from slate.com:
The unabashedly teensy-budgeted Funny Ha Ha, written and directed by Andrew Bujalski, is actually more like Funny Strange—or even Funny Unsettling. You might be tempted to walk out in the first 20 minutes, which seem artless and aimless: not very fascinating people making not very fascinating small talk in drab settings. The by-default protagonist, Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer), is a listless 23-year-old between jobs and quietly smitten with an old friend, Alex (Christian Rudder), who has just broken up with his girlfriend. Does Alex like her? Other friends, among them Alex’s sister, don’t quite know. Alex, it seems, doesn’t quite know. Marnie doesn’t communicate her affections very forcefully. In fact, she does nothing very forcefully. She drinks a little at parties, she lies around, she hangs out with laid-back friends, and she floats.

Floating, indecision, the indefinite: This is the gray arena of Funny Ha Ha. The surprise is how the movie comes together and gets under your skin before you even know why you should give a damn. What seems improvised and random turns out to be controlled, at times cunningly shaped, and the surface of nonsequiturs and random shrugs conceals fairly intense emotions—the emotions of self-consciously cool, easy, inarticulate people afraid to pin anything down. The nonaction is set (in what appears to be Cambridge, Boston, and Somerville) in midsummer and has a midsummer formlessness—an extension of the kind of languor you feel in those hazy dog days before the sudden hardness and definition of fall.

Dollenmayer becomes more and more fun to read. A young woman with long limbs and sleepy eyes on a big, open face, she’s just the sort of beauty whose self-effacing vibe would make her less than magnetic to really handsome guys and madly irresistible to nerds—who think that maybe, just maybe, they’d have a shot. The one she attracts is played by the director, who makes himself look very unprepossessing, indeed. In fact, he’s cringe-worthy. The character he plays, Mitchell, tries to make a virtue of his self-deprecation: Loathing himself is obviously all he has to think about. He’s so unappealing that it really would be a sign of self-disrespect for Marnie to go to bed with him. Fortunately, he’s too lame even to press his case. But she’d be no better off with adorable Alex, whose boneless diffidence seems increasingly selfish and calculated.

Funny Ha Ha is a bit of a stunt. How can intelligent people, even slackers, be this vaporous? No one talks about life, the world, politics, music, movies—anything concrete. But out of this vaporousness, and within the narrow parameters he has set, Bujalski has made an indelible film…
by David Edelstein

Andrew Bujalski - (2002) Funny Ha Ha.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 30mn
Size: 	1.44 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 900 Kbps
BPP: 	0.183
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps (Audio Commentary with Russian scholar)

https://nitro.download/view/48705B71475ED95/Andrew_Bujalski_-_(2002)_Funny_Ha_Ha.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Andrew Bujalski – Funny Ha Ha (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Set over the course of a weekend tournament for chess software programmers thirty-some years ago, Computer Chess transports viewers to a nostalgic moment when the contest between technology and the human spirit seemed a little more up for grabs. We get to know the eccentric geniuses possessed of the vision to teach a metal box to defeat man, literally, at his own game, laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence as we know it and will come to know it in the future.

1.45GB | 1h 31mn | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/F3C476F995525F8/Andrew_Bujalski_-_(2013)_Computer_Chess.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Andrew Bujalski – Computer Chess (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Beeswax is Bujalski’s third feature and the first to be conceived and shot since Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2003) turned him into a rising indie star. For the most part, it’s just as insular and homogeneous as any of the films Taubin rapped in Film Comment. It takes place in Austin, Texas, the little countercultural cocoon that launched Bujalski’s career, and most of the action centers on a funky little vintage clothing boutique favored by college students and the like. Its primary characters are all young, straight, white, middle-class, and college educated. And like so many other mumblecore movies, Beeswax is largely preoccupied with sexual and romantic maneuvering, as a young couple who’ve broken up circle each other tentatively and get back together.
Like many good storytellers, however, Bujalski trades breadth for depth, transcending his narrow social parameters by zeroing in on individuals. For all three of his films he’s reversed the typical practice of creating characters and casting actors to play them; instead he starts with people he knows socially and invents a story around them. Beeswax is about a pair of twins, Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher) and Lauren (Maggie Hatcher)—one of whom, Jeannie, is paraplegic. Though their facial features are identical, Lauren is conventionally slim, while Jeannie is built like someone who’s spent years in a wheelchair—she has a pronounced gut but muscular arms and shoulders. In a Hollywood movie this odd comparison-contrast would be the locus of the story, but in Beeswax, aside from a handful of scenes in which Jeannie requires minor physical assistance, it barely figures at all. The characters seem more real when their idiosyncrasies are taken for granted.
Taubin called Bujalski “a poet of demurral, hesitation, and noncommitment,” and one reason the mumblecore tag stuck is that it so aptly reflects the verbal groping and mushy equivocation common to many of the films. Yet Bujalski’s portraits of Generation Whatever can be remarkably exacting once you get past the dialogue to the characters’ actual behavior. Beeswax, as its title suggests, considers not just love relationships but business relationships, and the similarities between them are striking. Jeannie, who runs the clothing shop, is having serious communication problems with her business partner and is beginning to worry about getting sued. Her old boyfriend, Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), is a law student preparing to take the bar, and when she meets up with him to get his advice on the situation, they wind up going to bed together. Before long their romance has started up again, and though neither of them ever admits it, Merrill’s biggest attraction is his ability to calm her fears about her rapidly deteriorating business situation.

3.09GB | 1h 40m | 1024×552 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/FFF1A87016A98AB/Andrew_Bujalski_-_(2009)_Beeswax.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Andrew Bujalski – Beeswax (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Walter Francis (Bill Morrison) and Jerry Peoples (Ralph Tyler), two characters from Mutual Appreciation, share a visit at the Peoples’ home in the countryside.

109MB | 08m 13s | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/610D2350D9CD565/Peoples.House.2007.576p.Bluray.AC3.2.0.x264-SaL.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Andrew Bujalski – Peoples House (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In Bujalski’s new film (notable director of Computer Chess, Funny Ha Ha, and Mutual Appreciation), the general manager at a highway-side ”sports bar with curves” has her incurable optimism and faith, in her girls, her customers, and herself, tested over the course of a long, strange day.

1.89GB | 1h 30mn | 1280×720 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/3147281347D86DC/Support.the.Girls.2018.720p.BluRay.x264-x0r.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Andrew Bujalski – Support the Girls (2018) first appeared on Cinema of the World.