Mattie (Greta Gerwig) and James (Joe Swanberg) are a struggling loving couple in Chicago. They break up and a year later, he calls her out of the blue. He has attained some success and she lives in New York. He is the subject of a photo shoot and the photographer even brings her into the picture. They try to reignite their relationship.This is a mumblecore indie. It's not that much written. The dialog is almost improvisational in its nature. The shooting style is strictly amateur indie. Swanberg plays it stiff initially as the foundational piece of the relationship. Gerwig brings an energy and charisma. Apparently, the film was shoot in two parts just like the on-screen relationship. There is a change in the characters especially Swanberg. He's more confident in the second part. This is a great introduction to two indie careers.

Mumblecore is an American independent film movement of the early 21st characterized by low-budget production, focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors. I thought I would start my review off this week with a kind of warning label. I am sure that this genre of film is something only half of all viewers find enjoyable.Nights and Weekends is the newest in the genre due to the lack of microphones which make the actors sounds like their mumbling at times. Although a relatively new field of film-making, the basis for this style hasn't changed.With Nights and Weekends, staples to the genre Joe Swanberg (LOL, Quiet City) and Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead) return for a film that revolves solely around these two characters building and breaking apart in a timeless tale of breakups and makeups.In previous films of theirs, the two have never tried a relationship story where at least 90% of the film is shot only on them. The film was shot in Chicago and New York, however in a faux-ironic way; the viewer only gets to see these beautiful cities for a few minutes as the majority is filmed in either apartments or hotels. I'm sure they did this technique on purpose to make the story seem more genuine.As you can probably guess, such low-budget idealism doesn't transcend well to the masses, but luckily there is a thriving subculture out there that believes you don't need a bunch of special effects and money to make a substantial and interesting movie.For instance, what better medium can you think of to show the hardest of all concepts, love. Real people having real conversations about real problems. It almost feels like watching reality TV, except the sincerity is tenfold and the people are more down-to-earth.The title stems from the long distance relationship dilemma of only being able to seeing your significant other on nights or weekends. It's a sad but true concept because these situations can be extremely passionate but also heartbreaking. The passion and sadness are amplified to the extreme, however instead of coming off forced or unnatural, I felt the truest sense of longing and hope for the two characters.I felt a real sense of confusion, which, under any other circumstance I would find annoying and immediately turned off. However, this confusion only seemed to keep my curiosity on the brim as I increasingly wanted to see exactly what was going to happen. Are we friends or more? Do I want to be friends or something more? These are real questions that everyone has asked at some point in their lives. When put into a film like this, it feels as if you're vicariously living through the characters in some scenes.Like I've said, many people will lose interest immediately within the first ten minutes simply because you're only going to see and hear dialogue for the next hour and a half but, for those of us who can see this for what it is - happiness in the saddest form possible - N&W comes highly recommended from me.Nights and Weekends can be found on Netflix.

Though Swanberg's previous film "LOL", was not the most visually stunning, it was creative, and I found it quite interesting simply because it had something to say about how we relate to one another in this day and age. This film seems to want to say something as well, but the immature, whiny, uninteresting way the characters say it, has started to become a staple of the Mumblecore movement (to see the most blatant example of this, see "The Puffy Chair"...actually, don't). The majority of these films been festival darlings and been fairly well-received by critics. This is mostly due to the fact that many of the films have been able to strip away the traditional Hollywood artifice from their characters and allow them to exhibit some honest behavior, no matter how awkward. However, you get the sense that these middle-class, white, 20-somethings need something to fill their time besides thoughts of their own neuroses and navel-gazing.The allure of these films for many viewers is that the people on screen are "just like me", and the situations are "just like what happened to me yesterday". This could be interesting if only there were actually something at stake. The NY Times review summed it up better than I can, when it stated, "The problem with the movie is that James and Mattie exhibit little but shallow, infantile neurosis, with next to no hint of a complex — or even legible — inner life."

I will try not to be overly critical here because I have been somewhat harsh on the mumblecore movement and while this movie is not something I enjoyed I did not find it as sloppy as some of the previous mumblecore work.This film was showing at south by southwest in austin, after it showed some people were really into it while others hated it. I was impartial, having seen the previous mumblecore work I knew what to anticipate. Rambling scenes, mumbling, nudity for the sake of shock and attention, whiney pathetic lead characters.I hate to tell people what to think, and I can say a few people seemed to find it interesting. I can say what I thought though, their was basically no plot, the whole story revolves around two characters, and if you find whiney pathetic characters annoying then you are in trouble.I have a theory that after seeing so much garbage that looked the same at SXSW people were merely impressed because they saw a different looking piece of garbage, and they said, well is that still garbage, it looks different. The thing is, garbage comes in all shapes and sizes.