was ad-libbed, but it seems as though it was) but most of the time, you had to listen carefully, because there was a lot of mumbling, and to be honest, the characters weren't that compelling. They also seemed as if they could learn some social skills as well.

And, of course, there is Hannah. She seems to be floating through life, not a care in the world, except for who she is going to sleep with next. She wasn't intelligent like the men at work claimed. She was so self absorbed, so annoying, and it was really hard to listen to her voice, quite honestly. I have read many books and seen movies where the characters are not good people or I don't empathize with them, but at least in those situations, the characters were intriguing! The conversations were so awkward, with so many pregnant pauses, and everyone interrupting each other. It was like not being able to look away from a car crash.

My boyfriend walked out of the room halfway through, but I decided to stick it out, just in case it got better. I hardly ever write really negative reviews like this, unless something is really terrible.

There is an opening shower scene with one lover. And a closing bathtub scene with a third lover. The middle lover didn't get a nude scene. The nude scenes are the highlight (the only highlight) of this movie. The cinematography is good so a star for that and another for the leading lady's charms. You have to wonder if they made up the script as they went along. It is worse than mundane. I cannot believe anyone talking like these people do. I cannot believe these people work at a television show. There are scenes where she makes faces at a bus stop. I don't know why she dumped the shower guy. But the bathtub guy playing a horn along with nude Hannah playing her horn was worth the $1.17 I paid for a used copy. But don't waste your life watching the middle of this. How did it ever get into blockbuster?

Transitionally and historically speaking, the entire canon of independent filmmaking has derived from a basic desire to be `anti-Hollywood;' a reaction to the sameness associated with mainstream films. But this movement known as Mumblecore became its own cookie-cutter, like putting up a mirror in front of something and calling the reflection the original. These films are so ingrained within Hollywood ideology, I wouldn't be surprised if big budget films started moving into this aesthetic for stylistic intent. Indie films in the past were reflexive of the politics of the era in order to challenge (for lack of a better term) 'mainstream' ideals in regards to cinema; this new mode of digital filmmaking has made an absolute economy out of it.

Hannah is a basic plot; a bored girl has boring relationships, finds love, the end.
Stylistically, we're dealing with an absolute bare bones project: The film keeps `on location,` the location typically being two or three sparsely decorated houses; the mise-en-scene is kept quite minimal. The cameras are also completely framed with a handheld `home video' look, exemplifying both the digital video era we are currently living in, as well as evoking a type of YouTube-esque exhibitionism.
It's the content of Hannah that is so perplexingly frustrating; there is nothing that the text could be saying. The director is aiming for 'naturalized' acting, 'naturalized' situations, and 'ultimate realism.' But for what purpose? 'To document a generation.' Well, then do a documentary; don't create an absolutely facetious representation that is inherently speaking to absolutely nothing. What's the point of creating if there's no creativity?

Cheapening form and content, in the sense, is another example of capitalistic deterioration of quality in favor of quantity also inspires the "I can do that" phenomenon; audience members view these cheap, `technically unfinished' films, get the idea to make their own, and in the process lessen the quality even further as time progresses. Look at how many filmmakers have emerged due to the "YouTube phenomenon," which transcends any sort of filmic value to the mode of a home video camera and digital assets. "By changing the world they exist in through labor," Dallas Smythe argues, "human beings at the same time alter their own nature, for the lives of people are influenced both by what they produce and how they produce."

Scary concept if this is what my generation is calling a 'film movement representative of our culture.'

**1/2

Joe Swanberg`s "Hannah Takes the Stairs" is a low-budget art-film done in a quasi-improvisational style. It centers around a group of self-absorbed twenty-somethings who spend most of their time sitting around discussing life and relationships as if such subjects had never been talked about before. The result is a sometimes insightful but more often tedious look into the mindset of today's younger generation.

Hannah (Greta Gerwig) is a neo-Bohemian playwright with poor instincts when it comes to men, who, upon dumping her ne'er-do-well musician boyfriend, immediately strikes up romances with two fellows at the obviously loosey-goosey TV production company where she works. The movie strives hard to be as extemporaneous as possible both in its performances and its direction, and while that does yield a few moments of truth and honesty along the way (the break-up scene is almost painfully convincing), too much of the movie is simply vapid and self-indulgent, with a trio of perfectly able-bodied young folk puling and mewling and whining about life to the point where we just don`t care to listen to them anymore.

With no real plot or storyline to speak of, watching "Hannah Takes the Stairs" is a bit like staring at someone else's random doodlings for an hour-and-a-half and finding no real reason why we should care about them. And, oh yes, unless I missed it, no actual staircase appears in the movie, with or without Hannah going up or down it. I guess it must be metaphorical.

When I saw my first Swanberg film, I thought it was a brilliant parody of this subculture of folks I like to call indie kids - even though they're chronologically not kids at all. You will find them in great abundance in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles, for example. They try to be super-ironic and arty.

As a slice of life treatise on this group of people who are totally emotionally detached, intellectually stunted, and socially and politically disengaged - his movies work great. However, it has dawned on me that this is not the director's intent at all. This isn't a polemic on a generation of young adults who have been given everything and waste it in the most pathetic, contrarian fashion - this guy actually thinks hes making serious films about real people.

This realization has thus turned my view of his work on its head. The only thing more torturous than watching this movie would be sitting next to these losers in some faux-bohemian coffeehouse.

Easily the best effort to date of Joe Swanberg, an indie filmaker fav. This film rocks in its subtleties as Hannah grows into different relationships. No ninjas or zombies, but what can be more engaging then two people searching for love playing trumpets in a bathtub.