Review of Tiny Furniture

I always had mixed feelings about New York filmmaker Lena Dunham. While her outspoken presence on social media and in interviews have attracted significant controversy, criticism and media scrutiny throughout her career mostly with her views on racial and women rights. I do feel like her work on films is not god awful. Honestly, if you like Dunham's work on the HBO Television Show 'Girls', then this independent movie is for you. Not only does the film features some of the same cast members, including Alex Karpovsky as Youtuber personality named Jed and Jemima Kirke as a drug addict friend named Charlotte. "Tiny Furniture' has a very similar plot to the first season of that show with a young woman, Aura (Lena Dunham) trying to figure out what to do with her life while living in New York City. Most of it drawn from the filmmaker's own life struggles. The failure to launch themes involving her are so familiar that the movie could be called a quasi-autobiographical. After all, Dunham's own mother artist Laurie Simmons and sister Cyrus Grace Dunham stars in the film as characters loosely based on themselves. While the movie can be seemed as a bit nepotism due to that and her mother financing the project. They still had all great on-screen chemistry. Yet the film is harder to watch now due to the controversy surrounding passages in Lena's 2014 memoir 'Not That Kind of Girl' which recount childhood interactions between then seven Lena and then 1 year old Cyrus engage in what many perceived as a sexual act with each other. Now that is a disturbing especially when most of the film has the adult them walking around in their underwear talking about sexual things with each other. If that wasn't weird enough, the comedy also shown most of Dunham's early viral online videos like 2007 'The Fountain', which depicted her in a bikini brushing her teeth in the public fountain at Oberlin College as odd art pieces shown for the public. I really didn't get what the film was going with the whole depiction of internet culture. To be truthful, even with that in the movie. The film still doesn't really stand out much as it could had. Like other mumblecore films before this, a single white young person who fairly is aimless in both their professional and personal lives had better told. One such example is 2002 Andrew Bujalski movie 'Funny Haha' that got praise by critics for its realism and won an Independent Spirit Award the following year. Don't get me wrong, Dunham's film also won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay, but I don't see why. Her script was drawn out, highly repetitive and somewhat full of uncreative not raw natural dialogue. Add all the first world self-entitled annoying whinny moments without much redemption arch. It was enough to turn me off at parts. Regardless I do like that this movie has better acting than Bujalski's flick. Plus, some of the throw away jokes like the sex in the construction site pipes with Keith (David Call) were entertaining funny. Even some of the discussions hit my funny bone despite it dragging the film down like the Nietzsche cowboy sequences. Another thing the movie got going for it, is the amazing cinematography. Everything seems well shot; especially whenever Aura is lying down being depress or lazy while talking to somebody who is somewhat off-frame in the same room whom doing something productive. You really get the sense of how she can believe that the world centered around her. The soundtrack is also pretty good. Music by Teddy Blanks of The Gaskets, Domino, Rebecca Schiffman and others really does add to the story of the film during the party's sequences. The rest of the movie not so much. Regardless, overall: While this film made producer Judd Apatow a fan of her, I can't say the same with me. I don't even believe this movie deserve to be in the Criterion Collection along in the same vein as Mike Nichol's masterpiece 1967's 'The Graduate', another film similar to this. They shouldn't be in the same room together. One is like a dirty sofa cover with cat fur, pee and scratches from a thrift store. The other is comfortable recliner from IKEA. It's clear as day which one I will buy. I'm sorry Dunham's fans, no amount of moving the living room furnitures around to gain feng shei will ever get me to watch this movie again. It's a one time sit.