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.

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"?

"It's like hard to like describe just how like exciting it is like to make a relationship like drama like with all the like pornographic scenes thrown like in for like good measure like, and to stir up like contro- like -versy and make us more like money and like stuff." - Ellen, the lost quote."Kissing, Like, On the, Like, Mouth And Stuff" is like the best like artistic endeavor like ever made. Watching like Ellen's hairy arms and like Chris masturbating was like the height of my years-long movie-viewing experience and stuff. But before I like begin like breaking new U.S.-20-something-airhead records with the my "likes", let me like just briefly list like the high- like -lights of this visual like feast: 1. Chris doing the deed with his genitals. And not just that: the way the camera (guided so elegantly by Ellen and Patrick) rewards the viewer with a full-screen shot of Chris's fat white-trash stomach after he finishes the un-Catholic deed - that was truly thrilling. I can in all honesty say that I've never seen such grace. Chris, you should do more such scenes in your next movies, because that is exactly what we needed as a continuation of what that brilliant, brilliant man, Lars von Trier and his "Idiots 95", started. A quick w*** and then a hairy, fat, white belly: what more can any movie-goer ask for?! Needless to say, I can sit all day and watch Chris ejaculate (in spite of the fact that I'm straight)... Such poetry in motion. Such elegance, such style. No less than total, divine inspiration went into filming that sequence - plus a solid amount of Zen philosophy. Even Barbra Streisand could not get any more spiritual than this.2. Ellen's hairy, thick arms. The wobbly-camera close-ups, so skillfully photographed by our two directors of photography (I can't emphasize this enough), Ellen and Patrick, often caused confusion regarding the proper identification of the sex in question. There were several scenes when we would see a part of a body (a leg, arm or foot), yet it was often a guessing game: does that body-part belong to a man or a woman? Naturally, Chris and his fellow artists, Ellen, Patrick and whatsername, cast themselves on purpose, because their bodies were ideal for creating this gender-based confusion. It was at times hard to guess whether one is seeing a female or male leg. Patrick is so very thin and effeminate in his movements, so hairless and pristine, whereas Ellen and the other girl are so very butch, what with their thick legs and arms. Brilliant. 3. Brilliant - especially the way that neatly ties in with the theme of role reversal between the sexes: so utterly original and mind-blowing. Ellen behaves like a man, wants sex all the time, while her ex Patrick wants to talk - like a girl. Spiffing.4. Ellen's search for a Leftist mate. "He must love 'The Simpsons', which is quite Leftist." I am glad that the makers of this movie decided to break the long tradition of offering us intelligent Leftists. Ellen is such a refreshing - and realistic - change. The number of "likes" that she and her liberal friends manage to utter in less than 80 minutes is truly phenomenal (3,849, to be exact). They have managed to realistically transfer their real-life ineptness onto the big screen with a minimum of effort, and I applaud them for that.5. The close-ups of toes. Plenty of stuff here for foot-fetishists, which I think is a very liberal, highly commendable way of reaching out to sexual minorities. After all, shoe- and foot- fetishists are offered so little in modern cinema, so it's nice to see that someone out there CARES.KOTM, or rather, KLOTLMAS, offers more than meets the eye. It is not just a modest little film about shallow people engaging in hollow relationships while indulging in meaningless conversations. No, it's much more than that. It's about the light that guides all silly creatures; the guiding light that dominates the futile lives of various pseudo-artistic wannabes who just dropped out of film school, and plan to assault our senses with dim-witted drivel that will hopefully play well at pretentious festivals like Sundance and Cannes, enabling them to gain the necessary exposure hence some real cash for a change, with which they will later hire the likes of Sean Penn and George Clooney in promoting the saving of this planet and the resolving of ALL political problems this world faces. What better way to do that than by making porn at the very start? If Chris and Ellen did the camera here, as is clearly stated in the end-credits, then who held the camera while the two of them were in front of it? They probably hired some passers-by and shoved the camera into their hands...

This film was absolutely awful, I even feel uncomfortable calling it a film. Its the typical "mumblecore" movie, with zero plot and a bunch of aimless whiny twenty somethings stumbling around trying to "figure stuff out". I have tried to give mumblecore a chance, but lets be honest its just horrible.I am not out of sync with cinema, I appreciate Dogme95 films, Idioterne is one of my all time favorite films. So I do not mind if a film is cheaply made so long as there is some (ANY) substance.Everything in this film is horrid, the acting, the writing (or was it all improvised?), the direction, but MOST of all, above everything else, the camera work was just plain and simple nonsense. The camera was never anywhere logical, there was no consistency. I got to admit being a guy I had heard there was nudity in this film so I thought to myself well even if its horrible at least there's nudity (yea I know, I'm a jerk). Well thanks to the uber crappy camera-work you never really get to see anything, and the things you do see, TRUST ME - YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE. This film made me want to vomit on numerous levels.The dialogue made me want to vomit, the camera-work made me want to vomit, but mostly the idea that this film was praised by some legit critics, well now that more than anything makes me want to vomit.